Shaenon Garrity + Jeff Wells

October Skin Horse Wallpaper

Added 2019-09-30 05:30:18 +0000 UTC

The Cartoon Art Museum has a show of 1950s EC horror comics planned for the Halloween season, so I decided to draw a tribute to one of the most infamous EC covers. In 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held a hearing on comic books, which led to this exchange with EC publisher Bill Gaines:

Chief Counsel Herbert Beaser: There would be no limit, actually, to what you'd put in the magazines?

Gaines: Only within the bounds of good taste.

Senator Estes Kefauver: Here is your May issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that's in good taste?

Gaines: Yes sir, I do — for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding her head a little higher so that blood could be seen dripping from it and moving the body a little further over so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.

As you can see, I have made the revisions suggested by Gaines to officially put my cover within the bounds of bad taste.

You can get this and a bonus Halloween wallpaper from the archives here:

http://skin-horse.com/wallpaper_educational.html

Thanks as always!

Shaenon