Amos Sewell 1901-1983

[dem bones]

Master of the slobbering geriatric sex fiend and sadistic invalid, Amos Sewell's brief incarnation as a horror pulp artist began with a stint at Harry Bates' Strange Tales of Mystery & Terror (1931-1933). When ST went bust, Sewell found regular work at Popular Publications, providing-chained-women-in-peril interior illos for the notorious likes of Dime Mystery Terror Tales, and Horror Stories, before cracking the slicks circa 1937, most notably the respectable and financially rewarding Saturday Evening Post where he established himself as a superior cover artist.

For a detailed biography, see Sewell's entry on Pulp Artists

Nat Schachner - Thirst of the Ancients: (Terror Tales, Feb. 1935; The Devil's Nightclub, 2011).

George A Starbird - Nightmare House: (Horror Stories, Jan 1935)

William B. Rainey (Wyatt Blassingame) - When the Rats Fed: (Dime Mystery Magazine, April 1934)

Edith & Ejler Jacobson - Corpses on Parade: (Dime Mystery, April 1938: Zombies from the Pulps, 2014).

Larry Moore - Bedfellow From Hell: (Dime Mystery, March 1936)

H. M. Appel - Her Suitor from Hell: (Terror Tales, April 1936)

Hugh B. Cave - Enslaved to Satan: (Terror Tales, Feb. 1935)

[helrunar]

Great drawings! Was there a whole series involving an evil old fiend slobbering away over his victims in a wheelchair? Or was it simply a common event in these tales?

cheers, Hel.

[dem bones]

Mar 8, 2023 19:52:12 GMT helrunar said:

Great drawings! Was there a whole series involving an evil old fiend slobbering away over his victims in a wheelchair? Or was it simply a common event in these tales?

Common event. No "cosmic" claptrap or "supernatural" terrors for the shudder pulps. They nailed the true cause of all the misery, pain and suffering facing the world. Old bastards.

Francis James - Music of the Damned: (Horror Stories, Jan 1935)



Wyatt Blassingame - Death Underground: (Dime Mystery, Jan. 1934)



George Edson - Dead Men's Eyes: (Dime Mystery, Nov 1934)



George Edson - The Cross of Blood: (Terror Tales, Feb. 1935)



Franklin H. Martin - The Girl Who Loved Pain: (Terror Tales, April 1936)



John H. Martin - Men Without Blood: (Horror Stories, Jan. 1935)



Hal Field Leslie - The Night the Devil Walked: (Horror Stories, Jan. 1935)



Terror Tales, April 1936)

[helrunar]

Wow, male nudity in the drawing for the Blassingame story. That's quite the rarity. Excellent selection!

cheers, Hel.

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

I had a brief look at censorship in the USA, and it seems the pulp magazines managed to escape censorship, unlike comics, which had the CCA starting in the 1950s. While voluntary the CCA really controlled what was published. I suppose comics were seen as juvenile literature at the time, and corrupting the young.

[helrunar]

Hi Anna, 

The censorship of comics seems to have been spearheaded--and perhaps straightforwardly instigated--by this quack named Frederic Wertham who wrote a book called The Seduction of the Innocent in the 1950s. Wertham was sort of a precursor to Mary Whitehouse in the UK. This is an interesting article:

kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonandkirby/archives/1428

cheers, Hel.

[dem bones]

Mar 9, 2023 15:02:23 GMT 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr said:

I had a brief look at censorship in the USA, and it seems the pulp magazines managed to escape censorship, unlike comics, which had the CCA starting in the 1950s. While voluntary the CCA really controlled what was published. I suppose comics were seen as juvenile literature at the time, and corrupting the young.

Artist uncredited (probably not Amos Sewell).

"Clean-up organizations started to throw their weight around ang gave editors the jitters, and artists and writers were instructed to put panties and brassieres on the girls." — Bruno "Russell Gray" Fischer, author of the infamous Fresh Fiancés for the Devil's Daughter. (Robert Kenneth Jones, The Shudder Pulps, 1975)

Not sure if there was any nationwide ban, but the Spicies ran into trouble with Fiorello La Guardia, the Mayor of New York, to the point where they'd issue the magazine with two covers, the toned down version made available on the newsstand, the lurid original under the counter. It's hardly surprising the shudder pulps at their most extreme — circa 1938 — faced similar difficulties. They pretty much asked for it.

Blayre Kendrick. "I earned $300 to $400 a month during the Depression. I'm not fast but I guess I'm prolific .... One of my pulp stories that made quite a hit was one where they burned the panties off the girls with a blowtorch. Those were hard to write. Hell, you don't think I'd put my own name on a thing like that? They changed the title. You lost everything when you sold a horror story."

Faced with the implied threat of prosecution, Dime Mystery, who inadvertently (?) gave birth to weird menace with Norvell Page's Dance of the Skeletons (Oct. 1933), reverted to a detective pulp in late 1938. Horror Stories and Terror Tales, clothed their cover heroines, cut down on the mindless sadism and torture and lost their audience. By the close of 1941 they'd given up the ghost.

The previous decade saw perhaps the most famous "banning" of a pulp magazine. At least, Weird Tales for May-June-July 1924 was allegedly withdrawn from newsstands in the more censorious states. Legend has it that the "outcry" over C. M. Eddy's The Loved Dead dramatically upped sales and saved the magazine.

Mar 9, 2023 18:41:44 GMT helrunar said:

The censorship of comics seems to have been spearheaded--and perhaps straightforwardly instigated--by this quack named Frederic Wertham who wrote a book called The Seduction of the Innocent in the 1950s. Wertham was sort of a precursor to Mary Whitehouse in the UK. This is an interesting article:

kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonandkirby/archives/1428

Martin Barker wrote a superb book on the politically motivated British Campaign versus American Comics, Haunt of Fears, 1984. Werham also wrote a book on fanzines, long out of print and prohibitively expensive. From what I can gather, he was sympathetic.

[helrunar]

Dem, if I recall correctly, your write-up of Fresh fiances for the Devil's Daughter was truly hair-raising. I wonder if the people who wrote this kind of thing had become very inured to brutality and carnage through their experiences in the trenches of World War I, aka "the War to End All Wars"--what a macabre joke that turned out to be.

Hel.

[andydecker]

Mar 9, 2023 18:41:44 GMT helrunar said:

Hi Anna, 

The censorship of comics seems to have been spearheaded--and perhaps straightforwardly instigated--by this quack named Frederic Wertham who wrote a book called The Seduction of the Innocent in the 1950s. Wertham was sort of a precursor to Mary Whitehouse in the UK. This is an interesting article:

kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonandkirby/archives/1428

cheers, Hel.

Seduction of the Innocent should be a must-read. I have read it ages ago. Wertham was a respected psychiatrist, who did a lot of civic work. On the other hand if you consider that at the time cold-water treatment was recommended for mental illness  and lobotomy was a treatment for depression, the whole profession doesn't look good in hindsight. Wertham raised some interesting questions in his book - which you can still ask for the streaming culture and the assault of violence in pictures - but he also had many preposterous theories, especially if it was about sexual things. Like McCarthy he was a product of hysterical times, just like the people who wants to self-censor Ian Fleming nowadays.

The CCA was a self-censorship board mainly for the pacification of distributors. This was the lynchpin,concerned parents or the - supposed - threat of censorship from the state came later.  And it was and is highly doubtful, if such a thing could ever be done on a federal scale. On a local scale is another topic. 

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

The CCA seems to have killed off the EC comics line. Some of the CCA rules limited the use of words in titles, so no "horror" or "terror" or "weird" were allowed. EC cancelled five titles. As andydecker suggests, the distributors were the key, and they wouldn't carry these titles without the CCA approval.

There is an interesting story about the Comics Code Administrator, Judge Charles Murphy, ordering EC to change a story called "Judgment Day" (Incredible Science Fiction #33 Feb. 1956), because the central character is black. The story is about a planet with two robot races, the orange and the blue, who are identical except for colour. However one has more rights than the other, so the astronaut determines that the planet should not be admitted to The Galactic Republic until they both have equal rights. The key panel is the last one, where the astronaut removes his helmet and is revealed to be black. On this occasion it was a victory for EC, as the panel remained unaltered, the judge having overextended his authority. The story was itself a reprint, as the intended story "An Eye For an Eye" was rejected by the CCA.

[dem bones]

Mar 10, 2023 8:31:08 GMT andydecker said:

Seduction of the Innocent should be a must-read. I have read it ages ago. Wertham was a respected psychiatrist, who did a lot of civic work. On the other hand if you consider that at the time cold-water treatment was recommended for mental illness  and lobotomy was a treatment for depression, the whole profession doesn't look good in hindsight. Wertham raised some interesting questions in his book - which you can still ask for the streaming culture and the assault of violence in pictures - but he also had many preposterous theories, especially if it was about sexual things. Like McCarthy he was a product of hysterical times, just like the people who wants to self-censor Ian Fleming nowadays.
The CCA was a self-censorship board mainly for the pacification of distributors. This was the lynchpin,concerned parents or the - supposed - threat of censorship from the state came later.  And it was and is highly doubtful, if such a thing could ever be done on a federal scale. On a local scale is another topic. 

From what I can gather, it was self-censorship under the threat of prosecution killed off the shudder pulps, too. Have never so much as seen a copy of Seduction of the Innocent, just a few panels saved to my hard-drive — no idea where they came from. A decade on from Wertham, Ron Goulart, of all people, chimed in with The Assault on Childhood (Gollancz, 1970).

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

Here is Judgement Day (Incredible Science Fiction #33 Feb. 1956).

superheroesincolor.tumblr.com/post/659013302545940480/judgment-day-incredible-science-fiction-1956

Here is An Eye for an Eye. The banned story it replaced.

marswillsendnomore.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/ec-comics-an-eye-for-an-eye-by-angelo-torres/

[dem bones]

Wyatt Blassingame - The Unholy Goddess: (Terror Tales, Dec. 1934)

G. T. Fleming-Roberts - Kinsman's Curse: (Terror Tales, Dec. 1934)

Frances Middleton Bragg - Hidden Horror: (Terror Tales, Dec. 1934)

Lawrence Donovan - Swamp Madness: (Terror Tales, Dec. 1934)

[dem bones]

More Sewell Grand Guignol.

Hugh B. Cave - Unholy Night: (Dime Mystery Stories, April 1934)



Arthur Leo Zagat - Death Dancers: (Dime Mystery Stories, April 1934)



Wyatt Blassingame - The Marriage Made in Hell: (Horror Stories, Aug. 1937)



Hugh B. Cave - Dark Slaughter: (Dime Mystery Stories, Jan. 1934)

E. G. Morris - Out of the Past: (Dime Mystery Stories, Nov. 1934)

William B. Rainey - The Dead Walk: (Dime Mystery Stories, Jan. 1934)