ABSTRACT
In EC horror comics from the early 1950s, narratives of power, desire, and pleasure are communicated through image-grounded depictions of sexual scripts, relying on a knowing audience to read and understand them. Sexual relationships account for between 50% and 75% of the plots in these comics, depending on the book. This focus on sexual relationships makes horror comics fruitful ground for representations of sexual scripts in children’s media. Though the sexual scripts of these comics might not be transgressive, reasserting cultural expectations for heterosexual relationships and gendered behavior, horror comics allow young readers to access these scripts from the point of view of a participant, acknowledging child readers as sexual subjects. I argue that such texts were necessary for children navigating the changing sexual mores of the 1950s, and continue to be necessary for contemporary childhood socialization and development.
