EC Comics, perhaps best-known today as the company behind Mad Magazine, spent the 1950s producing some of the most subversive and contentious comic books in history.  These comics were remarkably cognizant of the social issues of their time, containing parabolic stories that dealt with anti-Semitism and Jim Crow laws while Batman was still trading blows with the Penguin.  Though not conventionally considered to be works of literature, many of these comics contain the same fundamental division between form and content that books do, and can be subjected to literary analyses.  More importantly, they are visual as much as they are textual; this added dimension compensates for their – admittedly –…