Reefer Madness

by Craig Yoe (Editor), Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster

Degradation! Crime! Madness! Hysteria surrounded marijuana as a perceived gateway drug from the 1930's to the 1950's and beyond. Adventure Comics, by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and works by Frank Frazetta, Jerry Robinson, Jack Kirby, and many more, reveal the social reaction to this era of "Reefer Madness." Like the anti-drug propaganda film, these stories range from comically misinformed to soberly concerned about the influence of Mary Jane on the youth of America. Eisner and Harvey Award winner Craig Yoe brings us his newest collection of wacky, wild, and culturally relevant comics.
See how marijuana was perceived in the days of ignorance before it was legalized by the visionary people of Oregon, Washington, and Colorado!
See marijuana demonized as a "Satan's cigarettes" in 1950's comics!

Genres: Comics, History

200 pages, Paperback

First published June 13, 2017

About the author

Craig Yoe is an author, editor, art director, graphic designer, cartoonist and comics historian, best known for his Yoe! Studio creations and his line of Yoe! Books. Yoe is married to Clizia Gussoni, who is also his creative partner

Reviews

[David James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deserves a 4.20 rating.

My favorites were the Jack Kirby piece about a guy who kills and burns the corpse of a woman whenever he can’t score a joint, and the romance story where the female lead gets seduced by a reefer smoking jazz drummer. Because jazz.

[dejah_thoris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled onto this title while searching our consortia catalog and had to borrow it. The introduction by Yoe is well done and you have to love someone who loves R. Crumb. The comics themselves get a bit repetitive, but it's challenging to create an anti-marijuana comic within such a short format. Most of the comics are either true crime tales told from law enforcement's perspective, naturally, or tragic romances that invert the Garden of Eden story. Of course, there are a couple of superhero tales too. Yankee Boy is enthusiastically implausible, but the tidbit mentioned by Mister Universe about using library books as sources for ciphers is entirely true.

The two stories I liked the most in this compilation were Kerry Drake #10 and Abbie an' Slats #3. Kerry Drake is wonderfully drawn and colored with a well-developed plotline. It's very hard boiled and quite engaging. Abbie an' Slats, however, is a much darker story of a femme fatale using BANZAI-WEED to trick someone into marrying her. Aside from the overuse of the exclamation "Keerect!" in the strip, it's very good.

My only disappointment from this collection is that the Frank Franzetta comic I was anticipating with delight turned out only to be a full page single panel piece. Overall though it was certainly worth reading.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume of pre-Code anti-pot hysteria gets the usual superb Yoe treatment. Probably the best part of the book is the introduction, a witty recital of the stages of America's war on weed with colorful illustrations of posters, books, magazines, and especially comics that fought the "good" fight on behalf of policy goons like Harry Anslinger and the liquor industry. The comics reprinted here are fun but extremely repetitive; there's really only one main narrative and the variations in art and narrative extremity are mildly amusing but, by the end of the book, somewhat stale, like good reefer gone bad. My favorite reprint is the multi-part Abbie and Slats offering, wherein the town rich girl uses Japanese Banzai weed to seduce the noble object of her affections, a genuine piece of original Americana with a class warfare core and a welcome departure from the formulaic rehashes of most of the other offerings. This is a worthwhile book, probably best read a story at a time over many weeks to avoid the sense of four color flashback.

[Steven Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is funny as hell.

[Ellie Martz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the script over and over for 2 months so I’ve decided this counts as a book

[BVC · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interessante il contesto, ma i fumetti in sé sono di una noia allucinante.