The Hillbilly Stereotype in Horror Comics

Abstract

From William Byrd’s 18th-century “lubbers” of the North Carolina backcountry through the deviant gun-toting hicks with missing teeth from John Boorman’s survival thriller Deliverance (1972) to Darlene Snell from Netflix’s recent crime drama series Ozark (2016), the stereotype of the “hillbilly” has been one of the most pervasive images in American popular culture. This image has been usually associated with mountaineers inhabiting either the Appalachians or the Ozarks, and it has portrayed them as dirty, lazy, ignorant, often mean, violent and dangerous. Since the beginning of the 20th century, it has been popularized by film, music, and, starting with the Depression Era, also by comic strips such as Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, which shaped all subsequent depictions of these mountain folk. This article considers the depiction of hillbillies in comics with a focus on horror comics published by EC in the early 1950s.