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Old 12-04-2004, 03:20 AM   #1
Grojlach
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Join Date: May 2, 2001
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Interesting article about one of the most vocal comic book "adversaries" in the 40's and 50's, typed out by someone on SA who found it in "Uncle John's Bathroom reader".

Comics Enemy #1

Pow! Wham! In the 1950s, comic books were jam-packed with violent villains, crypt creeps, femme fatales, and other baddies. But by far the scariest thing to ever happen to comic books was a psychiatrist named Frederick Wertham.

Though some groused that the first newspaper comic strip, The Yellow Kid, distracted attention from hard news when it debuted in The New York World in 1895, few complained seriously about the gentle, funny strip and its brethren: Popeye, Little Nemo in Slumberland, and Mutt and Jeff.

But when comic books grew up and got serious in the 1930s, people started to pay attention. Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy were full of thrilling adventure -- with a dash of violence thrown in. By the arrival of Superman in 1939, media critics were complaining that the "funny books" weren't all that funny anymore; they were growing seamy.

An oft-quoted editorial by Sterling North, literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, said this on May 8, 1940:

Quote:
Badly Drawn, badly written, and badly printed -- a strain on the young eyes and young nervous systems -- the effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoil a child's natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the "comic" magazine.
Yet despite such invective, comics' popularity exploded. WWII servicemen and school kids devoured Superman, Batman, and Captain America. By 1947, 60 million comic books were being sold per month and it seemed nothing could halt their upward trajectory.

Enter Dr. Wertham
One man was ready to try -- Dr. Frederic Wertham, a 53-year-old German immigrant psychiatrist. It wasn't that Dr. Wertham was an uptight bluestocking. In fact, he was broadminded for the times.

Werham earned his M.D. in 1921. One of his early jobs proved influential -- working with a psychiatrist who held the novel theory (at the time) that doctors should investigate a patient's environment before diagnosing treatment. Wertham brought that idea with him to the U.S., where he began investigating the connections between mental health and criminal behavior.

In 1941 Wertham wrote Dark Legend, a successful study of a 17-year-old who murdered his mother. In 1949 he continued his study of criminal backgrounds with the case study round-up Show of Violence. At the same time, he began testifying in front of various lawmaking bodies. His article, "Psychological Effects of School Segregation," was submitted as evidence in the landmark case of Brown vs. the Board of Education and helped strike a blow against segregation.

Wertham continued working with troubled, often criminal, youths, many of whom he noticed were avid comics readers. Once he started examining the comics, the lurid sex and violence he found in them worried him. In 1949, he spoke at a psychiatric convention, charging that excessive comic book consumption had figured largely in the delinquency of the troubled youths he studied.

Funny Book Fallout
Wertham's idea struck a chord in an America worried about a rising tide of juvenile delinquency. Articles criticizing comics appeared in Time and The Saturday Review of Literature. Some communities staged mass comic book burnings and protested in front of comic book stores. Others enacted laws designed to censor and control comic book dealers and publishers. In 1949 the book Love and Death called comics publishers "degenerates" and said that the two biggest companies were "staffed entirely by homosexuals and operating out of our most phalliform skyscraper." That same year, the Canadian government passed laws against the production of "crime comics."

In 1959 the U.S. feds entered the fray, when a Senate special committee investigated the link between crime comics and organized crime. Blaming comic books for subsequent crimes became a common gambit for young criminals who calimed that the violent comics they read about "made them do it."

Tales of the Corrupt
But the worst was yet to come for the comic companies. Still worried about the effect of comics on troubled youths -- especially a new breed of gruesome horror comics published by impresarios like Tales from the Crypt's M. C. Gaines -- Wertham continued writing articles attacking comics throughout the 1940s. Finally he published his landmark book Seduction of the Innocent in 1954.

Today the book is a real howler, with passages that term the Batman and Robin series "a wish dream of two homosexuals living together" and Wonder Woman as a "lesbian counterpart of Batman" who gave little girls "wrong ideas" about a woman's place in society. He even criticized Superman as giving kids the wrong ideas about physics because he could fly.

Drawn and Quartered
But not many people were laughing in 1954. Wertham's accusation was taken seriously. The U.S. Senae convened a Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency that spring, and Dr. Wertham was both consultant and its chief witness.

The subcommittee was an unqualified disaster for the comics publishers. One particularly damaging exchange will serve as an example:

Quote:
Senator Kefauver (holding up a gory M. C. Crime SuspenStories comic cover): "This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up, which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?"
M. C. Gaines: "Yes, sīr, I do -- for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the blood could be seen dripping from it..."
Kefauver: "You've got blood coming out of her mouth."
Gaines: "A little."
Censored Comics
In the end, the Senate decided not to pass official censor laws. But comic book producers were forced to draw up a self-regulating code. Only sanitized comics received the Comics Code Authority (CCA) stamp of approval, marking it safe for sale to America's kids. The code restricted sex and violence, strictly forbade criticism of religion, and even restricted the use of slang terms.

Disgusted by the CCA's kowtowing, Gaines dumped his horror comic lines and concentrated on his new satire magazine, Mad. Sales of the censored comics dropped off throughout the 19050s (though some attributed this more to a new form of media that was absorbing children's attention, namely television). Marvel Comics (then called Atlas) was almost forced to fold, and DC Comics faded to a shadow of its former self. Dozens of other comics companies went out of business.

Eventually the comic book industry would recover as superhero comics like DC's The Justice League of America, and Marvel's Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four recharged the genre in the 1960s. But it would never again be the entertainment monolith it was in the 1940s.

Wertham's Demise
As for Wertham, he continued to write throughout the 1960s and 1970s, publishing books on the rise of American violence. In 1973, startlingly, he published The World of Fanzines, a book that praised sci-fi and comics fanzines as a praiseworthy new form of art. After its publication, New York Comic Art Convention founder and promoter Phil Seuling invited Wertham to a panel to address his "fans." Instead, Wertham was besieged at the panel by angry comics fans who accused him of wrecking comics in the 1950s. Wertham stalked out and never again wrote about comics. Wertham died in 1981.

[ 12-04-2004, 03:28 AM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]
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Old 12-18-2004, 08:03 PM   #2
Sir Degrader
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actually pretty interesting, though the quote from the senate inquiry is hilarious!
"a little" LOL!
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