Tales From The Crypt

I enjoyed David Hadju's Positively 4th Street and just read his Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Wertham had trouble with all sorts of material.

It's really two books. Half the narrative is about the wild, early days of comic books in the 40s and 50s. It's actually the best part. But the point of the book, as evinced by the title, is the moral panic. Across America, authority figures, often with letters after their names, but not with any scientific backing, claimed that comic books were central in explaining why kids were so unruly at the time.

For years comic book creators gave free rein to their imaginations, creating plenty of amazing stuff (and plenty of rotten stuff, too). They had freedom because their product sold well and because they were beneath notice. Cultural critics figured that stuff all those kids (and adults) loved was garbage. Still, especially after WWII, there was a steady drumbeat saying comic books were a bad influence.

But not too much happened until Frederic Wertham wrote Seduction Of The Innocent and Senator Estes Kefauver held widely publicized hearings. Witness Wertham claimed he'd done research on the effects of comic books on kids, though his evidence tended to be anecdotal (turned out a lot of kids who'd turned bad read them).

He thought Superman was fascistic, Wonder Woman sadomasochistic, and Batman homoerotic. Okay, I'll give him that last one. (He also had a lot of odd ideas about how the stuff was created and distributed. This happens all the time when people don't like something. Rock haters believed the music was popular due to payola, while rap haters claimed the stuff was created by white producers forcing black rappers to humiliate themselves.)

Wertham said a lot of amazing things in his testimony. For instance: "I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry. They get the children much younger. They teach them race hatred at the age of four, before they can read." He was referring to a story where the word "spic" was used--of course, the point of the story was to condemn racism, but crusaders can't be bothered with nuance.

Laws were passed banning comics. I'm proud to say the first two were where I come from--Detroit and Ann Arbor. (Yes, liberal Ann Arbor. Wertham himself was a progressive. This shouldn't come as a surprise. The left is just as happy as the right to control people's lives.) Scarier, there were mass comic book burnings across the nation.

(There was an informational film directed by Irvin Kershner--The Empire Strikes Back, indeed--that staged scenes where kids went out into woods, read their secret stash of comics and then captured another kid and tortured him.)

In an attempt to protect themselves through self-censorship, the industry created the Comics Code Authority. It effectively gutted comics, which swiftly lost their popularity. The book has an appendix listing about 800 people who lost their jobs and never worked in comics again.

To Hadju, though, the ultimate irony is the censors lost. We still love the stuff from the "Golden Age of Comics," and it inspired much of popular culture since WWII. Whether that's good or bad, you decide.