Action and adventure
Action and adventure |
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Page 27 of 42  Cover to the influential academic study, Seduction of the Innocent (Museum Press, 1955) by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. To simplify a long story, these comics - especially those produced by EC - caused a furore. In America, the idea that they were at least partly reponsible for the rise in juvenile delinquency quickly gained ground, fuelled by a book by an eminent psychiatrist, Dr Fredric Wertham. The book, entitled Seduction of the Innocent (Rinehart, 1954), attacked most genres of comics, but focused on horror and crime in general, claiming that at best they were 'especially apt to interfere with children's sleep', and at worst led to copycat crimes." In fact, the book was academically unsound, and used illustrations from the comics completely out of context, but its sensationalism -'The Most Shocking Book of the Year' - and its author's evangelical zeal, were enough to inspire widespread moral panic. This manifested itself in protests, and even in neighbourhood comics burnings. In Britain, similar fears were whipped up. The EC titles had been reprinted in black-and-white by the Arnold Book Co, and had sold in tiny quantities compared to mainstream comics like The Eagle, but had nevertheless caused a scandal. An influential article in Picture Post in 1952 asked the question: 'Should US "Comics" be banned?', and answered it by repeating Wertham's claims about delinquency, and getting British experts to back him up. It ended with a 'slippery slope' analogy: 'these books depend on the administration of violent shocks to the nervous system, and just as the drug addict must progressively increase the size of the dose to obtain the same effect, so, as sensibilities become dulled by the repetition of a particular kind of brutal act, the degree of violence must of necessity increase.'   Cover, Ivanhoe (Gilberton, 1946). Art: Anon. One of the Classics Illustrated line, educational comics that automatically escaped censure. |