The Seduction Of The Innocent

[poliphilo]

If you love comics you'll know- and spit upon the memory of- Dr Frederic Wertham's book The Seduction of the Innocent.  If you don't love comics I probably need to explain. Wertham was an American psychiatrist. His book came out in 1954. It's thesis- broadly stated- is that the youth of America were having their tender minds frazzled by the images of sex and violence in comic books. The book was a minor best seller which led (a) to a Congressional Enquiry and (b) to the publishers adopting a code of self-censorship that took a lot of the juice out of their product.

Judy has been reading The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay- which has its fictional characters get embroiled with the Wertham episode- and we've been talking about it. She assumed that- as an Englishman of a certain age- I wouldn't have heard of Wertham, but actually- and oddly- an encounter with Wertham's thesis was one of the formative incidents of my childhood. I didn't read comic books- they were hard to come by over here- but we did get the Reader's Digest- and of all the things I must have read in that useful, informative, bourgeois publication the one I particularly remember is an article in support of Wertham.This was probably the first time I was ever exposed to a current affairs story that shocked me. According to the Digest, suburban children my age were running amok and murdering people- and all because they were reading something other than Enid Blyton.  The hook was a lurid story about how some child had fired an air-rifle (purchased by mail from a comic book advert) out of his bedroom window at random and managed to kill a spectator in a local sports stadium. I was horrified. And haunted. What must it feel like to be only eight and have blood on your hands?  I also remember the picture that went with the article. It showed a young boy lying on his stomach with a comic book in front of him and a look on his face that suggested he was dreaming up evil mischief. It's entirely possible he was also toying with a switchblade.

My early exposure to Wertham had two consequences. One- short term-  was I never developed a taste for comics. The second- long term-  is I've learned to treat  folk panics about youth culture with scepticism and contempt.  So computer games are rotting the minds of our children? Yeah, sure;   that's exactly what stupid people were saying about comic books back in the 50s.

Comments

[dadi.livejournal.com]

Oh my. Good that Wertham apparently never made it to Germany, otherwise my parents would have been less happy about my learning to read at age 3 and from then on never ever needing a babysitter or minder again, as long as there was a comic book around. I never graduated to the "heavy" stuff though, when Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse started to get old, I had already discovered "real" books and was completely hooked on SF, the worst in "bad" comics I ever got to was good ole Superman and his cryptonite, Batman already wasn't really something I ever got into.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

American comics were scarcely available in Britain in the 50s. I got hold of one once- a western adventure- and it was so culturally alien I couldn't make head nor tail of it.

[petercampbell.livejournal.com]

Wertham was very well intentioned, from what I can remember, and he certainly wasn't wrong about some of the weird sexual subtexts that existed in the 1950s comic books - he just drew the wrong conclusion about the effect it was having on teenagers. It's a classic example of cultural misunderstanding. From your story, it sounds as if his theories were more traumatising than the comic books he was criticising in the first place.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

My experience of comics was limited to wholesome British publications like the Eagle- which featured rock-jawed, flaxen haired, white men dishing out well-deserved punishment to cowardly, sneaky, foreign types- so nothing the least bit corrupting there...

[wokenbyart.livejournal.com]

In the 60's an uncle of my dad's - so fairly elderly at that stage - went from his home in Canada, across the border to the USA and there he bought me a whole load of Marvel and horror/supernatural comics. So when he visited us in the UK he surprised me with those. They were great! Up until then, I'd been reading the usual English comics to do with teenage girls and their dates and their pimples... and of course beezer, dandy, et al. But... nothing made me want to murder anyone, even from the Marvel stuff!

Thankfully I didn't clap eyes on a copy of Readers Digest til I was old enough to know better... what a load of old twaddle most of it is! (Though it pays well, I gather, for the enterprising writer...)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

My grandad used to take the Readers Digest- and pass his old copies to us. I liked the jokes.

What I mainly hate about their set-up is the way once they've succeeded in selling you something they never remove their claws.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

I remember the famous anti-comics campaign of the early to mid-1950's. All my young life I had been an avid reader of comics, had amassed a considerable pile of the lovely things to re-read and swap back and forth with friends. None of them taught us to break the law, become promiscuous, murder our parents (or anyone else). Many were simply fun, such as Walt Disney and Little Lulu, others dealt with superheroes who fought for the right side to put down the bad guys. The crime comics I read all had the moral that crime does not pay, often ending a story with a murderer being taken to a life in prison, or worse to capital punishment. Oh, yes, and there were the war comics - these promote war and heroics and patriotism, always with the highest ideals. (Maybe I could fault those particular ones in the light of future events).
This post belongs in my own journal so that I can eventually add it to my "Memoirs" flash drive, so I am copying it there, too.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

English comics were rather different. They were weekly magazines, featuring lots of different characters- many of them in stories that ran as serials. The one I took- the Eagle- was all about celebrating the virtues that made Britain great. Its most famous character was "Dan Dare, pilot of the future"- an RAF man of the 1940s who just happened to be flying spacecraft.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

And so --- those would be censors of reading-materials-for-youth were not talking about the British publications, either. I wonder where they got their mis-information?