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WERTHAM REVISITED
Seduction in the Eighties
The following essay appeared in The Comics Journal No. 106 in March
1986, hence the reason for the subtitle above. As a book review, it needed no
adjustments to be as pertinent today as it was then. But whenever the argument
involves the moral climate of the times, I’ve done a little tinkering to make
it clear which times I’m referring to, then or now. And at the end when I turn
to the prospect of a “new Wertham” invading the precincts of the comics world,
I’ve made a few more adjustments and added a fresh concluding footnote—again,
hoping to fit the discussion into both the mid-1980s and the waning years of
the Bush League ascendency. In the
article’s original publication, a clump of sentences was mislaid and never made
it into print; I’ve restored those here, so this is actually the first—and, so
far, the only—time the entire piece appears as I intended.
While
I’ve been thinking for some time of posting this essay, I was prompted anew a
week or so ago when I learned that Wertham’s bombshell tome, Seduction of the Innocent, long out of
print since its initial publication in 1954, had been recently reprinted. A
couple versions are presently available, at least one of which is offered
through Amazon.com for about $42. One of these is from Amereon and is dated
1996; the other, from Main Road Books, is copyrighted 2004. My copy, just
purchased, is one of the latter (limited, it says, to 220 copies), and it
features a lengthy introduction by James E. Reibman, who teaches literature and
media studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Although a
specialist in law and literature with publication on the legal writings of
Samuel Johnson and his circle, Reibman is Wertham’s biographer and is co-editor
of the forthcoming Fredric Wertham
Reader. He is understandably distressed that Wertham’s reputation has
apparently been determined entirely by comics aficionados who have turned the
psychiatrist into a compunctionless censor and detest him for it. Eager to
rescue Wertham, Reibman rehearses his life, beginning with his birth March 20,
1895, in Nuremberg, Germany, and ending with his death November 18, 1981, in
the United States. Wertham came to the U.S. in 1922 and worked for seven years
at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
where he met Florence Hesketh, an artist and Charlton Fellow in Medicine, who
became Wertham’s wife and intellectual partner. As an indication of Wertham’s
social and mental gifts, Reibman notes that while Wertham lived in Baltimore,
he frequently gathered with H.L. Mencken and his musical cohorts for the
meetings of the fabled Saturday Night Club, a weekly soiree of good food and
drink, rousing music, and stimulating conversation. Wertham authored at least
ten books, most of them on social and/or psychiatric issues, and he emerged as
a distinguished psychiatric witness in legal matters. His testimony in a
Delaware case about the impairment suffered by African American children due to
school segregation became part of the legal argument in the famed Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka, which struck down the “separate but equal”
doctrine, laying the groundwork for desegregation of schools (and of the rest
of I
have always thought that Seduction of
the Innocent was a Book of the Month Club selection, but apparently it
wasn’t. It was scheduled to be the Club’s “alternative selection” one month,
but at the last minute that plan was cancelled for reasons Reibman doesn’t
specify; we may suppose were the most sinister from his subsequent assertion
that the book’s publisher had torn out of the volume pages 399 and 400 because
they listed the publishers of the comic books Wertham castigated. (These pages
have been restored to the edition I have; and probably to the other one, too.
In any event, you should look for them in order to reassure yourself that you
have a complete and valid reproduction of the original volume.) The reprinted
volume at hand also includes the scabrous illustrations Wertham had plucked from
assorted sordid comic books.
When
I wrote the article that follows, Ronald Reagan was President, and the
so-called Moral Majority loomed powerfully over the land. The conjunction of
these two forces suggested to many observers on the comics scene that the
industry was about to be subjected to another repressive assault by censors. My
examination of Wertham’s book and the review I wrote of it was prompted by this
wild-eyed supposition. Here we go:
First
there were grumblings about too much violence in comics. Then came rnurmurings
about rating systems and codes.
Today’s comics industry (1986),
poised on the brink of a new prosperity thanks to direct sales successes,
hesitates momentarily to turn introspective. Books manufactured for direct
sales evade the Comics Code Authority and go into the world naked and unadorned
with a seal of approval. The absence of that seal thirty years ago had sprung
the death trap for more than one publisher. Is history about to repeat itself?
What kind of risks are being run by publishing violent stories, unsealed
comics? And if the risk is too great, could it be reduced by introducing a
rating system like that used for movies? Do we reed a new codifying of comics
to separate the sheep from the goats, marking the former for ruminating
children, the latter for rutting adults?
Amid such rumblings we can hear the
distant din of another voice, speaking from the past—the voice of Fredric
Wertham, M.D.
As every comics fan knows, Werthan’s
1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent,
tolled the death knell for comic books as they then existed. His book and his
testimony before Congressional investigating committees focused public
attention on comic books, which brought pressure on comics publishers, which
resulted in the creation of the clean-up Comics Code Authority, and that
eventually caused the untimely demise of the revered EC Comics line.
That’s what every comics fan knows. Or
thinks he knows. Fact is, other publishers besides EC went under, too. And
probably Wertham didn’t slay all those dragons single-handedly. But he made a
name for himself in comics history—a name much invoked these days amid the
rumblings about excessive violence and rating codes.
Like most comics fans, I’ve seen
quotations from Wertham’s book here and there from time to time. Invariably,
the quotations struck me as silly. Judging from these snippets in isolation, it
seemed obvious that Wertham had traded in patent nonsense. His snake oil cure
for the increase in juvenile delinquency in the wake of World War II was to ban
comic books for everyone under the age of fifteen. As if comics were the sole
cause of youthful crime!
Again judging from quoted bits and
pieces, it seemed that Wertham forged his case against comic books entirely in
the heat of his fevered imagination. His explanations and accusations bore so
little resemblance to the facts about comics as I remembered them (or so
twisted interpretations of those facts) that they seemed to be mere maniacal
ravings. How could any such utterances, so transparently bereft of science and
logic and (even) reason, prove so powerful in swaying public opinion that a
giant publishing empire was brought to its knees?
The best way to find the answer to that
question, I decided, was to stop reading Wertham out of context. Truth to tell,
I’d never read Seduction of the Innocent, this watershed work in the history of the medium. A summer or so ago, it seemed
soon enough to correct the omission.
The first thing I found out was that
although I’d never read Wertham’s book, the book was not going unread. The
libraries of the University of Illinois carry over a dozen copies of the
book—and they were all checked out. The one I finally laid my hands on had been
checked out five times a year since 1980. Wertham may be dead, but his book
still gets around.
I suspect that a lot of us have bandied
the good doctor’s name about over the years without having actually perused
this tome. So I thought this might be a good time to review the thing in some depth
and to present Wertham’s argument and examine it. Writing the review that
follows proved no easy task. The book itself is a simmering stew of accusations
and innuendo, a grab-bag of examples, case histories, anecdotes, facts,
near-facts, and (I suspect) some fictions. Although the book’s fourteen
chapters give it some semblance of order by providing topical headings, the
ostensible subject of one chapter often crops up again in another chapter for
extensive treatment. To find in this confusion the single thread of organizing
principle by which a review of these chapters could be strung together in a
unified, cogent argument was more than I bargained for in setting myself the
task. So I gave up that search. What follows here is, I hope, organized, but it’s
my organization of Wertham’s material, not his. And it’s not all of his
material either—just enough to illustrate his case, his method, his madness.
Wertham’s argument is actually quite
simple: reading comic books is bad for children. It gives them unwholesome
ideas, turning some kids into sex perverts and some into criminals. But even if
reading comic books doesn’t turn everyone into one or the other, the habit does
no good for anyone. We should ban comic books, Wertham urges; and if we can’t
ban them, we should forbid their sale to anyone under fifteen.
This argument is the chorus of his
book. It is the melody of Wertham’s song, and it runs like a rushing river
current through the flood of examples, incidents, and exegeses that litter the
banks in his book. The hodge-podge organization of the work results from his
heaping up of instance after instance, allegation after allegation—all to prove
his initial premise.
I’ve made no attempt to verify or
disprove the factual accuracy of the information Wertham retails as cold
fact—circulation figures of comics, for instance, statistics on the rise of
juvenile crime and the like. My purpose is to report on the content of the
book, to present as much of Wertham’s argument as seems essential to an
understanding of his major positions, pausing occasionally to analyze his
methods. Some of what I quote from the book shows either sloppy thinking or
conniving rhetoric. But some quotations, I hope, reveal the passionate humanity
of the author. The book is all of these things—fallacious, contriving, and
humane. It may even be right.
Wertham’s
Motives
Wertham’s
motives in writing the book cannot be impugned from anything in it. That he has
at heart the welfare of children is clear throughout. He sees children as
victims, the scapegoats of a society that has created social values that seem
to nurture juvenile delinquency and other kinds of maladjustment. In permitting
such things as crime comic books to fall into children’s hands, society ignores
its proper role in the care and rearing of the young, and when children go
wrong, the courts discharge society’s responsibility (and assuage its
collective conscience) by sending them to reformatories “with a light heart and
a heavy calendar.”
Wertham castigates a judge who vows angrily
to treat kids as criminals when they act like hoodlums. But were these youths
ever treated like “kids” in the first place? Wertham asks. “Were they protected
against the corrupting influence of comic books which glamorize and advertise
dangerous knives and the guns that can be converted into deadly weapons?”
Gawking at the pulpy colored pages
of badly drawn comic books, Wertham looks askance at society. “Why does our
civilization give to the child not its best but its worst, in paper, in
language, in art, in ideas? What is the social meaning of these supermen,
superwomen, super-lovers, superboys, supergirls, super-ducks, super-mice,
super-magicians, super-safecrackers? How did Nietzsche get into the nursery?”
Wertham may have made a lot of money
with his book, and he certainly achieved
celebrity
if not notoriety. But the announced objective of his crusade was to protect
children from the alluring malevolence he saw in comic books. While he
sometimes seems clumsily to mistake a simple sequence of events for a cause and
effect relationship as he attempts to indict comic books, Wertham doesn’t say
that comics are the sole cause of juvenile delinquency or of any aberrant
behavior: “Slowly, and at first reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that
this chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction by comic books, both their
content and their alluring advertisements of knives and guns, are contributing
factors to many children’s maladjustment.” Contributing factors.
Unhappily, in an effort to make his
case convincing, Wertham very often allows himself to be seduced—seduced away
from logic and scientific method into insinuation and allegation, into
sentimental rhetoric instead of scientific reportage. The effect is to weaken
the argument of his book by leaving various passages open to question. But even
after those questions have been asked, the weight of his rhetoric hangs heavy
still, pregnant with suggestions the truth and validity of which we have yet to
ascertain or overthrow with certitude.
Crime Comics
Defined
Wertham’s
particular bete noir was the crime
genre of comic books. Books with titles like CRIME Does Not Pay, LAWBREAKERS Always Lose, There Is No Escape for
PUBLIC ENEMIES, CRIMINALS on the Run, CRIME Can’t Win, and the like. The
words I’ve capitalized were always printed much larger on the book covers than
the other words of the titles. And that emphasized the subject.
The usual crime comic book of the
late 40s and early 50s peered closely at the exploits of crooks. Typically, the
stories traced the careers of gangsters, beginning with their rise to power in
the underworld and continuing with accounts of their exercise of power and
concluding, eventually, in their downfall. By way of characterizing the
demented personalities of criminals, most crooks were portrayed as wholly
unsavory villains—cruel, thoughtless, and treacherous, given to acts of
merciless brutality and, often, of craven cowardice.
The choice of narrative focus was
unfortunate. It made criminals the protagonists of the stories and police the
antagonists. By this simple rhetoric of the ensuing narrative, crooks were the
heroes; cops, the villains. By concentrating on the lives of gangsters, the
efforts of law enforcement agencies were shoved into the background. Even if
the crooks were captured (or killed) in the end, the stories nonetheless
emphasized lives of crime. The emphasis was not lost on Wertham: it gave him an
opening through which he eagerly pounced.
About such comics Wertham could
legitimately say: “The atmosphere of crime comic books is unparalleled in the
history of children’s literature of any time or any nation. It is a
distillation of viciousness, The world of the comic book is the world of the
strong, the ruthless, the bluffer, the shrewd deceiver, the torturer, and the
thief, All the emphasis is on exploits where somebody takes advantage of
somebody else, violently, sexually, or threateningly. Force and violence in any
conceivable form are romanticized. Trust, loyalty, confidence, solidarity,
sympathy, charity, compassion are ridiculed. Hostility and hate set the pace of
almost every story.”
But Wertham’s attack on comics was
not confined to the kind of crime books I’ve just described. For Wertham, a
crime comic book was any comic book that depicted crime, “whether the setting
is urban, Western, science-fiction, jungle, adventure or the realm of supermen,
horror, or supernatural beings.” Even animal comics in which the characters
pursue furry criminals are crime comics to Wertham. In one such comic, he finds
a picture of a rabbit “crying and begging for mercy, a duck poised to kill him
with a baseball bat.” Given the conventions of animal comics, it’s debatable if
the duck is planning to “kill” the rabbit; but the conventions were undeniably
violent, and that’s the axe Wertham grinds.
“Jungle, horror and interplanetary
comics are also crime comics of a special kind,” Wertham says. “Jungle comics
specialize in torture, bloodshed and lust in an exotic setting. Daggers, claws,
guns, wild animals, well- or over-developed girls in brassieres and as little
else as possible, dark ‘natives,’ fires, stakes, posts, chains, ropes,
big-chested and heavily muscled Nordic he-men dominate the stage. They contain
such details as one girl squirting fiery ‘radium dust’ on the protruding
breasts of another girl; white men banging natives around; a close-up view of
the branded breast of a girl; a girl about to be blinded.”
Romance comics, too, are crime
comics. In many of their stories, young women become romantically involved with
criminal types—much to their subsequent grief. “Unless the love comics are
sprinkled with some crime, they do not sell,” Wertham observes. “Apparently
love does not pay.”
Wertham allows that there are some
“harmless” comics, but they are outnumbered by crime comics. Between 1937 and
l947, he says, only 19 crime comic titles existed. But in the post-war years,
crime comics became so popular that by l948, “107 new titles of crime comic
books appeared, 53 straight crime comics, 54 ‘Westerns’ featuring crime.” In
l946, crime comics represented only a tenth of the total number of comic books;
in 1948, their representation had increased to one third. “By 1949 comic books
featuring crime, violence and sadism made up over one half of the industry. By
1954, they form the vast majority of all comic books.”
Because crime comics are so exciting
to children, crime comics are the most popular and most widely read. “The great
attraction of crime comic books for children is alleged to be continuous fast
action. There may be some. But when the stories come to details of a
delinquency or depiction of brutality, the action slows noticeably. A typical
example, vintage autumn 1950: in one story there are 37 pictures, of which 12
(that is, one in three) show brutal near-rape scenes.” In another comic,
Wertham finds 97 pictures showing the criminal winning and only one picture for
“the apotheosis of his suicide.” In another, of 51 pictures “no less than 45
are scenes of violence and brutality.”
“In many comics stories there is
nothing but violence. It is violence for violence’s sake. The plot: killing.
The motive: to kill. The characterization: killer. The end: killed.” In what he
calls “the blood-and-bra formula” of crime comics, Wertham finds an “obscene
glorification of violence and sadism” through savagery, murder, lust, and
death.
Wertham quotes Dr. George Reed,
director of the psychiatric hospital at McGill University, who holds a similar
view of comics. “Dr. Reed said what comic books are about: ‘Violence is the
continuous theme, not only violence to others but in the impossible
accomplishments of the heroes, heroines and animals.’ He found undue stress on
superdevelopment of hero and heroine: ‘... any variation from this norm is the
subject of suspicion, ridicule or pity.’ He noted that distorted educational
data are common; that direct action by the hero is superior to the dumb and
incompetent police; that race hatred is taught; that ‘scantily clad females are
man-handled or held in a position of opisthotonos (exaggerated intercourse-like
position).’ It was his opinion that juvenile delinquency is in part dependent
on environment and that ‘books are of increasing importance as a part of
children’s environment.’”
The
Morality of Crime Comics
Publishers
of comics and other apologists for the medium countered Wertham’s allegations
by contending that the moral message of crime comics was that crime doesn’t
pay: crooks were always caught or killed in the end. But marketing strategies
made equivocators of the publishers. Crime may not pay, but it certainly sold:
the largest letters on the cover of CRIME
Doesn’t Pay showed that the publisher knew what interested his youthful
readers.
Considering the portion of a crime
story given over to the life of the criminal, it would not be surprising if
readers missed the lesson in the concluding panels. Wertham points out that
frequently children remember only bits and pieces from the stories they
read—often the goriest details. “A fifteen-year-old girl, asked which comics
she remembered, said, ‘I like one where a man puts a needle in a woman’s eye.
The eye is all bloodshot and frightened. And another one with a hunchback man
carrying a woman from the grave or to the grave. I read four or five a day.’
This is typical of how crime comics are reflected in a child’s mind. Nothing
here of crime prevention or of ethical lessons.”
But even if readers are aware that a
comic book criminal career usually comes to an unhappy ending, the comic book
means to that end are, says Wertham, scarcely desirable: “The experts claim
that the theme of comic books is good conquering evil, law triumphing over
crime. (But) there are many more crimes in comic book stories than crimes that
are punished. Moreover, punishment in comic books is not punishment; it usually
takes the form of a violent end. Melodrama instead of morality. ... If the
forces of law do win in comic books, they do so not because they represent law
or morality, but because at a special moment they are as strong and brutal as
the evildoer. The real message of the comic books to children is the equation:
physical force equals good. As author and critic Marya Mannes wrote: ‘In twenty
million comic books sold it would be hard to find a single instance where a
character conquered only because he was kind, honest, generous or intelligent.’
Can there be a more serious indictment?”
The actual lessons taught by
depicting the defeat of a gangster protagonist who has starred for many pages
in his own lurid life story is something quite different from “crime does not
pay.” To suppose, Wertham writes, that the final defeat of the villain cancels
out his previous triumphs and achievements is “psychologically naive.” The
lesson, he goes on, “is not that the villain should have been a better person
but that he should have been shrewder.” When he asked children how it came
about that a crook gets punished in a comic book, they often replied that it
served the criminal right—“He got caught, didn’t he?” His dessert was just
because he was stupid enough to get caught—not because he was evil. The real
crime is in getting caught.
But even if children were to learn
that crime doesn’t pay, it’s the wrong lesson, Wertham points out. The slogan
“Crime does not pay” is not moral, he says, “but highly immoral” because it
stresses payment, reward. “The reason that one does not hit girls, even if
comics have made it so attractive, is that it is cowardly and that it hurts
them; the reason that one does not steal or break into stores is that that is
not how one lives in a civilized community; that whether crime pays or does not
pay, it is not what a decent person wants to do. That should be the lesson for
children.”
Influence
on Attitudes
As
literary criticism, Wertham’s point is doubtless on target. But Wertham is less
interested in the literary stature of comics than in the effects of reading
them on the young. He estimates that in 1954, 90 million comic books flooded
the newsstands each month. By his definition, most of the books were crime
comics (including, remember, Superman and Super Duck). Contending that his
conclusions are based upon hundreds of case studies of children, Wertham
alleges that these comic books are the most important of the cultural
influences under which children grow up. Largely discounting the teachings and
experiences of the home, the school, the church, and the street, Wertham says
the “most exciting” influence on children is the crime comic book. “It arouses
their interest, their mental participation, their passions and their
sympathies, but almost entirely in the wrong direction.”
In the world of Wertham’s case studies,
comic books were easily available in vast quantity. Children read them during
most of their spare time—two or three hours a day. And they read little else
and were influenced by little else. Thus, reading comics resulted in distorting
a child’s ethical perceptions, his character development, his emotional and
social maturation, and his cultural appreciation.
“Children seek a figure to emulate
and follow,” Wertham writes. “Crime comic books undermine this necessary
ingredient of ethical development (by playing up) the good times had by those
who do the wrong thing. Those who at the tail end of stories mete out
punishment use the same violence and the same lingo as those whom they punish. Since
everybody is selfish and force and violence are depicted as the most successful
methods,” children are led to accept such behavior as normal. And this
rationalization in turn leads them to think that it is permissible to indulge
their own most primitive (and anti-social) impulses.
“In this soil, children indulge in
the stock fantasies supplied by the industry: murder, torture, burglary,
threats, arson, and rape. Into that area of the child’s mind where right and
wrong is evaluated, children incorporate such false standards that an ethical
confusion results for which they are not to blame. They become emotionally
handicapped and culturally underprivileged.” In addition, Wertham goes on,
“comic books are a factor in a host of negative behavior manifestations: dreams
and daydreams; games; nightmares; general attitudes; reactions to women, to
teachers, to younger children; and so on.” He finds attitudes of “arrogance and
bravado sometimes combined with a tendency to cruelty or to deceit and
trickery” that are “caused, stimulated, encouraged, or rationalized by comic
book reading.”
The attitude “most frequently
engendered by crime comics is an attitude of brutality” sometimes combined with
“sadism, with sado-masochistic tendencies, with cruelty, with sex, with
hostility and aggressiveness.”
But “the most subtle and pervading
effect of crime comics on children can be summarized in a single phrase: moral
disarmament. I have studied this in children who do not commit overt acts of
delinquency, who do not show any of the more conspicuous symptoms of emotional
disorder and who may not have difficulty in school. The more subtle this
influence is, the more detrimental it may be. It is an influence on character,
on attitude, on the higher functions of social responsibility, on super-ego
formation and on the intuitive feeling for right and wrong. To put it more
concretely, it consists chiefly in a blunting of the finer feelings of
conscience, of mercy, of sympathy for other people’s suffering and of respect
for women as women and not merely as sex objects to be bandied about or as
luxury prizes to be fought over. Crime comics are such highly flavored fare
that they affect children’s taste for the finer influences of education, for
art, for literature and for the decent and constructive relationships between
human beings and especially between the sexes. The detrimental effect on
character is if anything worse on girls than on boys. Their ego-ideal formation
is interfered with by the fascination of the sadistic female comic book
heroines.”
Racial
Prejudice and Brute Force
Wertham’s
case studies also revealed that children imbibe racial prejudice from comic
books. The good guys are always tall, blond, and regular featured. “On the
other hand are the inferior people: natives, primitives, savages, ‘ape men,’
Negroes, Jews, Indians, Italians, Slavs, Chinese and Japanese, immigrants of
every description, people with irregular features, swarthy skins, physical
deformities, Oriental features.” About such minorities, children say: They are
bad. They are vicious. They are criminals. They are dirty. You can’t trust
them.
Even if crime comics do not cause
such attitudes, they nourish them. “I have repeatedly found in my studies that
this characterization of colored peoples as subhuman, in conjunction with
depiction of forceful heroes as blond Nordic supermen, has made a deep—and I
believe lasting—impression on young children. And amidst all the violence
between slaves, apes and humans in these books are big pictures of lush girls,
as nude as the Post Office permits. Even on an adult, the impression of sex
plus violence is definite.”
Elsewhere, superheroes encourage the
worship of strength and force. “The superman conceit gives boys and girls the
feeling that ruthless go-getting based upon physical strength or the power of
weapons or machines is the desirable way to behave.” Superheroes Wertham
psychoanalyzes as “psychopathic deviates.”
The effects of reading the exploits
of such superheroines as Wonder Woman are even worse. “She is physically very
powerful, tortures men, has her own female following, is the cruel ‘phallic’
woman. While she is a frightening figure for boys, she is an undesirable ideal
for girls, being the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be.”
Moreover, the impossible deeds of
superheroes (defying the law of gravity, for instance) undermine a sound
education.
Injury-to-the-Eye
Motif
Wertham
supports his allegations throughout with specific examples from his file of
case studies. In support of his contention that superhero comics nurture
detrimental attitudes about strength and force, he produces this specimen:
“Particularly dangerous is the superman-speed-fancy in girls who in turn
influence boys. One young girl told me that she would only go out with boys who
would not let other cars pass them on the road. That was the idea of the proper
male behavior that she had got from comics.” To give Wertham the benefit of the
doubt, we must assume that the girl, when questioned, was precise in
identifying comics as the source of her attitude. That is the implication of
Wertharn’s concluding remark. But she could have developed the notion in other
contexts—in movie theaters, for example, where Saturday afternoon serials often
depicted high-speed car chases and the like.
In many of Wertham’s examples, we
must make an assumption. He connects an attitude or a behavior to comic book
reading. We assume he does so because his patient did so— specifically. But
Wertham isn’t precise in identifying the source of his conclusion. Did the
patient say so or not? And Wertham’s imprecision leaves his assertion open to
question: Is he reporting the results of an interview, or is he simply stating
an opinion? In almost all cases (like the one I just sketched), the attitude or
behavior that Wertham says is caused by comic book reading could, in fact, be
caused by some other influence.
One circumstance, however, seemed to
me when I wrote this in the mid-1980s to be inconvertible evidence of the
influence of comics. [I’ve since changed
my mind; see the Footnit below.] This involves the famous “injury to the
eye motif”—the threat or actual infliction of injury to the eyes of a victim,
male or female—which Wertham offers as “an outstanding example of the brutal
attitude cultivated in comic books.” Seduction
of the Innocent carries one illustrative panel (from a story drawn by Jack
Cole, but not a Plastic Man story) that depicts a woman (in close-up, eyes wide
with terror) into whose eye some fiend is about to plunge an ice-pick. This particularly gruesome detail,
Wertham says, “has no counterpart in any other literature of the world, for
children or for adults.” He conveniently forgets the blinding of Oedipus (a
curious lapse of memory for a psychiatrist) and of Gloucester in “King Lear”—to
name two literary instances that leap to mind—but I think the strength of his
case is not substantially diminished by this absent-mindedness. [It is, however, by the Three Stooges.] The
point is that the injury-to-the-eye motif is a peculiar, vivid and therefore
easily identifiable narrative detail. And when Wertham finds this detail
cropping up in children’s lives, he is fairly certain that it came into their
lives via comic book reading.
Wertham began working with children
in the 30s. In studying their dreams in those days, he says he found almost no
injury-to-the-eye motifs—and those he did find occurred in disguised forms. By
the 50s, however, this motif in dreams was no longer rare and no longer
disguised. This circumstance seems to me reasonable evidence of comic book
reading having some effect on the minds of young readers—on their subconscious,
at least. [But not anymore.]
Wertham goes on to say that the
injury-to-the-eye motif in comics produces two “brutalizing effects.” It causes
“a blunting of general sensibility” as children perceive that this kind of
thing is somehow permitted—and if it is, then so too are other acts of
brutality. And it inspires direct imitation: children at play, Wertham reports,
are increasingly apt to try to injure the eyes of other children.
FOOTNIT: Wertham cites several examples of eye-injuring action in comic books
and, as above, finds no other source for what he deems wide-spread episodes of
it among the youth of the day. Momentarily bowled over by the sweep of his
formulation, I failed to see the gaping hole in his argument: before
eye-injuries in comic books would have the pervasive effect on the behavior of
children that Wertham alleges, I imagine that virtually every other comic book
published would have to contain an instance of the injury-to-the-eye motif.
Clearly, that never happened. While I was able, at the time, to remember
Oedipus and Gloucester as possible “counterparts” outside the realm of
four-color pulp, lately I’ve been reminded of much more likely sources than
literary. One of the supposedly hilarious antics of one of the celebrated Three
Stooges was to poke one of his cohorts in both eyes at once with a two-fingered
fist. Wertham’s comic book readers would have been exposed to the Three
Stooges: there were 200 Three Stooges shorts made between 1934 and 1958. An
even more common source of the notion that injury to the eye is painful is
everyone’s experience when a foreign object, the proverbial cinder, gets into
the eye. It hurts. Finally, remember your mother’s caution whenever she saw you
playing with a sharp object? Be careful with that stick or you’ll poke your eye
out. With these examples before me, I no longer believe Wertham’s injury-to-the-eye
motif is indisputable evidence of the evil influence of comic books on the
young. And, yes—I should have thought of these before, in 1986.
Imitating
Comics
As
sources of inspiration for imitation, comic books exert their most insidious
influence upon the young, according to Wertham. He cites a study by Sister Mary
Clare, “a trained and experienced teacher” (but not a psychiatrist): “Children
want to put into action what they have learned in their comics, thinking they
can have the thrill that is theirs only vicariously as they read. Sometimes
they set out to imitate the hero or heroine, sometimes it is the criminal type
that appeals, and of course they are sure that they will not fail as the
criminals did in the magazine story, for ‘getting caught’ is the only disgrace
they recognize.”
For additional support, Wertham
musters the work of a sociologist, Harold D. Eastman, who analyzed 500 comic
books and studied several hundred high school students among three high schools
and 35 fourth graders. While the scope of the study is scarcely broad enough to
validate sweeping conclusions (the fourth graders, for instance, are doubtless
all from the same neighborhood, and their environs may be as important in
influencing them as their comic book reading), Wertham uses Eastman’s results
to bolster the case against comics. “In experiments with the fourth-grade
children,” Wertham notes, Eastman “found that over half of them wanted to play
the part of the villain” in comics.
Wertham finds more convincing evidence
for the influence of comics in a list of 12 cases of children who died or
injured themselves imitating comic book actions. In one of the cases, “a
fourteen-year-old boy was found hanging from a clothesline fastened over a
hot-water heating pipe on the ceiling. Beside him was a comic book open to a
page showing the hanging of a man.” Most of these cases involve hangings; but
several children injured themselves by trying to fly like Superman.
Children’s games, says Wertham, now
imitate comic book stories. Realistic games involving torture, “unknown fifteen
years ago,” he says, “are now common among children. To indicate the blood
which they see so often in crime comics, they use catchup or lipstick.”
Wertham allows that “violent games
may be harmless enough, but only a hairline divides them from the acts of petty
vandalism and destructiveness which have so increased in recent years.” (What
he says may be true: “only a hairline divides...” They are separate acts. But
notice how he implies a cause-and-effect relationship between two facts without
actually saying one causes the other. Assuming for the nonce that he has
successfully demonstrated a causal relationship between comic book reading and
violent games, he pairs this “fact” with another—an increase in petty
vandalism—implying that playing violent games leads directly to committing
petty vandalism. Wertharn frequently employs this kind of rhetoric, and its
sloppy logic that slyly indicts by association only weakens Wertham’s argument
over-all by making him appear less that straight-forward in the presentation of
his case.)
Conscious imitation is only the tip
of the psychological iceberg. Children not only imitate what they see in
comics, they subconsciously identify with comic book characters. “The child
gets pleasure from poring over what a comic book figure does, is emotionally
stirred and identifies himself with the figure that is active, successful,
dominates a situation and satisfies an instinct, even though the child may only
half understand what that instinct means. He looks for the same sensation again
and becomes conditioned to identify himself with the same type that stimulates
him to seek and satisfy the same pleasure again.
“In investigating the mechanism of
identification in individual children with individual comic books, it became
clear to me that comic books are conditioning children to identify themselves
with the strong man, however evil he may be. The hero in crime comics is not
the hero unless he acts like a criminal. And the criminal in comic books is not
a criminal to the child because he acts like a hero. He lives like a hero until
the very end, and even then he often dies like a hero, in a burst of gun-fire
and violence.” Moreover, “since the heroes of crime comics invariably commit
violent acts of one kind or another just as the criminals do, the child must
identify himself with violent characters.”
Primers for
Crime
And
if young readers identify with criminal types and desire to imitate them, they
are well on the road to a life of crime, Wertham claims. Comic books create not
only the desire to be a criminal, they show how to become one. Stories that
trace the exploits of crooks inevitably show how those crooks commit their
crimes. Although such demonstrations may be offered quite innocently by comic
book writers (that is, as integral narrative parts of the stories being told),
they turn comic books into what Wertham calls “primers for crime.”
“If one were to set out to show
children how to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault and break into houses,” Wertham
says, “no better method [than comic books] could be devised.”
Sometimes children “translate” comic
book crimes into a minor key: “stealing from a candy store instead of breaking
into a bank; stabbing and hurting a little girl with a sharp pen if a knife is
not handy; beating and threatening younger children, following the Superman
formula of winning by [superior] force.” But sometimes, Wertham claims,
children do no translating: they simply do as their comic books instruct them. Comic
books, he says, show in detail—in words with illustrative diagrams (the
pictures)—how to snatch women’s purses, how to pick pockets, how to throw
knives, and so on. They show how to rob banks and how to commit murder. And
they show how to run an extortion racket.
Finally, to complete the lesson,
there are the advertising pages in comic books. On these pages, one learns the
sources for weapons: knives, pistols, and rifles for sale through the mail.
And, says Wertham, these ads are used: once a New York district attorney linked
“such arsenal advertisements” to actual weapons caches confiscated by the
police from young offenders.
The case against comic books seems
conclusive. “Taking into account every conceivable possibility, comic books
present the details of how to commit crimes, how to conceal evidence, how to
evade detection, how to hurt people. ... The cover of the comic book draws the
child’s attention to a crime, the text describes one, the pictures show how
it’s done and the advertisements provide the means to carry it out.”
But Wertham’s case so far is mere
literary analysis: theoretical speculation based upon the content of the comic
books. To complete his indictment, Wertham had to show a definite
cause-and-effect relationship between reading comic books and committing
crimes. He had to move out of the world of theory into the real world.
Comics
Create Criminals
For
the most part, Wertham’s labors to prove a causal relationship all involve a
now-familiar maneuver: he links two sets of facts or circumstances as if
associating them together establishes that one causes the other. It’s the old
guilt-by-association ploy. But proximity is not proof.
He cites sociologist Eastman again:
“Crime comic books were listed as first choice (reading matter) by more than 90
per cent of the inmates” of two institutions for juvenile delinquents. The
implication is that reading comics made these inmates into juvenile
delinquents. But it could also mean simply that criminals prefer to read about
crime, and comic books are easy reading.
Again: “Our researches have proved that there is a significant
correlation between crime comics reading and the more serious forms of juvenile
delinquency. Many children read only a few comics, read them for only a short
time, read the better type (to the extent that there is a better type) and do
not become imbued with the whole crime comics atmosphere. Those children, on
the other hand, who commit the more serious types of delinquency nowadays, read
a lot of comic books, go in for the worst type of crime comics, read them for a
long time, and live in thought in the crime comics world.”
In this paragraph of seemingly
conclusive indictment, the opening reference to “our researches” and to
“significant correlation” creates a scientific aura into which Wertham
insinuates his damning juxtaposition of facts. He first admits disarmingly that
some children who read comics do not become criminals. Then he couples his
damning facts: (1) serious juvenile criminals (2) are constant comic book readers.
The implication is that the second fact created the first. Maybe that’s true.
But maybe, as in the previous example, young criminals prefer to read about
crime. (And, being poorly educated, maybe they don’t enjoy reading prose text
but prefer the picture storytelling of comic books.)
In one section of the book, Wertham
lists and describes 22 cases of juvenile delinquency, most of which are acts of
brutality rather than crimes against property. He introduces his list by
reporting that “juvenile delinquency has increased about 20 per cent since I
first spoke about crime comics in 1947.” (And after listing the 22 crimes, he
notes that “up to the beginning of the comic book era there were hardly any
serious crimes such as murder by children under twelve.”) His list, Wertham
says, is a “random sample” of the sorts of things juvenile delinquents are up
to. The acts described are undeniably gruesome. The implication, of course, is
that they were all inspired by comic books. But in only two of the 22 cases can
Wertham tie the brutalities of the juveniles to comic books: in one, the youths
confessed that they were enacting a comic book plot; in the other, the young
criminal when arrested was “surrounded by comic books.” In 17 of the remaining
20 cases, Wertham makes no reference to comics. But the other three include
references like that made in this one:
“Four boys, two of them fourteen,
one fifteen, one sixteen, carried out a comic book classic. They beat the
68-year-old proprietor of a little candy store with a hammer and while he was
lying on the floor one of the fourteen-year-olds drove a knife into his head
with such force that the hilt was snapped off.”
Brutality beyond reason. No
question. But was it inspired by comic books? Wertham says only that it was “a
comic book classic,” implying that similarity to a comic book plot is the same
as a causal relationship.
The two other cases with which
Wertham attempts to smear comic books involve an act of “comic book
torture-by-fire” and another torture inflicted “in comic book fashion.” Again,
guilt by implication, not evidence.
The other 17 cases are merely grisly
reminders that man’s brutality to his fellow man is not an exclusively adult
condition. Although they are only tangential to Wertham’s subject, including
this catalogue adds a dimension of horror to the book. A purely rhetorical
maneuver. At the conclusion of his list, Wertham opines that he could continue
it “indefinitely. There is nothing in these juvenile delinquencies,” he goes
on, “that is not described or told about in comic books. These are comic book
plots.”
He is probably correct. But to say
that “these are comic book plots” is not the same as to prove that the crimes
were caused by reading comic books. He asserts a similarity, insinuating a
causal relationship.
In this section of the book, Wertham
stretches beyond indictment by association until he reaches unabashed
name-calling. And in many of his examples elsewhere, he stoops to the same
technique, often attaching as many sensational accusations as he can to his
basic charge. Speaking of a collection of space comics, Wertham says “old
fashioned mugging—in recent years so frequently practiced by juveniles in large
cities—is a recurrent theme, despite the interplanetary trappings. Blood flows
freely, bosoms are half-bared, girls’ buttocks are drawn with careful
attention.”
In addition to implying that comics
are responsible for a recent upsurge in muggings, Wertham invokes the demon of
sexual stimulation (and what mother wants her son to be sexually stimulated?).
Turning to another inflamatory
subject, teenage drug addiction, Wertham first asserts that there are heroin
addicts “who are only twelve years old.” Then he goes on: “All child drug
addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with
whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic book readers. In the lives of
some of these children who are overwhelmed by temptation, the pattern is one of
stealing, gangs, addiction, comic books, and violence. The parallel with crime
comic stories is striking. ... Whatever factors come into play in the cases
that we have studied, the conclusion is inescapable that crime comics do their
part in the education of these children, in softening them up for the
temptation of taking drugs and letting themselves be drawn into participation
in the illegal drug traffic.”
First he juxtaposes two facts: (1) child addicts (2) who are
inveterate comic book readers, implying, in his usual fashion, a causal
relationship where none, in fact, has been established by anything he has said.
That he finds the lives of juvenile addicts similar to the lives portrayed in
crime comics is scarcely surprising: the comics set out to portray such lives.
But Wertham is suggesting that young addicts have deliberately modeled their
lives upon comic book stories instead of the reverse. Finally, he makes his
most insidious charge—insidious because imprecise and therefore less likely to
be proved or, significantly, disproved—that comics are “softening up” children
for lives of crime and drug addiction. How is one to be “softened up” anyhow?
Here, Wertham is simply being an alarmist, conjuring up bogeymen with
unsubstantiated and unverifiable accusation.
Once he gets on the kick of
hysterical accusation, Wertham pulls out all the stops: “When unscrupulous adults seduce and use
children for sexual and criminal activities, they do not use little
pornographic comics (8-pagers), but shower the child with the ordinary crime
comic books. In this way, children have been softened up by adults for the
numbers game, the protection racket, drug addiction, child prostitution (female
and male); and girls have been softened up for crimes where they serve as
decoys. A special way in which children are being used nowadays by adults is as
‘watchers.’ Adults who have sexual relations in a park engage children as young
as seven to watch for policemen.”
The most remarkable thing about this
passage is that Wertham stops short of invoking every perversion known to man
as being inspired by comic book reading.
Despite these hysterical flights,
Wertham returns to earth occasionally—sometimes as a model of reasoned
restraint.
“There is no doubt that the impulse
to commit a delinquent act is important. What counteracts the impulse, however,
is equally important. In the children I have studied, I have endeavored to
determine what perspective of life the child had and what it came from.
Children, like adults, are impelled in different directions, good or bad. ...
Crime comics are certainly not the only factor (in creating juvenile
delinquency), nor in many cases are they even the most important one, but there
can be no doubt that they are the most unnecessary and least excusable one. In
many cases, in conjunction with other factors, they are the chief one.” But
comics should not be ignored even if they are only one factor among many. Even
if their influence “always takes place in the setting of other factors, it
should be understood that the effect of a stimulus—any stimulus—on a child’s
life is not so simple as the impact of one billiard ball against another. A
child’s life, unlike a billiard ball, stores many memories and the game of life
is not played on a smooth, green, level surface. To disregard the comic book
factor is unfair to children, particularly in the light of the severe
punishments they so often receive, after they have become delinquent. A little
attention beforehand would do away with a lot of detention afterwards.”
Sex and
Sadism in Comics
Criminality
was not the only deviant behavior fostered by comics, Wertham claims.
Children’s attitudes towards sex, women, and life in general were shaped by
what they saw on those four-color pages.
Comics were certainly sexy in those
days—assuming that crudely provocative drawings of women are sexy. There may
well be more female flesh exposed more fully in today’s culture than in
yesterday’s, but the comics of the pre-code era went the limit of their day in
flaunting women’s primary sexual characteristics. Not in all comics, mind
you—but in some. It was the age of the “sweater girl,” and the women in many
comics all seemed to be vying for the title of champion sweater girl. Women may
have played minor roles in these stories, but they were displayed prominently
in the pictures. Backs arched and arms raised, they thrust their bosoms
tantalizingly towards readers—provocative sexual decorations in panels where
they often played no part in the action. Leg art was a big thing, and
frequently whole page layouts were designed around full-figure drawings of
leggy females. And Wertham notes that similar care and attention were lavished
on buttocks.
Stimulating as such displays must
have been to young male readers, Wertham’s principal objections to the
portrayal of women and sex in comics arise from the story content. Apart from
the few heroine roles accorded them, women played bit parts mostly—gun molls
for gangsters, hangers-on for space cadets, damsels to be rescued. And in crime
comics particularly, women were often brutally mistreated. Wertham notes the
effect of all this upon readers with anecdotes like this one:
“A twelve-year-old sex delinquent
told me, ‘In the comic books sometimes men threaten the girls. They beat them
with their hands. They tie them around to a chair and then they beat them. When
I read such a book I get sexually excited. They don’t get me sexually excited
all the time, only when they tie them up.’ The difference between the
surreptitious pornographic literature for adults and children’s comic books is
this: in one it is a question of attracting perverts, in the other, of making
them.”
Such episodes prompt Wertham to
observe that “if a medical student had to write a paper for his psychopathology
class on the varieties of sadistic fantasies and sadistic acts, he could cover
the whole field by studying just what is in our children’s comics ... typically
full of blood, violence, and nudity.”
In short, comics nurture sexual
sadism.
To illustrate the effect on young
readers, Wertham refers to such things as children’s spontaneous drawings. “In
one such drawing, a girl is tied nude to a post. A handkerchief is stuffed into
her mouth. On the floor are her discarded panties. In front of her is a boy
heating some torture instruments over a fire. On his chest is the S of the
superman.” He finds the influence of comics in interviews, too. “Several young
men who gloated over these sadistic comics stories as adolescents have told me
that during sexual relations they have to rely on the fantasy that the girl is
bound and tied down in one way or another.” A variety of sexual hang-ups are
appealed to in comics, Wertham says. “In Western comic books, the erotic
spanking of a girl by a man is frankly featured. Beatings with a sexual
connotation occur in many comic books.”
Comics also appeal to fetishes—such
aberrations as fascination with “high heel” pictures (of leggy women in high
heeled shoes) and bondage: “There are men who have a desire to see undressed
girls tied to posts or with their hands bound behind their backs or above their
heads, or confined in chains. Such deviations of psycho-sexual development
usually have their origin in some early chance experience either seen, heard or
read. American children are given every opportunity to develop these
psychopathic tendencies” through the plots and pictures of comic books. The
implication of the last sentence is, of course, that children will take
advantage of these opportunities and will develop psychopathic tendencies as an
automatic result of reading comics.
But Wertham’s catalogue does not end
with fetishes. “Comic books create sex fears of all kinds. In girls the
identification of sex with violence and torture may cause fear of sex, fear of
men, and actual frigidity. A Western with a picture of Tom Mix on the cover has
in one story no less than 16 consecutive pictures of a girl tied up with ropes,
her hands of course tied behind her back! She is shown in all kinds of poses,
each more sexually suggestive than the other, and her facial expression shows
that she seems to enjoy this treatment. Psychiatrically speaking, this is
nothing but the masturbation fantasy of a sadist, and it has a corresponding
effect on boys. For girls, and those boys who identify themselves with the
girl, it may become the starting point for masochistic fantasies.” In that last
sly sentence, “may” is not the same as “will” except, perhaps, in Wertham’s
rhetorical intention.
In one of his most curious
maneuvers, Wertham prints a panel from a comic book that shows in the
foreground a man (probably a pirate) with a red scarf around his neck, his
naked shoulder taking the prominent position in the drawing. By carefully
cropping the picture to focus just on the shoulder and the lines that define
and model its muscles, Wertham reveals that the shoulder is really a drawing of
a woman’s naked crotch. This artful dodge, Wertham claims, is frequently
practiced in drawing comics. (Think of the vast amounts of time the cartoonist
must spend constructing such hidden pictures!) The pictures, “looked at in a
certain way,” reveal “crude sexual details.” “This is so clear that it can
induce the immature reader to look for such things and stir him up sexually,”
Wertham intones. This example is, I submit, a better
measure of the temperature of Wertham’s fevered imagination than it is an
indication of the comic book industry’s intention to corrupt the morals of the
young. But when he turns to plot analysis instead of art criticism, Wertham
makes better sense. “Love comics do harm in the sphere of taste, esthetics,
ethics, and human relations. The plots are stereotyped, banal, cheap. Whereas
in crime comics the situation is boy meets girl, boy beats girl; in love comics
it is boy meets girl, boy cheats girl—or vice versa.”
Sex and Crime
Wertham
finds “a special kind of cruelty mixing crimes against property and sexual
exploits which I have hardly ever encountered in juvenile cases before the
comic book era. Nowadays,” he says, “it is not at all uncommon.” He relates an
incident involving a boy from a well-to-do family who was referred to him for
psychotherapy. “During treatment he told me once that he and three other boys,
fifteen and sixteen years old, used to go to a candy store in the neighborhood
where they ate ice-cream cones, bought comic books, and talked big.” One
evening, the boys picked up a young prostitute, took her to the home of one of
the boys whose parents were away, and had intercourse with her. En route to
returning her to where they’d picked her up, they stopped the car, beat the
girl “unmercifully,” robbed her of all her money, and left her at a subway
station. “This is comic book stuff,” Wertham concludes—once again labeling an
example without supplying any evidence (except eating ice cream and reading
comics) to support the allegation. But the clear implication is that the boys
got their ideas from comic books (not ice cream cones).
In another instance, he tells a
story about “Annie, aged ten,” who “engaged in sex play with men for which she
received money.” This child prostitute, Wertham says, read about twenty comic
books a day, “absorbing fantasies of violence and sex.” Although he doesn’t say
Annie turned to prostitution because she read about it in comics, he insinuates
vigorously that such was the case.
Wertham is masterful in limning
seedy scenes in which he juxtaposes comic book reading and shady sex. “There
are quite a number of obscure stores where children congregate, often in back
rooms, to read and buy secondhand comic books. The proprietors usually permit
the children to spend a lot of time in their establishments and to pore over
the comic books. In some parts of cities, men hang around these stores which
sometimes are foci of childhood prostitution. Evidently comic books prepare the
little girls well.”
The scene oozes innuendo, playing to
parents’ fears about their “little girls.” Each sentence (except the last),
viewed as a statement of discrete fact, is probably true. In combination,
however, they slyly suggest something else without overtly asserting it:
reading secondhand comic books in the back rooms of obscure stores leads to
childhood prostitution. Wertham could doubtless establish the factual truth of
each of the individual sentences. But it is questionable that he could prove
the truth of the implication he achieves by combining those facts.
Homosexuality
In
fanning the flames of parental alarms about sex, whether “normal” or perverted,
Wertham finally gets to homosexuality.
“Many pre-adolescent boys pass through a phase of disdain for girls. Some comic
books tend to fix that attitude and instill the idea that girls are good only
for being banged around or used as decoys. A homoerotic attitude is also
suggested by the presentation of masculine, bad, witchlike or violent women. In
such comics, women are depicted in a definitely anti-erotic light, while the
young male heroes have pronounced erotic overtones. The muscular male
supertype, whose primary sex characteristics are usually well emphasized, is in
the setting of certain stories the object of homoerotic sexual curiosity and
stimulation.”
I can’t recall ever seeing male
genitals “well emphasized” in comics; but leave that as it may be. After comics
have turned young boys off of women as sex objects, they present role models
like Batman and Robin, whose stories, Wertham says, are “psychologically
homosexual.” Batman and Robin live together and work together, constantly
saving each other from attacks by their enemies. The homoerotic overtones are a
prelude to homosexuality, Wertham implies. And “the feeling is conveyed that we
men must stick together.”
Noting Robin’s bare-legged uniform,
Wertham says that Robin is “devoted to nothing on earth or in interplanetary
space as much as to Bruce Wayne,” and he finishes by observing that Robin
“often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident.”
Discreetly? Given the pose, it’s more likely to be overtly than discreetly. And
the “genital region” is the crotch, the presence of which it is impossible to
omit and still draw human anatomy. But “crotch” is not as inflammatory a sex
word as “genital.” And Wertham is out to inflame his readers, to stir them if
he can into a lynch mob fervor against comics.
Image of
Women and of Life
The
image of women and the picture of life in general that emerged from comic books
was clearly distorted. About that there can be no quarrel. The same can be said
about television today and about movies. The entertainment industry does not
trade in ordinary events; it goes for the exotic and the exciting.
Looking at how women were portrayed
in comics, Wertham asks, “What are the activities in comic books which women
indulge on an equal footing with men?” And he answers: “They do not work. They
are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family. Mother love is entirely
absent. Even when Wonder Woman adopts a girl, there are Lesbian overtones. They
are either superwomen flying through the air, scantily dressed or uniformed,
outsmarting hostile natives, animals or wicked men, functioning like Wonder
Woman in a fascistic-futurist setting, or they are molls or prizes to be pushed
around and sadistically abused. In no other literature for children has the
image of womanhood been so degraded.” And again: “The repeated visualization of
women being treated violently by men can do nothing but instill an ambivalent
emotional attitude in the child towards heterosexual contacts.”
Just as the portrait of women was a
twisted one, so was the image of life in general distorted in comics. “In vain
does one look in comic books for seeds of constructive work or of ordinary home
life. I have never seen in any of the crime, superman, adventure, space,
horror, etc., comic books a normal family sitting down at a meal. I have seen
an elaborate, charming breakfast scene, but it was between Batman and his boy,
complete with checkered tablecloth, milk, cereal, fruit juice, dressing-gown
and newspaper.”
Elsewhere, Wertham quotes a letter
from a mother who found love comics in “bad taste” but otherwise
unobjectionable—“although they give a false picture of love and life.” And
Wertham uses it to frame a potent question: “What more harm can be done a child
than to give him a ‘false picture of love and life’?”
Our entertainments probably ought to
do better. But they don’t. If they can’t make ordinary life entertaining, then
at least they could aim at improving the quality of that life by inspiring us
to the achievement of humane if not noble goals. And some entertainments do
that. But few entertainments, if any, survive by presenting a true picture of
life. A true understanding of life is acquired only by living it. Children
whose parents provide a home with love and understanding and opportunity to
grow arrive at a comprehension of life that enables them to turn away from
“false pictures” because they know them to be false. And that sure knowledge is
more fertile soil for growing human aspiration than any entertainment.
Huckstering
in Comics
The
major thrust of Wertham’s indictment of comic books draws upon their editorial
content. Quotations from his book over the years have almost always reflected
this part of his argument. For most comics fans, this is the heart of the
matter, and for that reason, I’ve devoted the bulk of this review to presenting
this facet of Wertham’s case. But his book does not stop with the stories and
the characters: Wertham includes the advertising pages in his indictment, too.
From what I’ve already repeated from
the book, it is doubtless clear that Wertham regarded the advertising pages as
an insidiously logical supplement to the editorial content: the stories showed
how to commit crimes, the ads sold the tools of the trade through mail-order
warehouses. Not all ads sold weapons, but what they did sell was just as bad
for children.
Generally speaking, comic book advertising
played upon adolescent fears. Kids who worried about their complexions and
bodies (strength, shape, weight, breast size) found ads in comics that promised
to assuage such fears by curing pimples and building biceps and busts. Even if
the cures worked (which, Wertham says, they didn’t), the psychological damage
to children was done by making them self-conscious and ultra-sensitive about
real or imagined deficiencies. “Some children get so worried about acne and the
repeated failure of the costly comic book cures that they withdraw socially to
such an extent that they look like—and have been diagnosed as—incipient
schizophrenia,” Wertham says.
Body building ads for boys are
“illustrated with photographs of supermuscular he-men (often with big genitals like
some of the comic book heroes).” (Funny: there are those big genitals that I
never saw again.) These ads, Wertham says, are really selling more than better
bodies. “Boys with latent homosexual tendencies collect these pictures, cut
them out and use them for sexual stimulation,” he writes. Budding interest in
sex is appealed to in ads that sell telescopes, which Wertham says a “number of
youths” told him they used to spy on women undressing.
But the most “stupendous”
advertising effort in comic books, Wertham says, is devoted to the “childhood
armament program.” “Every device known to advertising” is employed “to
fascinate children with weapons. ... Glamorous advertisements in comics seduce
more and more children into wanting, buying, and using them.”
Wrapping up his indictment of comic
book advertising, Wertham writes: “Comic book stories teach violence, the
advertisements provide the weapons. The stories instill a wish to be a
superman, the advertisements promise to supply the means for becoming one.
Comic book heroines have super figures; the comic book advertisements promise
to develop them. The stories display the wounds; the advertisements supply the
knives. The stories feature scantily clad girls; the advertisements outfit
peeping Toms.”
Fostering
Illiteracy
Leaving
no rock unturned in his effort to expose the maggots of social decay that are
nurtured by comics, Wertham devotes an entire chapter to the contention that
“comics are death on reading.” His effort here is inspired, I suspect, by his desire
to counter the notion put forward by the comic book industry that reading
comics actually improves a child’s reading ability—“a fantastic idea,” Wertham
snorts.
Much of the chapter is about the
importance of reading and about various kinds of reading problems, none of
which Wertham is able to relate with scientific precision to comic book
reading. The best he can do in this regard is to demonstrate that “severe
reading disorders and chronic addiction to comic books are very often
associated.” The implication is that inability to read is caused by comics. But
one might very well explain the association of these two facts by supposing
that children who couldn’t read turned to comic books for a kindred experience
which they could have by “reading” the pictures.
That is exactly the difficulty,
Wertham notes. Those who read just the pictures and not the words are deluded
into thinking they can read, and they resist or ignore early training in real
reading. “Picture reading” of comics also masks an inability to read and
prevents the diagnosis of that inability. Masks it for whom? Not teachers,
surely: it would take only a few minutes for even a mediocre teacher to see
that a kid couldn’t read the textbook before him.
Comic books further interfere with
acquiring good reading habits by doing “specific harm to the acquisition of
fluent left-to-right eye movements, which is so indispensable for good
reading,” Wertham says. The left-to-right reading habit cannot be acquired
because comic book readers are accustomed to “reading irregular bits of
printing here and there in balloons instead of complete lines from left to
right.” Here, Wertham’s understanding of reading abilities is far too
mechanistic for an act that is essentially cognitive.
Comic books are also full of bad
spelling, and they discourage reading better literature because comic book
readers fail to appreciate quality in literature. Finally, invoking the
thematic chorus of his book, Wertham observes that bad readers are often
delinquents.
This chapter is the least convincing
in Wertham’s book. The long passages defining and discussing a variety of
reading disorders (sprinkled with an assortment of paeans to the importance of
reading for a good and successful life) camouflage the fact that he is unable
to demonstrate a causal relationship between habitual comic book “perusal” and
inability to read. He asserts that “not a single good psychological study based
on scientific data can show that comic books may help children to read.” But he
can’t find one that shows bad readers are created by comic books either.
Oddly, in quoting one youthful
“picture reader,” Wertham verges on undercutting his argument. “I get the story
by just looking at the pictures,” says the youth. “Once in a while, when a good
part cones, I read what I can, but the words I don’t know, I just pass over.
When it is a short story and it looks interesting—when it is bad and they shoot
each other—and when they get the woman—then I try to read it.” Here a poor
reader reveals that the pictures seduce him into trying to read the words. Not
a bad accomplishment for a medium that Wertham claims is “death on reading.”
Reading specialists today, while
they don’t claim that comics can teach reading, often use comic books as
motivational devices. Poor readers are likely to enjoy reading comics, and once
a taste for reading has been stimulated, it is less difficult to teach reading
skills. Then when rudimentary skills begin to develop, teachers steer these
readers into other reading matter of increasing difficulty and complexity.
Comic books alone may not improve reading ability, but they’ve often egged poor
readers on to improve.
The Rest of
the Book
Not
all of Seduction of the Innocent is
devoted just to comic book analysis. I don’t intend to go into tedious detail
in reviewing the chapters on tangential aspects of Wertham’s case, but to
provide another toe-hold on the import of the book, the rest of its contents is
worth noting briefly. In a chapter on “The Experts for the Defense” of comic
books, Wertham points out that many of the psychiatrists who defended comic
books as beneficial were on the payrolls of comic book publishers. He
successfully demonstrates that they sometimes contradict themselves: good
comics, they say, exert a great infIuence; bad comics, none at all. How is that
possible?
Wertham pooh-poohs the notion that
youthful comic book readers who become juvenile delinquents are those that are
already “predisposed” to anti-social behavior. “It amounts to no
more
than saying that comic books are good and the children bad,” he says, “and I
believe it is the other way around.” (For a discussion on this issue, click here to visit another Hindsight site where we examine precisely this question under
the heading “If Good Comics Can Have Good Effects—.”)
That there are other social forces
besides comic books at work in the creation of juvenile delinquency Wertham
does not deny. But the influence of comic books, he says, is so easy to control
that they, at least, should be removed as one of those factors contributing to
the phenomenon.
Elsewhere in the book, Wertham
relates various of his attempts to influence public opinion against comics.
Here he is fairly convincing (if slightly paranoid) in showing how a faceless
publishing industry is successful in squelching its opposition. He tells how
the work of another opponent of comics was suppressed when the magazine that
intended to publish it was pressured by its corporate owner, which also
published comics. A representative of the comics industry also tried to get
Wertham’s publisher (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston) to abandon its plans to
publish Seduction of the Innocent, he
says.
Baffled by the intricacies of comic
book publishing, Wertham imputes to the industry a conspiratorial
mysteriousness. An outstanding characteristic of the industry, he says, is the
anonymity of the publishers. They achieve this facelessness by conscious
design: a small company may publish several comic book titles but does so under
various names. And new names are forever cropping up. Different reasons, he
says, are given for this “concealment.” Noting the vagaries of tax laws and
postal regulations that might be responsible, Wertham nonetheless suspects the
anonymity is desired because the publishers are ashamed of the product.
In a chapter on “Makers of Comic
Books,” Wertham attempts to paint the Mafia-like power of the comic book
industry. Distributors who may not like distributing comic books are forced to
distribute them: if they don’t, they won’t get any other magazines to
distribute. They must market the bad in order to have a chance at marketing the
good.
Writers and artists are told what to
write and draw—that is, they must produce what sells or lose their livelihood.
“Text and drawings of crime comics are concocted, not created. And there is no
freedom of concoction.” Wertham interviewed one artist who agreed that crime
comics were unsavory. But he did his work on assignment, and he did as he was
told. “We want blood,” his employer told him. “They criticized my drawings
because they were not sexy enough,” the artist said.
In a touching series of passages,
Wertham speculates about circumventing the power of the comic book Mafia by
getting the courts to enforce certain laws, which, he says, ought to be applied
to comic books. “There are laws,” he says plaintively, “according to which it
is a punishable offense to ‘contribute to the delinquency of a minor.’ Yet the
text, pictures, and advertisements in crime comic books do that constantly”
without even a suggestion that the publishers be punished. Similarly, laws
against creating an “attractive nuisance” that could be invoked against comics
publishers never have been. A kid may be sent to a reformatory for using a
switchblade knife that he bought through a comic book ad, but the comic book
publisher remains at large, Wertham says sadly.
In a chapter on television and other
mass entertainment media, Wertham proves an early crusader against the boob
tube. Comic books influence other media, he says: “There are radio comic books,
tv comic books, and movie comic books. ... The study of comic books is
indispensable for understanding what happens in less overt form in other media.
If one has studied comic books, one recognizes sadism for sadism’s sake even if
it is embellished with psychological thrills.” He attacks tv for the same
reasons he attacks comics—and with many of the same techniques. “What all media
need at present is a rollback of sadism. What they do to children is that they
make them confuse violence with strength, sadism with sex, low necklines with
femininity, racial prejudice with patriotism, and crime with heroism.”
When he turns phrases like those,
Wertham can be remarkably persuasive.
Wertham’s
Science
The
scientific foundation upon which Wertham builds his indictment of comic books
seems a trifle shaky if judged by academic standards. The book presents no
statistical analysis of his data, for instance—nothing that reports how many
subjects he interviewed and what percentage of them became juvenile delinquents
because of their comic book reading. There is no precise analysis of the
population he studied: how many of them were juvenile delinquents, how many
were not? None of Wertham’s conclusions were ever subjected to experimental
validation. Although such an experiment would doubtless prove impossible to
implement, his findings might acquire greater validity if he had studied a
“normal” comic book reading population and compared the results to those that
emerged from his study of children suffering various degrees of maladjustment.
But such criticisms of his book, however much they must be considered in
assessing the accuracy of Wertham’s allegations, ignore the fact that he wrote
the book for a general reading public, not for the scientific community. A popular
book would never reach its intended audience if it were loaded with the freight
of scientific apparatus. Still, I’d expect a little more scientific reasoning
than I find here.
The publisher’s note that begins
Wertham’s book takes cognizance of its scientific shortcomings by stressing
that the book represents an “expert opinion.” “This book, thoroughly documented
by facts and cases, gives the substance of Dr. Wertham’s expert opinion on the
effects that comic books have on the minds and behavior of children who come in
contact with them.” Such opinions are not just ordinary opinions, we are
assured: they are “based on facts, facts that can be demonstrated and proved.”
While expert opinion is nothing to be sneezed at, an expert opinion is not the
same thing as a demonstrable fact. It is still an opinion. And it is not beyond
the realm of possibility that two experts viewing the same set of facts might
arrive at different “expert opinions” about the significance of those facts.
Wertham sees himself as a scientist
notwithstanding, and he goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate the science
he employed in assembling his case. He frequently dismisses contrary views by
simply labeling them “unscientific” without further elaboration, an autocratic
stance he feels safe in assuming once he has devoted an entire chapter to a
description of the ways in which he collected his information. In this 38-page
chapter (one tenth of the book), Wertham describes a variety of tests he
used—Rorschach tests, thematic apperception tests, mosiac tests, intelligence
and aptitude tests, reading tests and association tests. His subjects were
tested and interviewed, and in some cases, he talked also to parents, siblings,
teachers, social workers, school officials, and friends. Children participated
in an assortment of self-expression exercises—drawing and story-telling,
chiefly—and in these, as in almost everything else, Wertham found the
malevolent influence of comic book reading.
Wertharn determined that many
children spent a good deal of time reading comic books, and “nothing that
occupies a child for several hours a day over a long period can be entirely
without influence on him.” Tests revealed “underlying feelings of hostility and
destructiveness” and “preoccupation with unhealthy sexual attitudes” and with
violence in general—all, Wertham states, due to the influence of comic books.
In storytelling games, children revealed the influence of comic books in the
plots of their stories: violent stories, as the children testified when
questioned, were inspired by comic books.
One of Wertham’s methods called for
children (ages five to twelve) to make up plays for puppets. “It was
interesting to see how the concrete inspiration for a plot, such as it was,
came usually from a real event or from a movie, radio program or comic book.
Typical crime comic book methods appeared in the plays: knife-throwing,
throwing somebody out of the window, stomping on people, etc.” Wertham
classified the productions into one of two groups —constructive or destructive.
“The constructive plays were about parties, family reunions, lovers, dancing,
painters in the house, etc. ... Destructive plays were about crime, robbers,
spies. ... Comic book influences played a role only in the destructive plays. I
have seen no constructive play inspired by a comic book. ... No good marionette
show plots ever came from comic books, although the children read so many of
them. The ‘inspiration’ from comic books was never artistic, literary, or even
a good story. It was a precipitate of fragmentary scenes, violent, destructive
and smart-alecky cynical. This was in marked contrast to the inspiration
children derived from movies, of which they had seen a much smaller number.”
Given Wertham’s definition of a
“destructive” play (and considering that he regarded virtually every comic book
published as a crime comic book), it is not surprising that comic books played
a role only in destructive plays. Indeed, given his definitions, it would be
difficult to avoid that outcome. By this kind of logic, a child’s play that was
actually inspired by a movie would be classified as “comic book inspired” if
the movie were about crime. Presumably this sort of erroneous logic was
prevented: Wertham says that after every play performance, the author was
questioned by his audience. In the example Wertharn cites, the young author
says the source of his ideas was a comic book. From this single instance, we
are to assume that the sources for all the plots of “destructive” plays were
similarly identified by their authors.
For a scientist, Wertham expects us
to assume an awful lot. He gives us no statistics, no raw (or refined) numbers.
Perhaps Wertham didn’t keep score. (If not, what of his pretension to
scientific method?) And so we are left to ponder a most pertinent question:
What percentage of the children’s productions were “destructive”? If only one
of every ten plays were “destructive,” how malevolent is the influence of
comics? Not very—given the quantity of comic books kids read. On the other hand,
if seven of every ten were “destructive,” comic books could clearly be charged
with shaping children’s minds to their detriment. But Wertham gives us no
numbers.
He either can’t (because he has no
score card) or he doesn’t (because numbers would weaken his case?). If he
can’t, his science is surely questionable; if he doesn’t, his integrity is
suspect. In the absence of any kind of statistical evidence, rhetoric alone
makes the case against comics as the sole source of destructive ideas in
children.
Sources of
Wertham’s “Data”
Even
if we assume Wertham’s absolute integrity (and there is nothing practical to be
gained by supposing anything else), we should not therefore assume that his
conclusions apply to all children, to all readers of comic books. The
population he studied, after all, was a small one—and, in some respects, an
unusual population.
Wertham’s standing as an expert
whose opinion is worth consideration rests on his professional status and his
experience. At the time this book appeared, he was the author of a half-dozen
books, including a textbook, The Brain as
an Organ, “used all over the world.” His clinical investigations had
uncovered a new mental disease. He was not without status. For twenty years
(1932-1952), Wertham served as a psychiatrist variously in the Department of
Hospitals of New York City—directing mental hygiene clinics at Bellevue
Hospital and at Queens Hospital Center. As I mentioned earlier, his opinions
were part of the legal argument that destroyed the “separate but equal”
doctrine in America’s schools. He was in charge of the Court of General
Sessions Psychiatric Clinic. And he had appeared countless times in court to
give expert opinions and was the psychiatric consultant for Kefauver’s
committee investigating organized crime. Wertham’s opinions about the effects
of comic books on children were derived mostly from his experiences in
psychiatric clinics. In other words, most of the population he studied were
those who came to a mental hygiene clinic—presumably for treatment or
consultation on some behavior problem.
Wertham did not set out just to
study the effects of comic books on children: he says he was led to the study
when he discovered that comic books were often read in great quantities by the
children he was seeing in his various clinical settings. Eventually, he assumed
that there might be a connection between what they were reading and the
problems they were suffering, and he occasionally looked for evidence of that
connection. But for the most part, he says, the evidence that indicts comics
emerged almost incidentally in the course of consultation with troubled
children.
While this assertion protects
Wertham against the charge that he deliberately went witch hunting after
comics, it also reveals the source of most of his evidence—“children as they
are seen in mental hygiene clinics: children who were referred by every variety
of public and private child-care agency; who had come to the attention of the
Police Bureau or the Children’s Courts; who were seen in the course of private
practice or were confined for observation in psychiatric wards for adolescents,
or were confined for physical diseases in pediatric wards, or seen in pediatric
clinics.” Only those in the last two groups could be termed “normal” children.
But Wertham says “a large proportion
of children were normal children who came to our attention for some social
reason.” Unhappily, we have only Wertham’s word for that—and his word is, in
this instance, ambiguous. How large is “a large proportion”? Fifty per cent?
Thirty? And what were the “social reasons” that brought these “normal” children
to a psychiatric clinic?
Although most of Wertham’s evidence
was assembled through his clinical contact with children, he reports in some
detail the results of one study that involved a significant number of
non-clinical children. Ironically, the results tend to undermine Wertham’s
contention that comics corrupt youth. Astonishingly, Wertham doesn’t seem aware
of it.
The study in question took place
with 355 children enrolled in a parochial school “where ethical teaching played
a large part and all the children had undergone this uniform influence.” The
children all came from better-than-average homes economically. School
authorities assumed that these children read only the better comics, but
Wertham found that they read the “bad” ones, too. (And he makes much of this
fact: “school authorities had misjudged the comic book situation, and under
their very eyes, many of these children were being seduced by the industry.”)
Wertham says the kids’ comments were
revealing. Here they are. About Superman,
a boy said, “It teaches ‘crime does not pay’—but it teaches crime.” Other
comments: Superman is bad because they make him sort or a God. Superman is bad
because if the children believe Superman they will believe almost anything. I
think they (crime comics) are bad, but good to read. Some are dirty, some give
you bad thoughts. Some comic books lead us into sin. The children’s remarks
included such phrases as “impure dress,” “indecency,” “they are not modest,”
and the like. “Many children,” Wertham writes, “have received a false concept
of love, thinking of it as something dirty. They lump together love, murder,
and robbery.”
From all of this, Wertham concludes
that these children get from comic books “just the opposite of what they learn
at school or at home.” But a person anxious about the corrupting influence of
comics should derive some comfort from most of the children’s remarks. Most of
them reveal that the ethical teaching of the school “took.” Most of the
children recognized the so-called “bad” comics as something bad. If so, they
are scarcely being “seduced” as Wertham claims. They are, in fact, doing
precisely what their teachers and parents presumably hoped they would do under
the circumstances: they are rejecting the immoral blandishments they encounter.
Astonishingly, Wertham fails to see
this aspect of this study. Or ignores it. After all, if children properly
grounded in moral concerns reject the corrupting influence of comic books, much
of his case threatens to fall apart. Certainly there is less for the average
parent to be alarmed about. And Wertham has written this entire tome in order
to raise the alarm.
This study is the only one that
Wertham reports on at length that does not involve patients in a psychiatric
clinic or children brought to him for consultation. Given the parochial and
economic background of these children, they are probably not “average.” But
psychologically, they are closer to being “normal” than patients in Wertham’s
clinic.
I don’t bring up the abnormal
character of most of Wertham’s subjects in order to invalidate his conclusions.
(Even if only maladjusted kids were influenced by comics, isn’t that enough
reason to prevent the influence?) I mention it only to stress a point that is
often overlooked in discussions of Wertham’s book. Wertham’s zeal in assembling
the case against comics led him often to make statements which a hasty reader
could interpret to mean that all children who read comics are potentially
juvenile delinquents or sex perverts. And that interpretation is not entirely
the result of the reader’s haste: as I’ve tried to show, Wertham’s logic is (to
phrase it charitably) sometimes sloppily expressed, and his juxtaposition of
two facts often implies a causal relationship where none, in fact, exists.
Moreover, when he says crime comic books are primers for crime, teaching the
young reader exactly what he must know to be a successful criminal, the
implication is that all readers of comic books are being seduced into a life of
crime. But when facing the question point blank, Wertham says that comic books
are only “ccntributing factors” to maladjustment (remember?) and that “it is
true that many children read comic books and few become delinquent.”
Not only does most of Wertham’s
evidence come from case studies of maladjusted children, most of those children
are residents of a large metropolitan area, New York City. And even in the 40s
and 50s, the life of a child growing up on the streets of New York was
different than the life of a kid in Mason City, Iowa.
To repeat, my point is that a reader
of Wertharn’s book must resist the temptation to generalize too
enthusiastically from Wertham’s particulars, to assume that what he says is
true about maladjusted city kids who read comic books is true for all kids who
read comic books. Unfortunately, as we have seen, Wertham encourages surrender
to this temptation. Whether inadvertently or not, he often seems to generalize
sweepingly himself when marshaling his examples. Indeed, the rhetorical weight
of the sheer quantity of his examples and the potency of their implied
significance (which he does little to deny or diminish) overshadow those few
occasions on which he expressly mentions the legitimate limits of his
conclusions. When he says juvenile delinquency increased once comics were
published and devotes an entire chapter to the contention that comics
contribute to delinquency, we are likely to forget that he also once spent a
sentence saying not all who read them become delinquent.
What of It?
If
Wertham had been right, juvenile delinquency would have disappeared from the
face of the nation with the collapse of EC Comics. But juveniles continued to
be delinquent. Ergo, Wertham was wrong. This pat assessment of’ Wertham’s work
won’t wash. Although he labored strenuously to prove that reading comics caused
many young readers to become delinquent, he never said comics were the only
cause of this or any other maladjustment. “Of course there are other factors
beside comic books. There always are other factors,” he writes. But the
existence of a host of other factors should not justify our ignoring one of
them that we’ve identified (particularly when it is one that is relatively easy
to deal with). “When a child reacts to something, whether it be comic books or
a dog that bites him, a good doctor takes up the whole situation and does not
leave out any factor, including the possibility that either the comic books or
the dog may be virulent.” A good doctor in treating a disease attends to
anything that may contribute to that disease, even if he is able to isolate
only one such contributing factor.
No, we can’t leave Wertham to twist
slowly in the breeze just because juvenile delinquency continued to rage across
the land even after comic books were toned down and cleaned up. The question
about Seduction of the Innocent is
not: Did Wertham prove that comics were the cause of juvenile delinquency? It
is, rather: Did Wertham prove that comic books were one of the factors that
directly contributed to juvenile delinquency or to any of the other
misbehaviors and maladjustments he discusses? That’s all Wertham aimed to do;
all he claimed to have done. Did he do it? Perhaps. A few times. In some
special instances. But is that good enough? Was his proof good enough to
justify the wholesale demolition of publishing enterprises left and right?
One way to establish proof is to
look to the scientific method. And Wertham indeed glances in that direction.
But the proofs of science should be verifiable through repetition. The proof
emerges when a given phenomenon can be explained every time it occurs. The
power of the proof stems from its ability to predict outcomes. Wertham was
unable to construct this kind of proof. He was unable to prove that the reading
of crime comics always produced criminal or aberrant behavior in young readers.
He was unable even to identify with clinical precision the psychological
make-up of youngsters who might be the most vulnerable to the temptations
flaunted before them in crime comics.
Wertham is not much bothered by this
sort of failure. “It proves nothing,” he says, that only a few of the many
children who read comics become delinquent. “Innumerable poor people never
commit a crime, and yet poverty is one of the causes of crime. Many children
are exposed to the polio virus; few come down with the disease. Is that
supposed to prove that polio virus is innocuous?”
But this is the rhetoric of the
conjurer not the proof of the scientist.
For another kind of proof, we look
to courts of law with their rules of evidence. One objective in a trial is to
establish through evidence that a defendant is “guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt.” It’s the prosecutor’s objective, and Wertham plays that role here.
Would a jury bring in a verdict that comics were guilty as charged? Did Wertham
prove that guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”?
Historically, judging from the
results Wertham wrought, the jury found for the people, against the defendant.
Wertham won. But what about a jury of his readers today? I, for one, have
reasonable doubts. And those doubts will remain as long as so much of Wertham’s
evidence admits of more than one interpretation. In too many of his examples of
comic book readers gone wrong, the errant youths could have been led into the
error of their ways by something other than comics. While Wertham presents some
telling evidence (kids who hanged themselves enacting comic book stories, for
instance), the argumentative force is overpowered by the sometimes not so faint
odor that clings to the mud-slinger. Wertham so frequently attempts to indict
by evidence of association rather than of causation that he raises doubts about
his motives and his methods. If we doubt either, we must question too the
authority of his evidence as a whole.
Considered as scientific document, Seduction of the Innocent is more
insinuation than proof; as a trial brief, more innuendo than evidence. But if
the book is considered as literary criticism, it gains modest stature.
Literary criticism need not prove
anything: it needs only to be persuasive. It employs insight and analysis to
unveil the thematic inner workings of literature. And Wertham’s book clearly
performs this function with comic books. When he includes all superhero books
and animal comics in the embrace of his indictment, he is engaging in
hyperbolic allegation, true. But there were large numbers of comics “concocted”
to a “blood and bra” formula, and the violence and sex than ran rampant through
the pages of these books presented their readers with an “obscene” image of
life.
Literary criticism is generally seen
as a rather harmless academic exercise. We think of literature as providing
only a pleasant interlude of escape from the rigors of reality, and the proofs
of literary criticism cannot therefore be understood as impinging upon real
life. In this context, to accuse comics of being among the causes of juvenile delinquency seems far fetched
indeed. But many of those who labor in the fields of imaginative literary
enterprise—its teachers, scholars, and critics particularly—believe that
literature affects its readers. The imaginative engagement between reader and
book results in the reader’s participating in the fictional lives that unfold
on the pages before him. As those fictional folk live through their lives, they
encounter good and bad fortune, they are tempted, and some are weak while
others are strong. Vicariously, the reader has parallel experiences, making
hard choices and fearfully facing the consequences with the characters in the
book. This vicarious experience, while not of the same depth as real life
experience, nonetheless tastes of it. And every reader who enters imaginatively
into the life of a fictional character makes another acquaintance, and each
such acquaintance increases his understanding and appreciation of the human
condition. Literature may do many other things as well, but it does at least
this.
Wertham’s book revealed that many
comic books offered their readers imaginative experiences that were
unwholesome. We are likely to reject the experiences of imaginative literature
when our own experience of life shows them to be false—when the fictional
people don’t seem real, when their aspirations do not parallel those we have or
can feel a kinship with, when the circumstances of their lives are too
exaggerated to seem authentic. Those who grew up in surroundings that
approximated the myths of middle America probably rejected the image of life
they encountered in some of Wertham’s comics. But what of those who walked the
mean streets, virtually homeless, to whom the four-color fictions seemed real?
For them, reading comics may well
have resulted in distorting ethical perceptions, character development,
emotional and social maturation, and cultural appreciation. The damage may not
have been great or permanent or incapacitating. It may not have resulted in
destructive anti-social behavior. Maybe not many readers were affected at all.
And maybe the effects, like adolescent acne, were outgrown. But if good
literature has an effect on its readers, so must bad literature. And comic
books have as much potential for good or bad as any other literature. Today if
we tout the potential educational value of a comic book about drug abuse, we
cannot ignore the potential effects of a comic book in which Wolverine slashes
his opponents into ground beef. The two are not the same, true: the realities
of the former are likely to be more recognizably akin to life experiences than
the realities of the latter. But both have the potential of affecting their
readers.
Wertham may not have
proved—scientifically or judicially—a causal relationship between comic book
reading and maladjusted kids. But if literature has any social or personal
value beyond escapist entertainment (and I think it does), we are better off as
a society without the kinds of comic books he described.
A New Wertham Today?
[“Today,” back when this piece first
appeared, was 1986. In 1986, remember, Ronald Reagan was in the White House and
the Moral Majority was in ascendency. The times seemed ripe for a new round of
Werthamism. And it was exactly the prospect of that possibility that prompted
my examination of Wertham’s book. I returned to the proposition to conclude the
article. Here, I recycle again that conclusion—adding a few notes to bring the
argument up-to-date, almost. Then I’ve added a Footnote as a finale.]
Is there another Wertham, poised today just over the
horizon to pounce on the industry for its unsealed comic books? Maybe. Would he
be as successful today as Wertham was? I doubt it. In the first place, I like
to think that the specious reasoning of Seduction
of the Innocent would be recognized these days for what it is. But even if
it weren’t, Wertham wouldn’t have today an audience quite as attentive as the
one he enthralled in the fifties.
The attentiveness of Wertham’s
audience in those days stemmed largely from its awareness of the vast
quantities of comic books available to children. With temptation so apparent on
every hand, Wertham easily conjured up a bogeyman. But today’s comics are not
produced in similar quantities. Nor are they as widely available. Consequently,
they are the constant reading matter of far, far fewer children. So there would
be fewer parents alarmed by a Wertham today. I doubt that today’s Wertham could
muster troops enough to his cause to bring about substantial change.
Moreover, today, in 1986, a newer
bogeyman seems much more horrific to parents: television. And today’s mass
media exposes us all to more sex and violence than yesterday’s. Perhaps, as
Wertham long ago suggested, our sensibilities have been blunted by
overexposure. Whatever the case, we are less likely to be aroused to censorious
action by the sex and violence in today’s comics, which seem tame in comparison
to tv and movies. And the sex and violence in television and movies, in case
you hadn’t noticed, have scarcely been washed away by the much touted power of
the “wave of conservative morality” that eddies back and forth across the country.
The Moral Majority exists, I don’t deny that; but it has always existed—albeit
without a name. Its present distinction lies in its seeming organization, an
illusion buttressed by cable vision programs like “The 700 Club” that give
voice to its opinions (but that reach only like-minded listeners). Despite the
persuasiveness of this illusion, the Moral Majority’s failures as a social and
political force are at least as notable as its successes. It may have helped
elect Reagan in 1980 and 1984 [and George
W. (“Whopper”) Bush in 2000 and 2004], but it hasn’t yet secured
legislation banning abortion. And the porn movie industry, thanks to videos and
the Internet, is alive and thriving. The Moral Majority is hardly an invincible
monolithic juggernaut, grinding all opposition under its feet. No: judging from
the evidence of the cultural accouterments on all sides of us, the Moral
Majority is not even a simple majority.
What, then, about the rash of book
burnings and shelvings and other kinds of
censorship
that Jan Strnad catalogued in 1985 in The
Comics Journal? And what about the “concerned citizens” whose police
department shut down a comics shop because a comic book had a picture of a
naked painter in it? Don’t such incidents speak of a growing censorious power?
Not really. The usual targets of these efforts at censorship are libraries and
schools, local public institutions that are peculiarly vulnerable to the
pressures of their immediate constituencies upon whose votes they rely for
funding. There may be more voices raised these days in protest against Catcher in the Rye and The Grapes of Wrath, but that’s merely
because those voices acquired the courage to speak by believing themselves
members of a majority. (To that extent, the Moral Majority has been successful:
although it is neither moral nor a majority, it has succeeded in convincing us
that it is both. But it will take more than artful public relations, computerized mailing lists, and “The 700
Club” speaking largely to its own members to achieve a wholesale restructuring
of society’s moral postures and practices.) As for shuttered comic book stores,
they’re mostly in those few regions of the country where moral fervor burns
brightest and education is the slightest. Menacing, yes; but not yet widespread.
The censorship statistics so
helpfully assembled by the Association of American Publishers, the American
Library Association, and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development do not, I’ll bet, include many instances of any group successfully
censoring private enterprise. Despite the self-proclaimed power of the Moral
Majority, it has been remarkably unsuccessful in performing even such an
eminently moral act as shutting the doors of the adult bookstores that provide
sanctuary for much more scandalous material than comics, even television and
movies, have to offer—except in certain benighted regions and neighborhoods of
the country. In short, its power is regional, not national. Considered on a
nationwide basis, the Moral Majority is largely a phantom social force, an
impotent power. And even if it weren’t, comics, as I said before, are not
ubiquitous enough in children’s lives these days to constitute a target worthy
of the Moral Majority’s endeavors. Cat Yronwode was doubtless correct when she
said that our mid-1980s fears of a new Wertham investigation and exposure are
“childish” —even paranoid—deriving more from the days when “we got caught
reading comics under the covers by flashlight” than from actual conditions in
our present circumstance.
But comics are vulnerable. Their
distribution system is, at best, fragile; their economic base, slender. Relying
now [1986] chiefly on direct sales distribution through specialty shops, comic
books are more likely to be done in by self-righteous or fearful bookstore
operators than by social upheaval. We must recall that Wertham’s power was
rhetorical not evidentiary. And rhetoric needs only to approximate actual
conditions. His proof resided in the persuasiveness of literary criticism not
in science. The sheer quantity of his evidence, whether spurious or not,
weighed heavily in the scales. The chorus of his theme by constant repetition
dinned on the public ear, raising questions about smoke and fire.
When Don and Maggie Thompson,
writing in the widely circulated Comics
Buyer’s Guide, say “the threat of censorship of comics by a powerful
outside force unfriendly to comics is greater right now than at any time since
the early-to-mid fifties,” they add a loud voice to the chorus that today’s
Wertham (if he exists) might be rehearsing just over the horizon. Each noise
added to the chorus means the next noise must be louder in order to be heard.
So do alarms raise alarms. And the resultant cacophony assaults the ear without
addressing the mind.
At the helm of one of fandom’s major
periodicals, the Thompsons can scarcely keep silent on the subject. But their
utterances on this and other matters are sometimes infected with a kind of
prissy sanctimoniousness that is not only cloying in the extreme but revealing.
Sanctimony has a way of masking ignorance: it parades self-righteous virtue as
if virtue alone were sufficient justification for an opinion—a pose that
conveniently permits the poseur to ignore every fact and shard of reality that
might contradict his opinion. “Threat of censorship” and “powerful outside
force unfriendly to comics” indeed. C’mon. Name two. The Thompsons have spent
too long in the alien worlds of science fiction.
Be that as it may, elsewhere they
are probably right: comics might benefit from employing a rating system like
that used with movies. But I don’t see a rating code as a device by which the
medium shields itself against an attack by the spawn of Wertham. (A pointless
exercise in itself: as I said, Wertham’s minions are all but impotent in
today’s more permissive mileu.) Rather, I see coding as a consciousness-raising
mechanism. If publishers undertook to code their books as an indication of the
audiences for which they might be most appropriate, it might make the producers
of comics more self-conscious about the content of their books and the
potential they have for affecting their readers. The effect I have in mind is
the effect that imaginative literature may have upon those readers who become
engaged with it—the potential to broaden and deepen the individual’s human
experience, creating understanding of and sympathy for his fellow creatures.
Self-awareness may also breed a keener sense of responsibility. And many of
those who now dabble in four-color literature might dabble less and create
better if they took seriously the responsibility that producing imaginative
literature entails upon its producers—the responsibility to engage the reader’s
imagination and involve him in fictional experiences that bear enough upon his
life to enrich it.
In short, a coding system may help
to correct the notion that comics are inconsequential crap. Since that view is
held by many who produce comics as well as by some who read them (not to
mention the innocent bystanders, the public at large), it has the effect on
comics of a self-fulfilling prophecy: thinking the product is crap results in
producing a crappy product. This attitude acquires its philosophical nimbus in
such slogans as, “Give the public what it wants” and “The best is what sells
best.”
Wertham smelled that attitude in the
comics of his time. He believed those comics were cultural crap. But he was
convinced they weren’t inconsequential. If comics producers had his conviction,
they would disprove his belief: they’d think better of their work, and we’d get
better work as a result. So bring on the codes.
Footnits
As it turned out, comics weren’t
censored by a “powerful outside force” after all. Ratings codes and cover
advisories came along. And comics got better and better. Almost as I’d predicted
(although, after all the foregoing gaseousness, I’d hesitate to claim a
cause-and-effect relationship here.) And then, as the better comics assumed the
long form of graphic novels, the medium achieved a cultural status we could
scarcely have envisioned for it in the 80s. But the Moral Majority and the
Righteous Religious Right are still with us. In 1986 when I wrote this diatribe
about Wertham, I felt that the wave of conservative morality had probably
crested as a social and political force. Even the movement’s most obvious
beneficiary in those days had seen fit to modify his more extreme views: the
canny performer in the White House in the 1980s knew that there wasn’t a
conservative majority that could re-elect him unaided by other demographics. But
the moral passion of the Righteous Right has a peculiar resilience. Like most
extremist social forces, it has a relatively short life, but it has it often.
It crested again with the elevation of the Bush League in 2000, and now, as in
the mid-1980s, we are seeing the wave being sucked under by the more powerful
mainstream currents as the common man’s common sense re-asserts itself.
Still,
the last six years or so have been a time of moral assertiveness somewhat like
that of the early 1980s only a bit more strident and unforgiving. Back then, I
could not have conceived that a small cabal of Bush League ideologues could so
drastically alter our political and cultural life. But they have gone about it
systematically, insinuating into every nook and cranny of the federal edifice
bureaucrats of kindred moral dedication; it will take a generation to weed them
out and return our government to a pragmatic rather than a programmatic agenda.
And while that is going on, the Righteous Right will continue to flourish in
certain besotted regions of the country where significant portions of the
populace share a belief that they can make better humans of us all by imposing
upon us their own private codes of conduct and conviction. We will still need
the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to protect us all from those who regard
themselves as our moral superiors.
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