Comic Books

In 1954 an American psychiatrist called Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a book that took the thriving 1950s comic-book industry — crime stories, horror tales, caped heroes — and presented it as a factory for juvenile delinquents. Wertham's argument, roughly, was that children who read comics were being trained into violence, sexual deviance and contempt for authority. He claimed the EC Comics horror line was desensitising readers to gore; he claimed Batman and Robin were "a wish dream of two homosexuals living together"; he claimed Wonder Woman had "lesbian overtones." Called before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency (the congressional panel then hunting for causes of youth crime, and on which Senator Estes Kefauver sat), Wertham delivered the immortal line: "Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry."

The response was roughly the one you would expect. The industry, terrified of federal regulation, agreed to police itself via the Comics Code Authority in October 1954 — a stamp of approval that in practice banned horror, crime and anything morally ambiguous. Thousands of titles vanished. Parents' groups held comic-book bonfires in places like Binghamton, New York. The once-booming EC horror line collapsed.

Here is the twist. In a 2012 article in Information & Culture, historian Carol Tilley went back to Wertham's original case notes and discovered he had been making much of it up — altering the ages of children he quoted, stitching together statements from different interviewees as if spoken by one, and quietly dropping the context (abusive homes, serious mental illness) that would have undercut his thesis. The evidence had been cooked. The Code was not formally abolished until 2011. American comics took decades to recover the range they had in 1953, and the horror, science fiction and socially pointed stories of the pre-Code years are still revered as a lost golden age. What Wertham mistook for moral corruption was really a new imaginative space the postwar child had claimed for themselves, and the Code that narrowed the medium for a generation also happens to have kept the industry alive long enough to become the engine of 21st-century blockbuster cinema.