I discovered your thread while trying to find out about Sidney David Pace Wigransky, Jr., and was so delighted by the depth and originality of your research that I joined cgc comics for the purpose of thanking you. As with so many others on this thread, I felt I had to express my appreciation.
Checking old newspapers had told me almost nothing. He "never married and was an artist in Washington" (as you quoted earlier in this thread from his mother's obituary, which I have appended.) When David Wigransky died in 1969, he was not remembered in a newspaper obituary, but merely mentioned in an announcement, which named the officiating and assisting pastors at his funeral, the pallbearers, and those who attended the service, but said nothing about who he had been (other than a son.)
I think Wigransky's famous rejoinder to Wertham has some weaknesses. (For example, his first counter-argument would have the reader believe that Wertham's article had suggested that fratricide was impossible before comic books existed.) Still, it was a vigorous and precocious piece of work. Wigransky raises points that were later restated (without attribution) by Thrasher and by Gaines.
I thought of creating a display name as seems to be the custom here, but (sorry) I may be too set in my ways to begin that now. I could not think of one.
Thanks again.
Leonard Rifas
