We MUST Be Evil and Perverse Non-Members of Society

[PovertyRow]

The Good News: Weird Science-Fantasy never saw a CCA Stamp !!!

 

The Bad News: They retitled it Incredible Science Fiction and the last four issues all had the CCA stamp,........

 

Thanks to both. In my opinion EC tried to continue their WSF with Incredible. Perhaps that is why they did not mention it. An interesting pre-code transition!

 

Which brings up another thread! (sorry )

[Forbush-Man]

The Good News: Weird Science-Fantasy never saw a CCA Stamp !!!

 

The Bad News: They retitled it Incredible Science Fiction and the last four issues all had the CCA stamp,........

 

Thanks to both. In my opinion EC tried to continue their WSF with Incredible. Perhaps that is why they did not mention it. An interesting pre-code transition!

 

Which brings up another thread! (sorry )

 

[PovertyRow]

The Good News: Weird Science-Fantasy never saw a CCA Stamp !!!

 

The Bad News: They retitled it Incredible Science Fiction and the last four issues all had the CCA stamp,........

 

Thanks to both. In my opinion EC tried to continue their WSF with Incredible. Perhaps that is why they did not mention it. An interesting pre-code transition!

 

Which brings up another thread! (sorry )

 

 

[PovertyRow]

Today was a good day. I got two magazines in from Ebay. This April 1954 Saturday Review has a review of Wertham's Seduction Of The Innocent. Here it be, along with a cover scan in case anyone happens to see it in the quarter stacks!

 

 

The review below:

 

[PovertyRow]

And this May 1954 Reader's digest features their own condensed version of SOTI under "Comic Books - Blueprints For Delinquincey" (check the 7th title down on the cover.

 

Cover is below. The 6-page article is scanned in 3 2-page spreads and I have linked them.

 

 

Pages 1-2

 

Pages 3-4

 

Pages 5-6

[adamstrange]

Awesome, Scrooge!

 

Thanks for sharing those nifty purchases.

[PovertyRow]

Thanks, Marley! I am now hooked and am seeking more and more. OMG I am becoming a Wertham Completist!!!!!!!!

[ajaxfarrell]

My contribution, I doubt anyone has read this unless you lived in St. Louis 12 years ago. It's from the May 3, 1993 St. Louis Post-Dispatch...it has an unseen (by me anyway) picture of the comic book burning...WOW...also some info on comic book burning and censorship. I've kept the filesizes down and included just the article and the pics...There is a pic of a fella named Bruce Mohrhard, whom I've never met because I only recently moved to St. Louis (great city by the way). He was the owner of Comics and Stories, but it is now closed...anyhow, for your reading pleasure, my contribution, inspired by POV...

The intro with the pics

article part 1

article part 2

article part 3

article part 4

part 5

final part

One of the reasons they came up with the code

[Paris_Fred]

As incredible as it can be "Seduction of the innocents" have been translated in French in october 1955 in Jean-Paul Sartre's "Temps Modernes". Not all but 68 pages including 4 pages of illustrations !

 

the revue was:

We publish today, on a purely documentary basis, two studies devoted to a badly known aspect of the American society.

The first, due to Dr. Frederic Wertham, analyzes the crime comic, these collections of "comic-books" of which several tens of million specimens are sold each month in the United States.

In the second, Maria Mannes presents a "news item" which illustrates rather well the theses of Dr. Wertham.

Still should it be observed that the crime-comics are not exactly the cause of a certain "juvenile criminality": both would be rather the demonstrations of the same social disintegration.

 

[ajaxfarrell]

That's super cool Paris Fred...something about saying the name "Paris Fred" makes me smile...it makes me think of a French Fred Sanford...it must be all the comic books I've read.

[Jayman]

Thanks, Marley! I am now hooked and am seeking more and more. OMG I am becoming a Wertham Completist!!!!!!!!

 

[OldGuy]

Some interesting perspectives on Wertham (note, I didn't author any of this, just found it hear and there):

 

The book, Seduction of the Innocent, is the result of seven years of scientific investigation conducted by Dr. Fredric Wertham. He has had long experience in technical research and was the first psychiatrist to be awarded a fellowship by the National Research Council. From his studies on the brain came an authoritative textbook, The Brain as an Organ, used all over the world. His clinical investigations resulted in the discovery of a new mental disease now incorporated in leading psychiatric textbooks.

 

Dr. Wertham was senior psychiatrist for the Department of Hospitals in New York City from 1932 to 1952, directed the mental hygiene clinics at Bellevue Hospital and Queens Hospital Center, and was in charge of General Sessions Psychiatrist Clinic. For over twenty-five years Dr. Wertham has been giving expert opinion in medico-legal cases. His advise has been sought by defense councils, district attorneys, judges and legislators. His views have been discussed before state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. An "expert opinion" by a psychiatrist is an opinion based on facts, facts that can be demonstrated and proved.

 

Seduction of the Innocent, 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. He has studied all the varieties of comic books. His findings are presented, therefore, against the background of all kinds of comic books. He has directed this book specifically as crime comic books, which he defines as those "comic books that depict crime, whether the setting is urban, Western, sciencefiction, jungle, adventure or the realm of supermen, 'horror' or supernatural beings."

 

Frederic Wertham M.D.

 

In the middle 1940's a then unknown child psychologist

began some studies on his patients. These studies would

result in a series of articles written by him and later a

book which helped to fan national hysteria toward comic

books as social trash. This is his story..

 

Frederic Wertham was born March 20 1895 in Nuremburg,

Germany. Graduating from Wurzburg University in 1921, he

began his post graduate studies before he got a position at

Munich's Kraepelin Clinic.

 

Dr. Emile Kraepelin, the clinic's founder had founded a

novel idea that in psychological studies, he believed a

patient's social background and environmental

surroundings had psychological effects on those he

studied. Though it is a common belief today, these were

truly visionary ideas for the time.

 

Wertham emigrated to the United States in 1922, quickly

getting a position at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic located

at the John Hopkins University, one of the most

prestigious medical schools in New York City. During

this tenure he wrote "the Brain as an Organ" in 1926,

explaining his theories based on those of Dr. Kraepelin in

Munich. Though the book was initially ridiculed by

Wertham's colleagues, it would later become one of the

most widely used psychology books of the time.

 

He left Phipps in 1932 to become the Senior Psychiatrist

for Bellevue Hospital, continuing the writing of books

and articles tying together criminal behavior with mental

health and environment. During the thirties he advised

the City of New York on the first psychiatric hospital for

convicted criminals.

 

But it was when Wertham published his book "Dark

Legend" in 1941 that his studies began to take on a

noticeable trend in connecting popular culture with

crime. Dark Legend was the true story of a 17 year old

New York City teenager who killed his mother in the late

thirties. Detailing the boys life, Wertham noted the boy's

interests in movies, radio and comic books, which

Wertham believed helped the boy move emotionally into

a fantasy world, contributing to the boy's aberrant

behavior and finally the crime itself. The book was made

into a play, and only Wertham's insistence that a film

story follow closely the book did the deal fall through.

 

1948 brought two events from Dr. Wertham that began a

snowballing disaster for comic books. The first was an

article in Reader's Digest magazine that eschewed comics

as a direct contributor to violence in American children.

The second was another book about troubled New York

children in case studies. This book, "the Show of

Violence" firmly attacked comics, movies and other

forms of media entertainment as detrimental to children

and young teens, in the form and format of their

contemporary design.

 

It would be unfair to indicate that Wertham was alone in

his quest. In 1940 children's book author Sterling North

attacked comics as vile sex serials and in 1949 Gershom

Legman wrote "Parade of Pleasure" a highly sought

after book by comic collectors. In this book Legman

accused comic artists, writers and publishers as

degenerates and believe it or not he stated that the two

most popular comic publishers of the day were "..staffed

entirely by homosexuals and operating out of our most

phalliform skyscraper." Pretty strong stuff I say!

 

One of the results of these events was the convening of a

Senate panel in New York State focusing on comic books

and other media. But by this time the death knell was

beginning to ring for comics. All over America comic

books were feeling the pressure from religious and

community groups. Major cities in some states banned

comic books. Laws were introduced in 18 states

restricting the sale of comics. Protesters were visible in

front of stores and newsstands that sold comics.

magazine distributors were deluged with complaints.

 

Then Wertham wrote yet another book, and this would

ring the final bell for many comics companies, and

almost comics themselves. Released in 1954, "Seduction

of the Innocent" was Wertham's epic tome on the effects

of comics on children. He gave graphic examples of sex

and violence. He told of scores of stories with

unredeemed criminals. Dope, sadism, rape.

 

It was the final straw! Between the protests, senate

hearings, rising violence in America and just plain old

fear, comic books were about to be classified as trash and

only barely escaped extinction.

 

By the end of 1954 almost three quarters of the comics

publishing industry was gutted. Dozens of publishers

went out of business, many others stopped publishing

comics and yet others transformed their products into

the sort of publication that today is compared to bubble

gum and homogenized milk. One of the reasons was the

adoption of a "Comics Code." The other reason was the

abject fear of recrimination and bankruptcy.

 

The code carefully explained what could and could not be

written into or drawn into the pages of the comics.

Violence and sex were written out. Certain words like

"weird, horror, terror" and "crime" were restricted.

Even slang terms were controlled and attacks on religion

were strictly forbidden.

 

This was just too much for most publishers to deal with.

Many publishers closed their doors for good. Atlas

Comics (now called Marvel) almost folded. DC scaled

back the number of titles they published and famed

publishers like EC just barely stayed alive.

 

EC had been a particular target of many during this

period. Inarguably filled with graphic gore, sex, violent

acts, sadism and suggestive story lines, even after the

adoption of the code EC found itself unable to get their

books distributed. EC publisher Bill Gaines had told

many stories of unsold comics being returned from the

distributors without their bundles being opened. Only

the coming popularity of Mad magazine kept them

afloat. Mad would be the single publication from EC

forever more.

 

There were only two publishers who seemingly were

unaffected by the comics code. Dell Comics had been a

rather "sweet" company for it's entire history. Based in

Poughkeepsie, New York and Racine, Wisconson Dell

published comics that were family oriented. But they had

employed their own brand of comic code for years as the

publisher of among other titles "Walt Disney's Comics

and Stories".

 

The other company was the Gilberton Company who

published the famed "Classics Illustrated" title, who also

followed their own code (though they did not until the

early fifties, probably to avoid the problems other

publishers would later experience).

 

The effects of Wertham's crusade left just a few comic

publishers alive. Artist and writers fled the business

landing in every filed from advertising to animation.

Wertham had won!

 

Wertham wrote another book in 1958 called "Circle of

Guilt" whose main claim was that Americans were

starting to feel that they were less responsible for

themselves and their actions, resulting in higher crime

rates across the country. What did he claim was the

culprit? Comics and films of course! He continued his

attack on comics in "A Sign for Cain" released in 1965.

 

Then in 1973 he took a u-turn and published a book

entitled "the World of Fanzines". In this book he claimed

that sci-fi and comics fandom were responible for the

creation of a new form of art and expression that helped

to promote communication and artistic endeavor. That

fanzines were a positive force in the individual growth of

teenagers! WOW!

 

After the publication of this book, New York Comic Art

Convention founder and promoter Phil Seuling invited

Wertham to be a member of a panel at the coming

convention to speak to "his fans". In reality it was a

setup.

 

When Wertham arrived at the panel he found himself the

target of angry comic fans who complained he ruined the

field in the fifties. Hecklers were throughout the audience

and with the animous reaching a fever pitch, Wertham

left the panel and the convention.

 

He never wrote another word on comics and died in

1981..

 

source = http://www.comic-art.com/bios-1/wertham1.htm

 

 

Harvey Kurtzman in conversation with Kim Thompson and Gary Groth, published in The Comics Journal no.67, Oct 1982. ©1982

 

THOMPSON: It strikes me, particularly with the EC horror stories, that when one builds a story around the snap ending rather than around a theme or an observation, the story almost self-destructs at the end. The snap ending is the whole reason for the story.

 

KURTZMAN: True, but I don't think it's that simple. I automatically assume that any reading experience a person has rubs off on him/her. There has to be a residue. In fact, the reason I took vigorous exception to the EC horror stories was because I believed they had residual effect on young readers.

 

THOMPSON: I know Panic had at least one very major problem with censorship - the Santa Claus story - and I was wondering whether Mad, while it was a comic book, had any such conflicts?

 

KURTZMAN: No, we didn't have any problems. Of course, we had the big problem: Could we ever live under the censorship of the Comics Code? We decided, absolutely no. We could not go on as a comic book.

 

GROTH: How did you feel about the whole area of censorship?

 

KURTZMAN: Well, I was bitter. I felt that the comics business had brought censorship down on its head because of the kind of thing the horror comics were doing. I always thought the horror comics were evil. At some certain point they'd turned sick, I thought, and I think they reached that point when EC was running short of classic book plots and had to turn inward; what came out was sheer grue - ideas that sniffed of necrophilia. (Of course, who am I to talk, with my own naked cartoons?) Back then I took issue with the horror stuff. When the investigation turned on EC, it was like, "I told you so! Look what you did to us!"

 

GROTH: Did you think that comic books should have a censoring bureau like the Code to halt the kind of horror comics that were being done back then?

 

KURTZMAN: I didn't like the horror comics and I felt that thereshould be some controlling system. See, comic books are essentially sold to children - or were - and children are second class citizens. They should be. They don't have the vote, they're not responsible under the law for what a grownup is, and for good reason. There's an unequal relationship between parent and child that's legitimate. A parent has certain responsibilities toward his child. The parent is responsible for the child's welfare and environment. So here's the newsstand filled with horror comics that can be bought with candy money. How do you relate to that part of your child's environment? Do you keep your child off the streets? Do you censor thc newsstand? Once you have a son or daughter, you clearly realize you have responsibilities! You can't say, "Okay, go out in the street and don't come back." You've got to feed the kid, you have responsibilities to teach your child as well as you can what's right, what's wrong, what's up, what's down. The horror comics were just bad.

 

GROTH: Do you think they had a powerful effect on kids who read them?

 

KURTZMAN: I don't know. Who knows what effect anything has on your children. You do your best. You try to teach them that lying is wrong, stealing is wrong. Whether that will stop them from stealing - there's always the bad seed.

 

GROTH: In what sense do you think those comics were bad?

 

KURTZMAN: Well, from a Freudian perspective, they were questionable - the business of playing with dead bodies stories about chopping op people into baseball fields and making their intestines into a Christmas ribbon. That's not the kind of thing that I liked to subject my child to.

 

THOMPSON: You never worked within the Comics Code, did you?

 

KURTZMAN: No. Never. I couldn't have. Censorship codes are almost always stupid. Artistically, they're suicide.

 

GROTH: You're saying you could not have done your war books under the Comics Code.

 

KURTZMAN: Probably not, no.

 

GROTH: Were you morally opposed to Gaines's publishing the horror comics?

 

KURTZMAN: Sure.

 

CATRON: How did Gaines react toward your feelings about those hooks?

 

KURTZMAN: Well, we argued a lot. He was fair in the sense that he would defend his point of view and allow me to defend mine. We argued.

 

GROTH: Did he argue on moral grounds, or economic grounds?

 

KURTZMAN: On moral grounds. He believed in what he was doing. The one thing about Gaines, he had an honesty I always admired. His opinions may have differed from mine, but he was always honest, almost painfully honest.

 

 

 

Mad-man William M. Gaines in conversation with Dwight

Decker and Gary Groth, published in The Comics Journal

no.81, May 1983. ©1983

 

Bill Gaines on Comics

 

DECKER: So your father [Max Gaines] was killed [in a boating accident, 1947] and the company was left without a manager.

 

GAINES: Yeah. And as I say, it was doing very poorly at the time, because all these educational and relatively nice-type books that he was trying to publish weren't taking. I was finishing up my work at NYU and I had planned to be a chemistry teacher and I had a year to go when this happened. We had a business manager down there and I really had no interest in the business at all and didn't feel I could run it because I didn't feel I had any talent for business, and I wanted to close it up and be done with it. As I said to my mother, "If he was losing money, what do you expect me to do?" So the whole thing was absurd. But she wanted to keep it going mostly out of sentiment. So I said, "Fine. Okay." So we kept it going and I would just drop down there and sign checks and that's about all I did for the first year. Around about March of '48, which was 6-8 months after my father was killed, Feldstein dropped in. He had been doing teenage work at the time and he showed me all this artwork that he had been doing for a publisher named Victor Fox, and all the broads had big busts and I was so taken with those busts that I hired Feldstein on the spot to put such a book out for me.

 

DECKER: Headlight comics.

 

GAINES: Something like that. Before we ever got it out - and our first title would have been Going Steady With Peggy - before we got it out I discovered that teenage books suddenly were losing money, so I decided not to put out this book, but we decided to try something else. And just having Feldstein around to talk to, there was a rapport between us, so we just started to horse around and we put out love books and crime books and westerns. All very mediocre, very mediocre stuff.

 

DECKER: Was it just experimentation to see what would take?

 

GAINES: No, no, we were putting out what we thought was selling. We were like the smallest, crummiest outfit in the field at that point, with definitely the worst distributor, Leader News. We just imitated. Whatever we heard was selling, that's what we did, and probably not nearly as well. I had absolutely no interest in these titles because love books and western books abd true crime books have absolutely no interest for me. I had never been interested in those things, so why would I be then? We did them all because we thought they might sell. But then somewhere along the line Al and I started talking and we realized we bothe enjoyed things like Suspense and Inner Sanctum.

 

GROTH: If I may break in, how did you wind up with the lousiest distribution company? Was it because you were the smallest...?

 

GAINES: I inherited it from my father. You see, everything in business is contracts. Now, when he had the AA group, he was all set, he had his distribution, he had his paper. During World War II paper was very important and paper was allocated on the basis of what you had used or a percentage of it, So when he sold his business to DC., what they werebuying, largely, were his paper contracts. They were interested in Wonder Woman and so forth and so on, but they were more interested in the paper. As luck had it, the war was over six months later, there was plenty of paper [laughter], and they didn't make as good a deal as they could have made if they'd waited six months. But that was his good luck and their bad luck. When he went back in business, he was without contracts, he didn't have his characters anymore, he didn't even have Shelly Mayer, because Shelly Mayer was up at DC, and this was the best distributor he could get. And when he got killed, Leader News became my distributor.

 

DECKER: Okay. I guess we're getting up to the point where you switch over from the fuzzy bunnies to Shock Suspense.

 

GAINES: Well...almost. Feldstein and I were working along, putting out this [#@$%!!!], and suddenly talking - because we talked a lot, of course - realized that we both had similar interests in suspense and horror stuff, and although I'm a little older than he is-I grew up on the horror pulps and the science fiction pulps and The Witch's Tale on the radio and things like that and at that point they had things on television like Suspense, Lights Out, Inner Sanctum, so we just started doing that kind of story in our crime books. And you know that the Crypt-Keeper and Vault-Keeper were introduced two issues before War Against Crime and Crime Patrol went out of business. And they went out of business because we decided to change their names to The Crypt of Terror and The Vault of Horror. The Crypt of Terror we later changed to Tales from the Crypt because wholesalers objected to the word "terror." They didn't object to horror [laughter], but there's no logic to wholesalers, that's something I've learned over the years.

 

GROTH: Wholesalers aren't your favorite people.

 

GAINES: The wholesalers in those days were very strange. It's a whole new generation of wholesalers today. But then, today the wholesaler is a college-bred, reasonably sophisticated person. In those days their fathers were as a rule not college people, they were people that had brought themselves up by their bootstraps and gotten nice businesses, but they weren't sophisticated, and unsophisticated people are appalled by things more easily than more sophisticated people, as a rule. So, does that answer your question, which I don't remember what it was?

 

GROTH: I don't know either, but I think it does.

 

GAINES:[laughter]

 

Bill Gaines on Wertham

 

DECKER: It seems that people around the country were reacting very strongly to the violence and the horror, they thought it wasn't good for their children, and in reading the press clippings that we've got a whole file full from that time, people like Dr. Wertham seem to unable to conceive of comics as even deserving the right of free press, that they didn't see comic books as anything but a product on the order of spoiled meat. Dr. Wertham saw no artistic expression or anything of that nature in them.

 

GAINES: That's true. He didn't. I had a couple of little tussles with Wertham, he was taking things out of context in front of the Senate Subcommitte, but I'll tell you the truth, I was so nervous when I was up there I barely knew what I was doing. First of all, I'b been up all night writing my introductory speeech, which I wrote with Lyle Stuart. Actually, Lyle probably wrote more of it than I did, but I was with him writing it. And when I got into the Senate Subcommitte my Dexedrine wore off.

 

GROTH: So you went down.

 

GAINES: And maybe you know better than I do, because it's been so many years since I've taken it, but if you're on something and all of a sudden it wears off, you're like - well, for the last half hour or so of my testimony, they were just batting me around. They were like whacking a corpse. They didn't know it...

 

WHITE: Like a wet sponge.

 

GAINES: A wet sponge, that's how I felt. And I didn't know what I was doing. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

 

DECKER: I just commented that it was ironic that Wertham would see comics as the spoiled meat when he himself was about the ulimate liberal, since he had a free clinic in Harlem for the Blacks and he himself had testified against censorship in 1928 in a case involving a banned book and later testified in the defense of a nudist magazine.

 

GAINES: Well, you've got to understand that really what Wertham was doing was, he was trying to defend the kids. And as did Clarence Darrow before him - and Clarence Darrow was a great man and a great defense attorney - they felt that rather than attribute any bad act to the kid, they'll blame the kid's environment, and if the kid read a comic book, then obviously it wasn't the kid that did the bad thing, it's the comic book that led him into the path of badness, and Wertham did that over and over and over in the many... And of course, cynically, you could say that Wertham was making a good living testifying at trials with this line, and writing these books and everything else; but I think the man was relatively sincere in what he did. It's just that when someone is making a living at doing something you've got to be very suspicious of what exactly is the motivation. He wasn't a pure scientist making these observations; he was a man who was making a living on this kind of point of view. But he went up there and he read out of one of my Shock stories and started showing how we used the word "spic." I don't know if you remember the story... of course we had the bad guys using the word "spic" in the story. To pull the word out of context and say that we were using the word, "spic" in a comic book as though we had done a bad thing, when what we had done was a good thing, was the kind of thing he was capable of. And I don't know whether he did it maliciously or out of stupidity, because I don't think he understood half of what he was talking about.

 

DECKER: There are a number of stories he quotes in his books, which he obviously misread completely. Like that story in Shock SuspenStories where during the parade the blind man doesn't salute the flag and gets stomped because they don't know he's blind. Wertham misread that story, didn't understand the point, and thought it was advocating...

 

GAINES: That's precisely what he did. And as I say, he did that in front of the Senate Subcommittee too. And it's very hard to defend your point of view when you don't have the material to argue back with, and I didn't have that story with me.

 

 

 

BILL WARD REMEMBERS

 

I think it was around 1946 that Busy Arnold, Quality’s publisher asked me if I could do another story for Modernand did I have any ideas? I mentioned the fact that I had drawn a strip about a daffy blonde in the Army call "Torchy." He went for the idea, and I convinced him to let me ink it. At long last Torchy was in the comics.

 

The strip was very popular, running in both Modern and Doll Man for about 3 years. They were getting so much mail on it that Busy decided to do a Torchy book. I was ecstatic, my creation, that daffy blonde chick, was going to have a book of her own.

 

Then disaster struck, the greatest disappointment of my career. I had finished the cover and the lead story for issue No. 1 when George Brenner phoned and told me they were taking me off Torchy! Romance comics had come on the scene at the same time and they were instantly best sellers. None of the other artists, due to the fact they had had no experience doing women, could handle it - it had to be me. They planned on a bunch of books, and I was to do the covers and lead stories. It meant lots more money for me, but I was furious!

 

I phoned Busy and pleaded with him that Torchy was my baby. I just wouldn’t turn her over to another artist. We ended up with a compromise. If I could find the time, he would let me do as many of the covers as I could manage, plus the same with the lead stories.

 

Gil Fox did most of Torchy from then on, although I was able to do half of the covers and several lead stories. Gil, a great guy and a good friend, took over and did a remarkable job following my style. As a matter of fact, it was more than a bit disconcerting to me that he could. I worked day and night o turn the romance penciling out so that I could do Torchy. However, romance was selling like mad, so more titles were added.

 

The demise of Torchy? I shall never forget it. There was a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Wertham who milked publicity from criticizing comic books and the negative effect they were supposedly having on kids.

 

I used to deliver my finished jobs to Quality’s office in Manhattan. One day I was walking along Madison Avenue when I spotted Arnold, Busy’s son and an editor now, ambling along on the other side of the street. "There goes our worst offender!" he screeched to a friend, pointing at me.

 

I ran across the street to find out what the hell he meant and he threw a bombshell. "Dr. Wertham has come out with an 'unfit' list, and Torchy is on the list!" I couldn’t believe it. Torchy, that innocent little blonde, the stories equally innocent. Can you imagine that happening today?

 

As it turned out, comics, for me anyway, didn’t last long after that. Television was the culprit. Bit by bit it tookthe audience away. Pay started going down along with sales. Suddenly, Quality threw in the towel and went out of business.

 

source = http://www.womenofward.com

 

 

 

 

I'll post more later today or tomorrow.

[ajaxfarrell]

Hey Oldguy, your cut and paste skills are impressive.

[PovertyRow]

I'll post more later today or tomorrow.

 

Go for it, OG. All most interesting.

[OldGuy]

Hey Oldguy, your cut and paste skills are impressive.

 

No kidding. You try formating all that to look as good as it does and you'll have even more appreciation for my skills.

[ajaxfarrell]

It does look good.

[Forbush-Man]

Hey Pov,

 

Why don't we list the magazines featuring Dr. Wertham's attacks on comics? This way there'll be a reference for anyone interested in finding these mags.

 

As I've mentioned to you, I believe Collier's magazine, dated March 27th, 1948, is the first printed article showcasing the Doctor and his premise for comics and delinquency. The outer cover has the title "Books that breed Crime", page 22.

The inner title on page 22: "Horror in the Nursery" by Judith Crist. She wrote the artice, but it is about Wertham's view and quotes him often.

 

Has anyone heard of Wertham's book "The world of Fanzines: A special form of Communication"? It was written in 1973 and published by Southern Illinios University Press. I imagine he found a link between Satan and Fanzines too..

[Forbush-Man]

Here's the cover (part of it anyway) from the Collier's March 27th, 1948:

 

 

Is that laughter on their faces,......or STARK TERROR ?!?

[Forbush-Man]

 

Comic books are an important factor in juvenile crime, says Dr. Wertham, and cites a case wherein a boy and a girl jabbed another boy with a fountain pen "like a hypodermic." Professional models here re-enact scene.

[Forbush-Man]

 

Telling how comic books affected his play, a boy described the scene here depicted by professional models: "My sister plays an actress getting captured. We...tie her up....then sit at a table and make plans how to get rid of her."