A new SOTI book is always a thrill 0

[sfcityduck]

Wertham would have really had a field day with Swedish Superman and Batman and Robin.

[Happyfarm]

The influence of Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent wasn't limited to American soil but extended all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to a small country slightly to the north of where Wertham himself grew up in Germany. Namely Denmark where a book heavily inspired by Wertham's was published the year after his by Danish journalist Tørk Haxthausen. The title of the book was Opdragelse til Terror, which roughly translates as something along the lines of Raised to Terrorize, and it landed in Danish book stores in 1955 creating a moral uproar similar to what was seen in America and culminating in an autodafé at Enghave Plads in Copenhagen, only a few meters from my apartment, where jubilant parents would burn their children's comics. Here are some pictures of the book and interior pages with additional information added to each image. In fact, the book was so shaped by Wertham's that it also included examples from EC and other pre-code horror books, even though these had never been published in Denmark at the time. It's a pretty rare book today.

[Happyfarm]

And here's a news photo from when comics and a huge figure of the Phantom were burned in Enghaveparken in Copenhagen in the summer of 1955 only a few feet from where I live now.

[plady69]

Thank

On 3/11/2023 at 1:09 PM, Happyfarm said:

The influence of Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent wasn't limited to American soil but extended all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to a small country slightly to the north of where Wertham himself grew up in Germany. Namely Denmark where a book heavily inspired by Wertham's was published the year after his by Danish journalist Tørk Haxthausen. The title of the book was Opdragelse til Terror, which roughly translates as something along the lines of Raised to Terrorize, and it landed in Danish book stores in 1955 creating a moral uproar similar to what was seen in America and culminating in an autodafé at Enghave Plads in Copenhagen, only a few meters from my apartment, where jubilant parents would burn their children's comics. Here are some pictures of the book and interior pages with additional information added to each image. In fact, the book was so shaped by Wertham's that it also included examples from EC and other pre-code horror books, even though these had never been published in Denmark at the time. It's a pretty rare book today.

Thank you for a great piece of missing history for us in the US .🥸

[Jayman]

On 3/4/2023 at 11:07 AM, OtherEric said:

To borrow the quote from the Lost SOTI site:

"Typical is one called 'Your United States'. It devotes one page to each state and, although on bad paper and as smudgily printed as the others, it really contains some instructive information. But practically every state, although it gets only one page, has a scene of violence; if one doesn't, that is made up for in other states where there are two or three such scenes. For instance, a man hanged from a tree by a "vigilance committee"; Negroes in chains; corpses and dying men; a girl tied to a tree, her bound wrists above her head, her skirt blowing up in the wind and a coy facial expression of fright as in a sadist's dream; a girl about to be raped or massacred. Is that what you want your children to think is the history of "Your United States"? "

He unsurprisingly exaggerates when he claims nearly every page has a violent scene, but he wasn't entirely wrong in the general case that the creators seemed to be looking for "exciting" images to a somewhat disproportionate degree.

Care to share any of the violent pics? 

[sfcityduck]

On 3/11/2023 at 1:09 PM, Happyfarm said:

 The title of the book was Opdragelse til Terror, which roughly translates as something along the lines of Raised to Terrorize, and it landed in Danish book stores in 1955 creating a moral uproar similar to what was seen in America and culminating in an autodafé at Enghave Plads in Copenhagen, only a few meters from my apartment, where jubilant parents would burn their children's comics. Here are some pictures of the book and interior pages with additional information added to each image. In fact, the book was so shaped by Wertham's that it also included examples from EC and other pre-code horror books, even though these had never been published in Denmark at the time. It's a pretty rare book today.

That clicking sound you hear is SOTIcollector furiously searching the internet for a copy.

You've given him another reason to keep on collecting!

Edited March 12, 2023 by sfcityduck

[Happyfarm]

On 3/12/2023 at 1:54 AM, sfcityduck said:

That clicking sound you hear is SOTIcollector furiously searching the internet for a copy.

You've given him another reason to keep on collecting!

And I already feel deeply guilty about that because the terrible thing is that this book is really difficult to find. ;) I've only stumbled upon it once, and that was when I found my own copy. I was lucky to find it at a flea market here in Copenhagen, though, in a pile of books where the seller didn't seem to know what it was. I did a podcast recently on the moral uproar over comics in Denmark in the 50's but unfortunately it's in Danish so I'm not sure many here would find it meaningful to listen to. If there are a few here who speak Danish you can find the podcast through this facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/vildhistorie/posts/pfbid02CKgi7ksP919U733nbo8eCAR7LUJGpA82W645cbyuMKsC4dnfrpG3mRTcUjrUiVVAl

 

 

Edited March 12, 2023 by Happyfarm

[Happyfarm]

Here, by the way, is the Danish edition of the EC Big Book of Horror. This was published in 1974, and it's the first time we had EC stories published in Denmark, even though Haxthausen had already mentioned them in his book almost twenty years before.

[Happyfarm]

And then we didn't have any EC until many years later where we had two short runs, Gysertimen in 1987 and Skræk in 1994.