David Hajdu's History of a Comic Book Moral Panic Essay

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Hajdu, the Ten-Cent Plague

"Since I have written about comic books, I have heard from quite a number of young adults who told me that their childhood emotional masturbation problem was started or aggravated by comic books."[footnoteRef:0] This is an actual quotation from Dr. Fredric Wertham's notorious mid-1950s attack on the comic book industry, Seduction of the Innocent, and it demonstrates the extent to which Wertham ignited a "moral panic" about comic books, and ultimately caused an entire industry to cave to public pressure and change the content and artwork of comics for more than a generation. Does anyone nowadays -- sixty years after Wertham got Congress to take an interest in the censorship of comic books -- still believe that masturbation is a serious moral plague? Does anyone believe that comic books seduce and corrupt the innocent? In an era where any child who can spell can have access to information and images concerning any possible subject, good or bad, via the Internet, the 1950s attack on comic books is bound to see the whole episode as somewhat quaint and distinctly troubling. The tale of Wertham's bizarre crusade is told in David Hajdu's informative readable history The Ten-Cent Plague, and it raises fascinating questions about an artform that aims at a mass audience, about the type of influence such art can or cannot have, and about the real motives and mindsets of those obsessed with censorship. [0: Fredric Wertham, MD. Seduction of the Innocent. Introduction by James E. Rebman.Laurel, NY: Main Road Books Reprints, 2004.]

Dr Fredric Wertham was a medical doctor and psychiatrist who "studied in England and Austria, and received a medical degree from the University of Wurzburg" then "moved to the United States to teach at Johns Hopkins." [footnoteRef:1] Disturbed by the content of comic books at the time, Wertham launched a public campaign for censorship, eventually reaching the United States Senate, which investigated the industry -- the resultant level of pressure caused comics publishers to substantially censor and curtail Perhaps the biggest shock to a reader in 2014 reading Hajdu's history is to realize the extent and ubiquity of comic books at the time of Wertham's attack.

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Hajdu reports that in the mid-1940s, there were approximately 80 to 100 million comic books sold every week -- and that each copy sold was likely to reach between six and ten different readers. As Hajdu notes, comics were the "most popular form of entertainment in America." [footnoteRef:2] Moreover, the nature of comic books at the height of their publication is very different from what we expect of "comic books" after Wertham's successful attempt to censor content. For example, horror comics were arguably the most popular genre at the time of Wertham's publication: Hajdu reports that "by the end of 1952, nearly one-third of all the comics on the newsstand were devoted to the macabre." [footnoteRef:3] In point of fact, this should not be surprising. The sort of mass print readership for horror that Hajdu describes has been enjoyed for the past three decades or more by Stephen King, who is arguably the most successful writer in America, and King's chief milieu is horror stories and the macabre. The only reason why this aspect of comic book history does seem surprising is that Wertham's censorship crusade was ultimately so successful that few contemporary readers of comic books have ever seen a horror comic: they were replaced almost entirely by superhero comics, which managed to survive the censorship of content more or less intact. [1: David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague. New York: Farrar Straus, 2008. p.98.] [2: Hajdu, p.5.] [3: Hajdu, p.189.]

However, this was not really to the satisfaction of Wertham himself. Hajdu notes that Wertham's over-the-top critique of books demonstrates a true derangement of the censor's mentality, insofar as he saw malevolent messages even in the famously squeaky-clean DC comics….....

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