Oh, the horror!

I bought a new book this week-end, a cool collection of old comic book covers and excerpts, from the kid friendly age of horror!  The book is called "The Horror!  The Horror!" and was compiled by Jim Trombetta, with an introduction from one of my heroes, author R.L. Stine.  The main beef of the book is that these are the comics which infuriated the U.S. government, due to their apparent poor influence on children.  Here is a view of the book's cover:

Scary, huh?  The book focuses less on well-known comics, such as those from EC Comics, and more on forgotten titles, with a significant amount of the drawings completed by artists unknown.  Of particular interest to me is a comic story called "The Secret of the Walking Dead", by Fawcett Publications Inc.  The grimy linework, flat contrasting colors, and horrific content of the comic (corpse climbing into a coffin!) were exactly the sort of thing that would have creeped me out as a kid!  I love it.


Included with the book, is a DVD containing a documentary that aired in 1955, narrated by Paul Coates.  The documentary is an attack on the comics industry and the content of their products, and is notably late (taking place after the Senate hearings and the creation of the Comics Code Authority) and was thus decidedly irrelevant.  (See my previous post dated 3-22-2011).  However,  Trombetta still counterattacks Coates, with a type of moral authority which is also decidedly irrelevant.  I note with interest that the defenders of the comic industry blame the whistle blowers for not definitively proving that comics have a detrimental effects on young minds, when intellectual honesty tells us that such a point can't be proven in a scientific sense anyway.  What is required then instead, is common sense, which tells us that there is a limit to what we want our kids to be reading in comic books.  This is one of main points I think, brought forth by Coates' predecessors, Dr. Fredric Wertham and Senator Estes Kefauver.  As I said before, I don't approve of the government censoring comic books, but I also won't jump up and down either, insisting that children can't possibly be influenced by what they read.  Personally, I wouldn't care if my (hypothetical) son was reading about zombies returned from the grave, but I would be very angry if he was reading about the "pleasures" of smoking crack.  So I can see what Wertham was concerned about, given that he was dealing with comics which had stooped to a low not previously seen before (children murdering their parents)!  Of course people will be concerned then, when standards seem to be plummeting.  Any conscientious parent will draw a line somewhere, and the genius of Wertham's attacks, was that they woke parents up to what their children were reading, instigating changes in the comics industry without federal government mandates.  The will of the people was done, censorship of comics through the Comics Code Authority.  I don't agree with what was done, but it happened, and I won't pretend that I don't understand it at least a little bit.


Trombetta also suggests that a particular attack on the comics industry is an intentional distraction away from real life crimes, such as parents beating their children.  Trombetta wrote..."(committee junior counsel Herbert) Beaser was there to kill the (comic book's) message (of real life child abuse).  His intention was not to police abuse, but to police the representation of abuse."  I'm not sure if Trombetta even believes his own words regarding that?  Somehow I doubt that the government had a vested interest in protecting real world child abusers.   Sure, kids back in those days were given corporal punishment beatings that seem cruel by today's standards, but that was a society norm eagerly enforced by adults everywhere, not just a supposedly corrupt government.  I think it's more the truth that policing the comics industry was simply more realistically achievable, compared to imprisoning the entire adult population based on widespread child abuse.  And there must have been legal limits to corporal punishment already anyway (killing your kids was not permitted, so far as I know).


Politics aside, "The Horror!  The Horror!" is as fine a collection of gore and mayhem as can be found.  Still a little tame by my standards, but I'm jaded as all get out.  :)  

The Comics Code Authority

Today I was reading about the crackdown on comic books which occurred during the 1940's and 50's, in which the issue of over-the-top violence, gore and sex in comics came under heavy scrutiny and criticism in both the U.S. and Canada.  The central figure behind the movement to clean up comics was Dr. Fredric Wertham,  whose book "Seduction of the Innocent" took no prisoners in describing the decaying filth of society which was a result of children reading uncensored comic books.  The public was outraged about the publishers' crimes that Dr. Wertham brought to light.  Eventually the U.S. Senate held hearings to examine the scope of comic books' influence on the nation's youth.  One of the voluntary witnesses at the hearings was Willaim Gaines, publisher of Mad magazine and the notoriously graphic EC Comics (there's a website featuring Gaines' testimony, which can be viewed here).


Although there had been some local community / state laws passed in the United States, which enforced approval of comic content before publishing and distribution (or outright banned certain comics), no federal government action occurred in the U.S. as a result of the Senate hearings.  Instead, publishing companies found it necessary to police content of their comics themselves, through their creation of an independent supervisory board, called the Comics Code Authority.  This was effectively necessary since wholesale distributors of comics, completely spooked by an angry American public, were refusing to sell uncensored comics.  The publishers had to regain the trust of the consumer, and the Comics Code Authority's big stamp of approval on the covers of their watered down comics was just the thing to do it.  Woo hoo.  It's only very recently that the Comics Code Authority's influence on publishing houses has been reduced to zero (after a long, slow decay), with some publishers now creating their own ratings systems for their comics.    


I have mixed feelings about the crackdown on comics, but ultimately I would have been against the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Something such as what is available to read, and what children are reading, should be left to individual adults / parents to decide.  If adults don't like violent comic books, then the publishers will go out of business on their own (strangely, parents seemed totally unaware of the content of comics being read by their children, until Dr. Wertham and his cohorts pointed it out to them.  That's the real problem most likely).