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| Music man: David Hajdu has written biographies of music greats Billy Strayhorn, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. Michelle Heimerman/AP |
Why comic books scared us so
Captain Marvel reduced to ashes by terrified parents? David Hajdu examines the great comic-book panic of the 1950s.
from the March 25, 2008 edition
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As Hajdu notes, Wertham and his cronies often based their much-touted "research" on nothing more than assumptions and a lazy understanding of causes and effects. Yes, some delinquent kids enjoyed comic books. So did almost all other kids. Where was the proof of a link?
But the media believed a rise in juvenile crime was "directly traceable" to the reading habits of kids. In a 1948 editorial The Christian Science Monitor bemoaned the "cheap and lurid sensationalism" of comics. It didn't help matters that many comic books really did revel in crime – unlike censored Hollywood movies, they could let crooks go unpunished – and featured plenty of shapely females.
Once Congress and state legislatures got involved, it didn't take long for the comics world to collapse. Sales dwindled amid tight censorship that required Archie's Betty and Veronica, among others, to stop looking so curvaceous.
Even the creators of Mad Magazine gave in and shuttered their horror titles. (Mad's authority-defying satire survived because it was technically a magazine, not a comic book.)
In an appendix, Hajdu presents a stunning list of hundreds of comic writers and artists – including women and ethnic minorities – who were never heard from again after the 1950s "purge."
One artist, now in her 80s, still bears the scars. "I couldn't go back out there – I was scared to death," she says of her choice to stop illustrating. "Don't you know what they did to us?"
Journalism professor and biographer Hajdu does a fine job of bringing a forgotten chapter of 1950s hysteria back to life, although he could have devoted more space to an examination of what researchers have learned about the effects of exposure to violence.
Today's much tamer comics
Nowadays, of course, comic books and graphic novels often have dark themes but seem positively tame compared with TV and movies. Teachers even use comic books as a tool to encourage reading.
And what of those generations of impressionable kids exposed to dastardly and dangerous comics? Contrary to the dire predictions of the past, most grew up to be as mild-mannered as Clark Kent.
• Randy Dotinga is a freelance writer in San Diego.
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