The Case Against Comics
MUHLEN, NORBERT
The Case Against Comics Seduction of the Innocent. By Fredric Wertham. Rinehart. 397 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Norbert Muhlen Author and foreign correspondent The case against the "comic books"...
...That in his exemplary "East European countries" countless other books and magazines cannot be displayed and sold from the Bible to, say, Sigmund Freud, Rosa Luxemburg and the American mass-circulation magazines which publish Dr...
...there are so many bands of youthful "hooligans" that even the Soviet press is forced to acknowledge their existence...
...Children with healthy minds are not apt to "bump off a cop" or rape their playmates after reading True Crime Comics, any more than a healthy grown-up will murder the credit manager of his bank after reading the story of Raskolnikov...
...But many judges are probably afraid of being denounced as narrow-minded "cultural vigilantes" if they apply them...
...Fifty years ago, a French criminologist well known in his day, L. J. G. Proal, "proved" that crimes and suicides were committed under the direct influence of works by Dostoyevsky, Goethe and Shakespeare, which, he therefore suggested, should be banned from bookstores and libraries...
...In all East European countries, including Russia and Eastern Germany," we read, "crime comic books cannot be displayed or sold...
...Wertham, has coincided with the increase in juvenile delinquency in America in recent years...
...Wertham claims...
...Wertham's arguments, his case appears to be based on alarmist generalities rather than facts and figures...
...His evidence, quite accurate in itself, was: The greater the number of storks in a district, the greater, too, the number of children born...
...In those idyllic "East European countries" where there are no comic books, youthful crime is, nevertheless, rampant...
...As one looks more closely at Dr...
...After denouncing the allegedly stupid and corrupt American system of law enforcement, which lets murderers go scot-free, he extolled "the progress of a society" the reference being to Soviet Russia where the authorities apprehend and convict murderers "in practically every case...
...Despite the lack of reliable data as to their circulation and influence on youthful minds (the psychiatrists disagree violently, with each offering his own theoretical preconceptions and non-representative case samples), it is plain that they depict a society in which the strong rule and right lies with the man who is most ruthless (if not sadistic) with his gun in short, a totalitarian society...
...The increasing emphasis on violence in comic books, says Dr...
...While the miserably mass-produced comic books have nothing in common with the works of these great creators, Dr...
...The fact that they were comic-book readers proves very little one way or the other except that some of them took their idea for a crime where it was offered to them in the most conspicuous and accessible way...
...Only a few years ago (in his previous book, The Show of Violence), Dr...
...Do they support his case that the comic books should be suppressed...
...Wertham's reasoning has much in common with the fallacy of his French predecessor...
...Wertham had discussed these questions instead of calling for comprehensive censorship of comic books, he might have written a valuable book...
...But serious dangers to true freedom of expression do arise from special comic-hook control: Who is to decide which comic books should be permitted, according to which standards, etc...
...Such education through the organs of society family, school, church could, it is true, be successful only if these organs possessed an authority accepted by the children...
...This would consist in educating the children against craving these books, and in winning them to other, better reading...
...While more than 90 per cent of American children partook of comic books, considerably fewer than one-tenth of 1 per cent became delinquents...
...In East Germany, a short while ago, we read in the Communist newspapers of the widespread "rape clubs" and their nightly crimes...
...But do these two arguments, offered in a repetitious, rambling, rhetorical staccato, really prove what Dr...
...If a general spirit of violence has unhappily increased of late among young Americans, and if the output of comic and other books glorifying violence has also increased, the common cause would seem to be a weakening of belief in the community, a deterioration of educational standards in homes and schools, rather than artificial stimulation by money-mad publishing interests...
...But is suppression by general censorship necessary, as Dr...
...Wertham set out to provet hat comic books (with Big Business interests behind them, as he hints) are seducing innocent American youth into crime...
...After endless quotations, illustrations and denunciations of comic books of the crime, horror and jungle varieties often shocking indeed in their cynical preoccupation with unadulterated, inhuman violence with sadistic and masochistic overtones he refers to several dozen concrete cases of juvenile delinquents some of them from clinics he conducted, others merely from newspaper clippings who either admitted being fervent comic-book readers or claimed that they got the idea of committing their crimes from a comic book...
...In the first place, the number of comic books sold in 1952, estimated at between 50 and 80 million a month, indicates that the overwhelming majority of American children read them constantly and in great numbers...
...Wertham contrasted the social justice and general lawfulness in Soviet Russia with the lack thereof in this country...
...They also present a picture of man without faith or forgiveness in short, an inhuman man...
...The validity of the principle of a free press is at least highly debatable in the case of the comic hooks, whose publishers, instead of assuming the public responsibility without which there can be no right to press freedom, exploit and encourage the instincts of inhumanity...
...Curiously, however, the good doctor neglected to point out that, in the Soviet Union, the murderers of millions receive medals, villas and other honors and rewards instead of punishment...
...Similarly, a common root cause in the past decade produced both the rise in juvenile delinquency and the rise in comic-book violence...
...If Dr...
...But there are also nearly fifty cities in America from Los Angeles to Hillsdale, Michigan which have acted against the sale of comic books deemed harmful to youth...
...The real reason for this parallelism, of course, is that storks as well as births happen to be more frequent in rural areas than in industrial and urban ones...
...As it is, if he shocks some parents out of their apathy about the product being offered their children, he will have performed a useful service...
...What appears to be the only healthy, effective, democratic defense against the harmful effects of these objectionable publications is not mentioned at all by Dr...
...yet, there is no indication of a decline in juvenile delinquency in those communities...
...on the other hand, the arrests of actual juvenile delinquents in 1952, according to FBI figures, amounted to 86,000 youths under 18...
...Wertham contrasts this apparently healthy and progressive state of affairs with the sorry situation in America, where innocent children are seduced into committing murder and mayhem, since comic books are freely displayed and sold in most parts of this country...
...Yet, the danger cultural as well as moral of some kinds of comic books should not be underestimated...
...Existing state laws would probably suffice to drive these books from the stands if they were always applied...
...and, further, if parents and teachers had the courage to lead their children rather than to surrender to their anarchic "free will...
...Wertham's proposal for dealing with the comic-book problem follows a similar pattern of thought...
...Wertham's correlation of increasing comic-book violence and increasing juvenile delinquency as cause and effect reminds one of the playful statistician who "proved" that the stork delivers babies...
...Wertham's articles is a fact the author fails to mention...
...Reviewed by Norbert Muhlen Author and foreign correspondent The case against the "comic books" is presented here by Fredric Wertham, a New York psychiatrist and writer who in recent years has crusaded for censorship and suppression of this type of juvenile literature...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 20
