Children and Consumption, Wednesday, June 10th

The Comic Book Scare

Since the development of mass media, adults have sought to control

the media children consume.

Comstock Law, 1887

• Banned the interstate sale of pornography, birth control information, and other obscenity

• Not targeted solely at children

“A Crime Against Children,” Ladies’ Home Journal, 1909

“Are we parents criminally negligent of our children, or is it that we have not put our minds on the subject of continuing to allow them to be injured by the inane and vulgar “comic” supplement of the Sunday newspaper? One thing is certain: we are permitting to go under our very noses and in our own homes an extraordinary stupidity, and an influence for repulsive and often depraving vulgarity so colossal that it is rapidly taking on the dimensions of nothing short of a national crime against our children.”

The Golden Age of Comics

• Superman, 1938• Batman, 1939• Green Lantern, 1940• Wonder Woman, 1941

“The comic strips in the newspapers of the time were everything to me, as they were for every other kid I knew then. They made me want to be an artist, and that was a cause of great concern to my parents, because my father was an elitist in his heart, and my mother was a peasant and a very practical woman. . . . . My dream from the time I was quite young was maybe someday to be a newspaper cartoonist.”

~ Will Eisner

“Basically we were kids ourselves, so we were writing what excited us, which our audience then related to. We were inventing the language as we went along, and some of us had an awareness of that. Every time we did something that we didn’t think had been done before, it was exciting.”

~ Jerry Robinson

“A lot of guys looked down their noses on comics - they thought it was kid stuff. So it was kid stuff? It was work. You can call it kid stuff, comic books, garbage, you name it - labels like that, guys put on things so they don’t have to think about them. That’s just the way I like it. Leave me alone - I’ll go about my business and do what I want. If it’s any good, somebody will pay for it, and a kid’s dime buys the same cup of coffee.”

~ Mickey Spillane

“I decided when I was quite young that there was a certain element of nonsense going on in the grown-up world - a lot of people who were supposed to be older and wiser but were really in a world of their own, and I developed an inability to accept nonsense from people just because they’re older and supposedly wiser.”

~ Al Jaffee

“I really loved comics . . . I’d have to say that I probably loved comics so much, like I did, because my parents didn’t give a damn about them. . . . My buddies and me talked about them all day. If you didn’t know about comics, you were a nobody.”

~ Martin Thall

Why these comics, and why now? What was different or

special about this time period?

PRIMARY SOURCE: STERLING NORTH, “A NATIONAL DISGRACE”

“The ‘comics’ magazines, in our opinion, are furnishing a pre-Fascist pattern for the youth of America through emulation. The chances of Fascism controlling the planet diminish in direct proportion to the number of good books the coming generation reads and enjoys.”

~ Sterling North

“The comic . . . is the folklore of the times, spontaneously given to and received by children, serving at the same time as a means of helping them solve the individual and sociological problems appropriate to their own lives. Comic books may be said to offer the same type of mental catharsis to readers that Aristotle claimed was an attribute of the drama . . . Well balanced children are not upset by even the more horrible scenes in comics, as long as the reason for the threat of torture is clear and the issues are well stated.”

~ Dr. Lauretta Bender and Dr. Reginald S. Lourie, child psychiatrists, 1941

What event interrupted this debate? How did this event

change or shape comics?

“I worked at a couple of other places, and they were the anything-goes kind of operation. The first thing I did for Sheldon Mayer was the Green Lantern, which I created. He ran a clean shop. Of course, the war came after that, and things were fine and dandy as long as the bad guys were Nazis and Japs.”

PRIMARY SOURCE: ARE COMICS FASCIST?

“A large number of comic books depict the heroic adventures of one or more characters whose philosophy may only be described as un-American and in a few instances, anarchistic. The vigilante spirit is rife in the comics: the gestapo method is glorified . . . It is neither Christian nor American to permit the young to be taught in this way the pernicious totalitarian doctrine that the end justifies the means . . . Even juvenile characters in the comic books engage in un-American activities of this nature. Fictitious ‘junior commando’ groups bear a strong resemblance to the bands of child militarists in Nazi Germany.”

~ The Case Against the Comics, 1944

1944

“In a vulgar way, [Superman] seems to personify the primitive religion expounded by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. “Man alone is and must be our God,” says Zarathustra, very much in the style of a Nazi pamphleteer. Like it or not, there are plenty of American children who know more about the man-wonder Superman than they do about Christ or any of the great characters of the Bible.”

~ Rev. Thomas F. Doyle

“Every month 25,000,000 comic books are published in this country. Many portray crime, violence, gun-play, sex, and are largely responsible for juvenile delinquency. . . . what is to stop [young people] from getting ideas of hijacking, smuggling, gang fighting, train wrecking, robbery, racketeering, and murder?”\

~ Fr. Southard

“A creeping rot of disintegration is eating into our nation. I am not easily shocked or easily alarmed. But today, like thousands of others, I am both shocked and alarmed. The arrests of “teen-age” boys and girls, all over the country are staggering. Some of the crimes youngsters are committing are almost unspeakable. Prostitution, murder, rape . . .

“These are not isolated horrors from another world. They are danger signals which every parent—every responsible American should heed. These are symptoms—of a condition which threatens to develop a new “lost generation,” more hopelessly lost than any that has gone before.”

~ J. Edgar Hoover, “Youth . . . Running Wild,” 1943

United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency

1954 Comic Book Hearings

Sen. Kefauver: "Here is your May issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that's in good taste?”

Gaines: "Yes sir, I do - for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding her head a little higher so that blood could be seen dripping from it and moving the body a little further over so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody."

Kefauver:(doubtful) "You've got blood coming out of her mouth."

Gaines: "A little."

Comics Code Authority, 1954

• No vampires, werewolves, or zombies• Criminals must always be punished• No “lurid, unsavory, or gruesome” illustrations• Limit deaths of law enforcement• Love stories should emphasize the sanctity of

marriage

What other forms of media consumed by children have concerned adults over time?

PRIMARY SOURCE: HOW TO TEACH YOUR KIDS TO WATCH TV

Do Video Games Cause Violence?

Columbine

• http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/april-20-1999-columbine-shooting-9541833

Harry Potter& Witchcraft

Horror

PRIMARY SOURCE: WHY HORROR IS GOOD FOR YOU (AND BETTER FOR YOUR KIDS)