A Brief History in American Comics: Part 5- Critique and Dark Days of the 1950s

“Threatened with artistic sterility, and imprisoned within its own clichés, the American comic strip faced a new and grave danger,” according to Couperie.

Comics made headlines “Since their creation, the [American] comics had been the object of numerous attacks…” but yet nothing to this stature.

The Anti-Comics Movement: Early 1900s
In the earliest part of the 1900s, characters like Yellow Kid and the Katzenjammer Kids were labeled as glorified “anarchistic rascals” and called “a waste of time” by critiques. Comics as a medium has always held many critics, despite (and due to) its growing popularity. At one point, these critiques even led to the Boston Herald abandoning its illustrated Sunday supplement in 1908, although it was quickly re-added due to its great loss in subscribers ^[1]. 

In 1917, the Vatican ruled that he and some bishops could ban books and works which were deemed too obscene or containing non-Catholic issues. Inspired by this, in the early 1930s, Bishop John Noll established a regional League for Clean Reading or LCR.  In 1938, Noll brought his crusade “to a national stage” with the National Organization for Decent Literature, or NODT, a variation of the LCR. NODT became official in 1939, and held as a Christian-led effort nationwide ^[5].

The general repulsion of comics wasn’t new, even in the 20^th century, and is in fact supported by various social elements, as told by Sabin: “stories in pictures were maintained to be innately inferior to those in words, and it was now argued that children’s ability to learn to read would be retarded by an over-familiarity with comics. This view was supposedly corroborated by the fact that strips now contained fewer words than ever before (at least the old complained that close type strained the readers’ eyesight was no longer tenable). The pre-1914 prejudice against comics for being ‘reading matter for the working class’ held fast. Especially in the case of children, it was maintained that comics were not ‘improving’, were essentially ‘lowbrow’, and reflected badly on the reader’s background and intellect ^[3]” .

The presence of comics in public did not exemplify immediate vigor. In fact, “the public, at best, merely tolerated this type of literature.” It was often seen as “tasteless” or labeled as “trash” by many. In 1936, a Connecticut school teacher commented that dime novels “constitute a menace to pupil’s morals, English and mind ^[2].”

1940s – 1950s
In the mid-1940s, juvenile delinquency gained significant notice in public news and neighborhoods. Many thought that comics “not only depicted but incited youthful impropriety ^[5].”

“Within a year of Pearl Harbor, the American press was probing the effect of the war on home-front families… In the years to follow, there were dozens of prominent stories about young men from fatherless households, roaming the streets in lawless packs, and young women who had absentee working mothers, dropping their morals ^[5].” There were of course, several factors that could have helped cause these changes at home, but the one causation that media latched onto was comics.

Articles such as Robert E. Southard’s “Parents Must Control the Comics” in 1944 described superheroes as articles of fascism and “un-American.” Rev. Thomas F. Doyle’s “What’s Wrong with the ‘Comics’?” in 1943, described superheroes as “false cartoon gods” and asked his readers, “if young people inclined to antisocial behavior were to ‘get ideas’ from comics, ‘what is to prevent them from getting ideas of hijacking, smuggling, gang fighting, train wrecking, robbery, racketeering, and murder [5]?’”

Several writers began coming out of the woodworks, accusing comics of “sowing disrespect and insubordination in the minds of children.” Comic strips were seen as the cause of “undermining the morals of youth” by “psychologists, pedagogues, and demagogues of all political colors mounted an all-out assault against it” And hit the height of criticism in the 1950’s ^[1].

The Social Importance, and Thus Problem, of Comics
Despite their trouble, comics were seen as a part of ‘childhood’. As such, while “they may have had their faults, the thinking went, but, after all, they were a part of a… special time in life: a time symbolic of a state of innocence… A romanticism legacy from the Victorian Era, where Children were sentimentally angelic creatures to be protected from the temptations of the world… It was important that juveniles should not encounter any semblance of the adult world (any hint of sex, realistic violence or adult relationships would have shattered the illusion) ^[3].”

“Confusingly, then, comics were sentimentalized on hand, and criticized on the other… they still were not ‘respectable’… teachers felt perfectly at liberty to confiscate them in schools, and parents to ban them from the home. Yet because they were not oriented towards a juvenile market, they were also ‘winked at’ and tolerated. It was an odd set of contradictions, and one which children’s comics never quite escaped until the present [3]."

The Comic Book Siege

“If the newspaper strips had had trouble gaining the respect of society, comic books lowered even further society’s view of comics. The comic book was, clearly and without argument following the triumph of the superheroes, a medium aimed at children, and one that did not appear to be particularly beneficial or to possess any redeeming quality in the eyes of parents and educators. If for many people comics in and of themselves were bad, comic books were bad comics ^[4].”

 “Even though comic books were in fact read by many adults, this was not something acknowledged without some embarrassment. Gerard Jones observes that ‘when the press wanted to paint the murderous gangster Dukey Maffetore as mentally subnormal, they had only to report that he read Superman comics.’ This, despite the fact that a 1950 survey produced some surprising data, including that 54% percent of all comic books were read by adults over 20 years old, and that the average adult read some eleven comics per month ^[4].”

Public Burnings and Legal Action

After numerous instances of media claiming activities from thievery to deaths on the comics the perpetrators typically read, the first city to “crack down” on comic books was Detroit in 1948. Based on material presented to the Commissioner and other law-enforcement agents, 36 comics were justified as “objectionable material” and therefore seized and banned from newspaper stands. Less than two weeks after the events in Detroit, on May 10^th, the acting police chief of Ann Arbor announced the outlawing of 30 comic books due to their violation of the state’s law “prohibiting the sale of publications portraying ‘crime, bloodshed, and indecency.’” Only four days later, Mt. Prospect, Illinois forbade “the display or the sale of any comic book, regardless of its content ^[5].”

By the end of May, at least two more locations had passed acts “to curtail the sale of comics.” Still some others were in process of developing their own. “In the months to follow, more than fifty municipalities, including several of the most populous in the United States, would develop initiatives to curb the sale of comic books.” Due to law generalizations, many comic book titles fell subject to new and old legislation which forbid “immoral” or “indecent” mail, publications, or other types of media, leaving the evaluation to the eye of the beholder. Even the Supreme Court had objections to these books, as we may explore at another time ^[5].

Various schools, including Catholic and other religious schools, also staged book burnings, making it a fairly common occurrence. Depending on the event, students were encouraged to either bring in all comic books, or at least all of “offensive” or “indecent” materials” to school, where fire pits would be arranged to reduce all books presented to ash. Most students, convinced of their plague by their teachers, complied. Still others, either not quite convinced of their harm or still drawn to their stories and content, hid or kept at least some books away at home ^[5].

By 1950, the comic siege among the media had taken hold, and comic book publishers had toned down much of their content, specifically crime titles. Some, such as Victor Fox, began labeling their comics as “Not Intended for Children” or “For Adults Only” in attempt to set themselves apart from ‘childish content’ (which no one really believed). However, alongside with crime titles toning down, publishers had found a new genre to introduce: horror ^[5].

Towards the end of 1953, comic books criticism was rising to its peak. “Nobody was writing anything about [comic books] except to say how terrible they were” according to a recount by Will Eisner, “I felt that nobody was paying attention, except the readers, and they were mostly kids, so nobody took them seriously.”The communism threat also began to take hold on the United States, with comic book publishers looked at like, or called, Communists ^[5].

Comics reach The Innocent

In 1954, this “assault” culminated with psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham’s The Seduction of the Innocent. While providing careful examples, sketches, and “sometimes actual falsifications”, Dr. Wertham convinced numerous parents and community leaders of every sort that comics were to blame for “encouraging all the sins and vices of the earth” and were “the source of all our problems ^[1].”

The book’s “opening words^[5].”
… describe the book as ‘the result of seven years of scientific investigation conducted by” the author himself, who “has had long experience in technical research” and “thoroughly documented by facts and cases

Wertham concluded that all comic books, regardless of genre or form, were “harmful to the development of young minds” and mostly raked them all in with “crime comics” because “all of them, in his view, portrayed some violation of legal, moral, or religious codes… they were vulgar, ungrammatical, poorly drawn, and chilly printed, stunting children’s intellectual growth and bad for children’s eyes, recapitulations of the turn-of-the-century criticism of newspaper funnies ^[5].”

Superhero comics were treated no different, and specifically the three most popular heroes, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, were labeled as fascist, homoerotic, and sadomasochistic, respectively ^[5].

Although other studies refuted Dr. Wertham’s findings, the impressions he had left on mothers and many others could not be reversed. Cartoonists were almost immediately met with censorship by syndicates ^[1] and even banning in some American towns and cities ^[5].  Several, understandably, felt they clearly saw the age of comics as a whole coming to a brutal end. Artists like Burne Hogarth abandoned the comic strip entirely, while still others “were content to serve up to their readers an inoffensive gruel ^[1].”

In April of that year, two days of Senate hearings on comic books were held, ran by Robert C. Hendrickson. These hearings, which came to be known as the Hendrickson committee hearings, was a televised and anticipated event which brought all previous thoughts of comic books to a head, both in the courtroom and in family living rooms. During the hearing, 24 full-color, enlarged copies of various comic book covers and images were used as evidence of the graphic and immoral depiction of violence, sexualization, and grotesque nature of comic books. Representatives from Crime Does Not Pay to Tales from the Crypt were scrutinized ^[5].

The first senate hearing was held on April 21, 1954 and was televised, creating havoc amongst parents and comic critics. The second hearing, held on June 4^th, 1954, although not televised and “largely technical”, was focused on the selling and distribution practices of comics. These hearings are also known as the Kefauver committee hearings, after their co-sponsor, Estes Kefauver ^[5].

The Comic Industry’s Answer
Shortly after, inspired by the surrounding impending devastation in the industry, the call was set out to found the Comics Magazine Association of America. Initially devised of 38 publishers, distributors, printers, editors, and engravers in the industry, the CMAA held as replacement for the previous Association of Comics Magazine Publishers. One of the CMAA’s first orders of business was to establish a new code of conduct to be regulated and strictly followed by future-released comic books ^[5].

While not all comic companies were regulated by the CMAA’s Comic Code, parents took immediate notice of the small, rectangular seal on the cover of every “approved” comic, recognizing them as appropriate for child consumption ^[5]. Magazines like MAD and Panic! (as well as everything else by EC Comics) are examples as to those which were following, nor in regulation to, the Comic Code.

The After Effects.. What Happens Next?

 [1] Couperie, Pierre, Maurice Horn, Proto Destefanis, EdouardFrançois, Claude Moliterni, GéraldGassiot-Talabot, and Eileen Hennessy. A History of the Comic Strip. New York: Crown, 1968. Print.
[2] Steranko, James. The Steranko History of Comics.Reading, PA. 1970.Print.
[3] Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix& Graphic Novels. Hong Kong. 1996. Print.
[4] Garcia, Santiago. On the Graphic Novel. University Press of Mississippi. 2015. Print.
[5] Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York. 2008. Print.