Seduction of the Innocent

[Jeff of Earth-J]

Despite considering myself fairly well-read when it comes to comic books, I have never read the infamous Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham. I have seen originals priced in the hundreds of dollars range but, every once in a while, one publisher or another sets out to reprint it. I had never seen one of those reprints actually come to pass, though, a fact which I lamented recently here on this board. Captain Comics mentioned that he bought a copy that actually was reprinted in 2004, which sent me on a quest. (I remember reading about it, but never saw it solicited or published.) I soon found a copy at a price I was willing to pay. 

I first learned about Seduction of the Innocent (and read excerpts) from Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes. Wertham was never mentioned throughout my academic career, including college. In fact, all I have ever heard about him was through "comic book" sources. I have always been interested in reading Seduction of the Innocent, but only as a curiosity, which is the only way I thought it would ever be published. I just finished reading the 2004 edition's 37-page introduction, but so far that's all I've read of it. I was quite surprised to see Wertham championed as "a distinguished psychiatrist of wide and deeply humane interests, a advocate of social reform, and a defender of civil liberties." 

James Reibman, who wrote the introduction, does a good job of presenting both sides of the story, but the selected quotes of industry professionals are edited to highlight his particular thesis. (If I said one of the female writer/editors quoted is widely known for shooting off her mouth would you be able to guess to whom I was referring?) I know know more about Fredric Wertham now than I did previously, and I believe he thought he was doing the right thing. (Actually, I've always thought that.) Despite his intentions, I remain convinced that his research was faulty by today's standards and that ultimately he did much more harm than good. 

I have always been told (and believed) that Wertham's "research" consisted of him interviewing "juvenile delinquents" and asking them if they read comics. Since almost all kids read comics in those days, Q.E.D. But here's something I gleaned just from skimming his test cases, of which there are 14. They are all boys between the ages of 9 and 12 who read far below their age level, but there's something else that jumps right out at me. I'm not going to defend what "I.Q." means in this context, but these boys had scores ranging from 54 through 74. they did not present themselves well. I wonder what his results would have yielded had he interviewed children with I.Q.s of 100 (which is average) or above who read comic books?

There is also a 16-page section of illustrations culled from contemporary comics which are clearly taken out of context. One of them has a caption which reads: "Comic books are supposed to be like fairy tales." Oh, yeah? Who says? I don't know how much more I'll have to say about this book once I actually start reading it, but I thought I'd start this thread just in case. Frederic Wertham may have been a great guy with the best of intentions, but it's going to be difficult to convince me that he didn't do more harm than good. I will try to read with an open mind. 

[Richard Willis]

I have always thought that Wertham believed ahead of time that comics were culpable and twisted everything to fit that conclusion. If he was really scientific about it, he would have interviewed straight-A good kids to find out if they also read comics, even crime and horror comics. The example of the murderous duck proves this. How hard did he have to look for a funny animal comic with this situation?

We had studied his early development. We knew when he sat up, when he got his first tooth, when he began to talk and walk, how long he was bottle fed, when he was toilet trained. Psychiatrists and social workers had conferences about him." Waitaminute... Wertham knew Willie that well and didn't come to his defense? Unbelievable. No, unconscionable. 

Wertham and his colleagues should have been surprised that Willie did something that they hadn’t predicted. If they had predicted it, they should have interceded. Sounds like they treated him like a lab rat.

In the incident I transcribed, Wertham relates: ""In the apartment where this boy Willie lived with his great-aunt, and on the roof of the building, the police found 'two .22-caliber rifles, a high-powered .22-caliber target pistol, ammunition for all three guns, and a quantity of ammunition for a Luger pistol." that's pretty vague. What was found in the apartment and what was found on the roof?

Not only that, but anyone from the area likely had access to that roof. Once the shooter realized he had hit and possibly killed someone, the shooter took the murder weapon (likely an easily concealable pistol) and fled the area. The murder weapon joined many others at the bottom of a river.

 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

I have my doubts the shots were even fired from that building. My guess is the police found a fourteen-year-old Black kid to hang it on and case closed. The thing is, in case after case after case he helped kids who were often rushed through the system, even one little boy who had accidentally killed another little boy by pushing him into water where he drowned. (He blamed it on comic cooks, but he got the kid off the hook.) Sometimes children are referred from school, sometimes by parents, sometimes the police. He has them draw pictures, he has them tell stories (all open to his interpretation, of course), he asks them questions. As I have already mentioned, many of his patients are of below average intelligence and don't express themselves very well. Sometimes their plot summaries are difficult to read. In addition to the Rorschach test, he also used the Association Test, the Duess Test, the Mosaic Test, the Thematic Apperception Test and play therapy. 

One ten-year-old girl came from a "cultivated and literate home." One boy of was sent with the coplaint "he won't concentrate on his schoolwork" and had been diagnosed by a public social agency where he received a cliche diagnosis of "deep emotional disorder" and "underlying feelings of hostility and destructiveness," and that he "was attempting to repress his hostile and destructive tendencies at the expense of spontaneity." Skimming through the cases referred to him of other children he has helped reveal words such as "inattentive," "wild," and "aggressive." One boy was diagnosed with "schizophrenic tendencies." (Even Wethem says, "We could never discover any 'schizophrenic tendencies,' that convenient snap diagnosis for troubled children.') Apparently, every one of these cases was caused by one thing: reading too many comic books.

All of these kids he was able to help; all of these kids he was able to "cure." But not Willie. 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

IV. THE WRONG TWIST - The Effects of Comic Book s on the Child

Each of these chapter begins not only with a title and a subtitle, but with a quotation. I haven't presented ony of those so far but, believe me, there are some doozies coming. If you haven't noticed, I am presenting this thread in a very "seat of my pants" manner (as when don't I?). Transcribing Wertham's actual text is of primary importance; posts such as the one directly above are simple "notes dumps." I have, at this point, fallen into the habit of providing the chapter title and subtitle (although not yet quotation) as wel as the first paragraph, then a "note dump" depending on feedback. To that end, here is the fist paragraph of chapter four.

""A typical comic-book shows a blonde young girl lying in bed. She says" 'Then I was dreaming, of murder and morphine.' This is a crime-comic-book dream. Murder, crime and drug traffic are offered to children in a literature which the defenders of comic books call the modern version of the stories of  the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson or Mother Goose. But are there heroin addicts in Grimm, marihuana smokers in Anderson or dope peddlers in Mother Goose? And are there advertisements for guns and knives?" 

I don't mean to suggest that Wertham is completely off the point off the point here; only mostly off the point. I am familiar with the crime comics of the late '40s and early '50s primarily through those which have been reprinted in the 2Ks (the true "Golden Age of Comics'). Such titles include Crime Does Not Pay (but largely without the gun ads), EC reprints (including Crime Patrol, War on Crime and Crime SuspenStories) and the "Crime" volume of The Simon & Kirby Library series). Having said that, do I believe that crime comics should have been available to young children in the 1940s? No, I do not. (On that point, Werhtam and I agree.) But that's the point where parental discretion comes in. Not only that, but if something in a comic book (or a heavy metal album or a video game) is enough to send an impressionable child over the edge, something has gone wrong somewhere else. 

Those of you familiar with Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes will already be familiar with the following quotation , pulled from Seduction of the Innocent Chapter 4.

"I have known many adults who have treasured throughout their lives some of the books they read as children. I have neve come across any adult or adolescent who had outgrown comic-book reading who would ever dream of keeping any of these 'books' for any sentimental or other reason." 

Feiffer followed that up with the following:

"What the--?" - SUPERMAN, Action Comics 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

"The very children for whose unruly behavior I would want to prescribe psychotherapy in an anti-superman direction, have been nourished (or rather poisoned) by the endless repetition of Superman stories. How can they respect the hard-working mother, father or teacher who is so pedestrian, trying to teach common rules of conduct, wanting you to keep your feet on the ground and unable even figuratively speaking to fly through the air? Psychologically Superman undermines the authority and the dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children."

[The Baron]

What the frack is this guy talking about? How the Hell is Superman somehow more "undermining"  than all of the preceding heroes of myth and legend and literature?

Jeff of Earth-J said:

Psychologically Superman undermines the authority and the dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children."

[Richard Willis]

Jeff of Earth-J said:

….. if something in a comic book (or a heavy metal album or a video game) is enough to send an impressionable child over the edge, something has gone wrong somewhere else. 

Exactly! I always say that those video games really messed up little Adolph Hitler.

Wertham said:

How can they respect the hard-working mother, father or teacher who is so pedestrian, trying to teach common rules of conduct, wanting you to keep your feet on the ground and unable even figuratively speaking to fly through the air?

Did he only deal with kids with very low IQs? He doesn’t seem to respect kids’ intelligence at all.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

On racial stereotypes: "Some children take for granted these comics standards about races, with more or less awareness of their implications. For others they constitute a serious traumatic experience. for example, a twelve-year-old colored girl said at the Larfargue clinic: 'I read a lot of comic books, sometimes about seven or eight a day. Love Comics, and Wonder Woman, Sheena, Superman, Archie. I don't like the jungle. She don't have no peace. Every time she turn around, she'd be fighting. I don't think they make colored people right. The way they make them I never seen before--their hair and big nose and the English they use. They never have an English like we have. They put them so dark--for real I've never seen anybody before like that. White kids would think all colored people look like that, and really they aren't. Some of those children in my school don't like no white people. One girl's face was scratched up. I seen the girl, but not the fight.'"

[ClarkKent_DC]

Jeff of Earth-J said:

Psychologically Superman undermines the authority and the dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children."

The Baron said:

What the frack is this guy talking about? How the Hell is Superman somehow more "undermining"  than all of the preceding heroes of myth and legend and literature?

It's the same rationale J. Jonah Jameson has for his hatred of Spider-Man and other superheroes.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

"The most significant causes of reading difficulties are: visual defects--particularly far-sightedness and poor fusion resulting from eye-muscle imbalance; auditory defects; speech defects; prolonged illness; frequent absences from school; frequent changes of school; emotional maladjustment; foreign language background; home conditions in their socio-economic and emotional aspects; poor teaching; lack of reading readiness." 

Those statistics were true in the '50s, equally true when I was majoring in education in the '80s, and I'm sure they remain true to this day. Wertham goes on to discuss "reading readiness" as one of the points where reading comic books is particularly harmful. "They retard or even interfere with reading readiness. In this they may act as a prime causal factor or merely as an aggravating influence. Comic book reading is an inadequate experience. the child fastens on one  experience at the expense of others. If he is given the wrong or harmful experiences, he loses out on constructive experiences." 

I also found this assertion noteworthy: "There is a high correlation between intelligence, vocabulary and reading. Comic book readers are handicapped in vocabulary building because in comics all the emphasis is on the visual image and not on the proper word." He goes on to conclude: "The comic book industry has successfully spread the idea that comic books are actually good for children's reading. So the fundamental question arises, How many children suffering from reading disorders are comic book readers? The answer is simple. Most of them are."

It continues to fascinate me how right Wertham can be about some things and how wrong about others. 

[Captain Comics]

Jeff of Earth-J said:

"The very children for whose unruly behavior I would want to prescribe psychotherapy in an anti-superman direction, have been nourished (or rather poisoned) by the endless repetition of Superman stories. How can they respect the hard-working mother, father or teacher who is so pedestrian, trying to teach common rules of conduct, wanting you to keep your feet on the ground and unable even figuratively speaking to fly through the air? Psychologically Superman undermines the authority and the dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children."

Funny, it was Superman & Co. that taught me respect for "the hard-working mother, father or teacher who is so pedestrian, trying to teach common rules of conduct," not the actual adults in my life.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

Captain Comics said:

Funny, it was Superman & Co. that taught me respect for "the hard-working mother, father or teacher who is so pedestrian, trying to teach common rules of conduct," not the actual adults in my life.

Apropos that: "Comic books were the training ground for me, in terms of ethics, in terms of the things I learned about courage, good and evil, what heroism was, right and wrong." -- Harlan Ellison

[Captain Comics]