FUNNY
BUSINESS
Zounds!
Once again, the innocent citizens of Gotham City have been rescued
from the clutches of modern art by their mild-mannered mayor,
Rudy Giuliani. The latest menace to civilization? A reworking
of the Last Supper, shown at the mayors arch-nemesis, the Brooklyn
Museum. Entitled "Yo Mamas Christ," the offending picture features
a naked, black woman, the artist, n the place of Jesus.
Holy,
uh, blasphemy! After the fiendish image was zapped by Mr. Giuliani
as "anti-Catholic," the mayor in full, superhero mode launched
a renewed campaign against pornography, and called for the creation
of a "Commission of Decency," to police any cultural institution
that receives public funding.
Such
antics have led some observers to wonder if the mayor is actually
concealing a secret identity as an art-world publicist. The tempest
he has whipped up has delighted no one so much as the artist in
question no doubt in part because it has let her evade all those
awkward questions about whether her work is, well, good.
What
has engaged Gothamites much more is Giulianis campaign to move
stores that sell pornographic materials out of most neighborhoods.
After all, to move through almost any section of our culture today
from the movies to the internet, from television to a stroll down
the block is to be bombarded with images of sex and violence that
most Americans might consider fine for consenting adults, but
which they are much more leery about exposing their children to.
Our
debate over just what is or is not suitable for the kids has gone
on for more than half a century now. Its origins over what might
have seemed the most innocuous of subjects: the comic book. It
was the comic book that would be the last public medium to be
put under a self-censoring, industry code and the first to put
a real crack in the puritannical, public consensus that came into
being after the First World War.
Comic
books as opposed to the "funny paper" strips published in newspapers
did not even really come into being until 1933. Yet by 1941, one
study estimated that some 180 million issues were being sold each
year, from over 100,000 newsstands and that children aged 9-14
spent 75 percent of their free time reading them. Objections from
parents and educators proliferated almost as quickly. Most of
these were about the comics thin stories and simple pictures.
There were even fears as Amy Kiste Nyberg traces in her fascinating
account, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code,that
the poor quality of comics printing would "spoil a child's natural
sense of color."
But
the idea of comic books as a national threat really burst upon
the public consciousness in March of 1948. That was the month
a 53-year-old, German immigrant psychiatrist named Dr. Fredric
Wertham convened a psychiatric symposium at which he charged that
heavy comic-book reading had contributed to the delinquency of
every troubled child he had ever studied.
Despite
how he is regarded now by civil libertarians and comics aficionados,
Dr. Wertham was no stereotypical, blue-stockinged censor. During
a distinguished career at some of the nations leading hospitals,
he fought tirelessly for years to bring the first psychiatric
clinic to Harlemone that served its patients free of charge. Wertham
had become friends with Clarence Darrow, when he had proved himself
one of the few psychiatrists anywhere willing to testify for indigent,
black defendants, and his research and testimony would play a
crucial role in the landmark, Brown v. Board of Education case
that ended segregation in public schools. For his time, Dr. Wertham
was a generally broad-minded, tolerant, and idealistic advocate
for poor and troubled children and it was from his idealism that
his worst excesses would follow. The charges of Wertham and other
psychiatrists at his symposium were reported by Judith Crist in
Colliers magazine, under the sensational headline, "Horror in
the Nursery." They struck a chord. Post-World War II America was
undergoing a fresh bout of moral panic, swept with guilt that
the war years had produced a nation of "juvenile delinquents"
a phrase that was just then coming into its own.
Wertham
would state repeatedly that comic books were not the sole or even
the primary factor in producing delinquents. Yet he would pursue
the subject almost obsessively over the next decade, producing
a host of articles and interviews, and finally his most famous
and infamous work, Seduction of the Innocent.
The
book, like much of Werthams work, relied heavily on anecdotal
evidence from his case studies, and examples drawn from the comics
themselves. It is impossible to deny much of his indictment of
the medium. Many lines of comics had begun to feature horror stories,
with depictions of severed heads and limbs, graphic shootings
and stabbings, that resembled the Grand Guignol. The violence
was heavily flavored with sexespecially with scantily clad women
who were routinely beaten, tied-up, tortured, and demeaned. Non-whites
were depicted as inferior, semi-human beings. Still other comics
contained detailed plans on how to commit crimes.
Yet
Dr. Wertham was less successful in linking such images to the
behavior of urban, juvenile offenders. Social scientists have
since picked apart much of Werthams methodology and even to a
layman, many of his stories strain credulity.
One
passage in Seduction of the Innocent,for instance, relates
the deleterious effects of comic books on "Annie, aged ten, [who]
engaged in sex play with men for which she received money," and
who is quoted as saying, "I meet the men on the docks." Hmm...a
ten-year-old girl who trawls the docks, looking for tricks? Could
it be that comic books are not the real problem here? In another
instance, Wertham rails against a story that "gives a price list
for hurting people in the protection racket" apparently unaware
that the list, right down to prices and descriptions, was nearly
identical to one distributed by the Whyos, a gang of old-style
"juvenile delinquents" who had run the streets of New York some
seventy years earlier. Was life copying art, or art life? It was
in answering this question that Wertham showed himself at both
his most visionary and his most frightening. Preoccupied with
the effect that mass culture had on society as a whole, he let
his good intentions run away with him.
"People like to be nonviolent," Wertham maintained, adding, "It
is easy to laugh at that as a Utopia; but there is no proof that
hostility and violence are an ineradicable part of human nature."
Actually,
it was not easy to laugh at all, considering how much damage utopias
similar to Dr. Werthams had just wreaked upon humanity. From this
boundless faith, the familiar spiral of the censor soon followed.
It
did not matter to Dr. Wertham if comic stories showed that crime
did not pay, or that evil-doers would be punished. Even the adventures
of Superman were a threat" phantasies of sadistic joy in seeing
other people punished again and again." Meanwhile, "the Batman
stories are psychologically homosexual," and Batman's relationship
with Robin "a wish dream of two homosexuals living together" that
would corrupt children. Wonder Woman was "The Lesbian counterpart
of Batman"
Wertham
saw only one solution. As he told Crist, "the time has come to
legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy
stores."
Washington
was listening. In the postwar era, hysterical congressional investigations
seem to have been Americas means of choice for blowing off steam.
Wertham soon hooked up with Estes Kefauver, the irrepressible
Tennessee senator, whose interminable hearings on organized crime
wildly exaggerated the power of the Mafia, but nearly got him
nominated for president. Juvenile delinquency seemed to offer
another inviting target, and Kefauvers new Senate subcommittee
opened three days of hearings in New York City in the spring of
1954with Dr. Wertham serving as both consultant and chief witness.
The
hearings did not go well for the comics and their defenders. William
Gaines, whose E.C. Comics published many of the most violent books,
was outraged by the attacks on his industry, and eager to testify.
But his mind was muddled by diet pills at the time, and he stepped
into an easy trap when he told the committee, "My only limits
are bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste."
Senator
Kefauver then held up an E.C. comic and asked, "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 is in good taste?"
Gaines
dug himself in even deeper. "Yes, sir, I do for the cover of a
horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined
as holding the head a little higher so that the blood could be
seen dripping from it, and moving the body over a little further
so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody."
Kefauver:
"You've got blood coming out of her mouth." "A little," Gaines
admitted.
Wertham,
by contrast, was convincing and self-assured and disingenuous.
His testimony failed to mention the results of a questionnaire
he had designed and sent out on behalf of the Kefauver committeein
which nearly 60 percent of responding psychiatrists found no link
between comic books and juvenile delinquency, and almost 70 percent
opposed banning any comics. He went on to represent an E.C. Comics
story that clearly decried racial prejudice against Hispanics
as racist. Why? Because it depicted violent, racist men committing
violent deeds and using racist epithets. "I think Hitler was a
beginner compared to the comic-book industry" Dr. Wertham claimed,
abandoning all restraint. "They teach them race hatred at the
age of four before they can read."
"Once
you start to censor, you must censor everything," Gaines warned,
pointing out how widely Wertham had flung his net. If any depiction
of bad things undermined our children's psyches, what was not
to be banned? The Bible? Most literary classics? All newspapers?
In
the end, the committee decided not to censor officially. Instead,
the comics were forced into their own, self-regulating code, much
like that imposed upon the movies following World War I. A disgusted
Gaines dropped E.C.s horror comic lines, to concentrate on his
new satirical magazine entitled Mad. Sales of the newly sanitized,
homogenized comics dropped precipitously by the end of the decade,
although many observers attribute this less to censorship than
to the advent of a formidable new contender for childrens attention—television.
Neither
outcome much pleased Fredric Wertham. He felt that the comics
code did not go nearly far enough, and found plenty more to despise
on the tube. The implacable critic of mass culture even condemned
coverage of the Vietnam War on the nightly news; such broadcasts,
"really are war commercials." Instead, Wertham went on to publish
an admiring study of fanzines in 1973, praising them for their
nonviolence, anti-commercialism, and "genuine human voices outside
of all mass manipulation." It was an ironic denouement to his
great crusade. For the comics, like every other medium of American
popular culture, would soon slip their code and re-emerge in all
sorts of raucous, offensive, fascinating, and brilliant new forms.
A visitor to almost any, urban comic book store today will discover
plenty of sex, and quite a bit of what Anthony Burgesss droogies
liked to call "the old ultraviolence" albeit mostly in adults-only
sections. They will also find some of the most original, individualistic,
and provocative art in America today, from Art Spigelmans classic
Maus, graphic novels of the Holocaust; to my personal favorite,
Ben Katchor's brilliant, hallucinatory adventures of Julius Knipl,
Real Estate Photographer; to the works of Lynda Barry, Chris Ware,
Adrian Tomine, Scott McCloud, Harvey Pekar, the Los Hernandos
brothers, Jessica Abel, Angus Oblong, and a whole host of others.
In
short, the readers and creators of comics today have worked out
a typically pragmatic, American solution to the problem of censorship,
imposing some restrictions on what is suitable for children but
nurturing a lively and independent culture. One would like to
think that, if he were around today, Fred Wertham would be a fan
of the comics.
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
