I posted the video yesterday but am late in announcing it! In this week’s video, I discuss one of the flash points of comics history in the US: the moral panic against comics, which culminates in Frederic Wertham’s famous book, Seduction of the Innocent.
There’s a ton of information online if you’d like to dive deeper into information about the moral panic.
Here’s an article in the NYT summarizing Dr. Carol Tilley’s research about the flaws in Frederic Wertham’s research, as well as a few others’ findings.
Here’s a link to a lecture from Dr. Christopher Pizzino regarding his research about Robert Peebles, the Polo Grounds murder, and Wertham’s misuse of the case.
The Web’s Original Seduction of the Innocent Site doesn’t have the most up-to-date web design, but it has a lot of information about the specific comics Wertham discussed in the book, different editions of the book, as well as its impact, etc.
I showed a short clip from the Confidential File on Horror Comics from October 9, 1955. Click the link to watch the whole episode on YouTube...it will give you a really great sense of the rhetoric at work in the 1950s.
However, Bart Beatty works to address a more balanced view on Wertham’s ideas in his book, Frederic Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. While I still fall on the anti-Wertham side, I think Beatty raises some really important points.