#dr. wertham

[charnel-grounds]

Tomb of Terror #17 - Harvey, September 1955. Cover art by Bob Powell... Was never published.

Instead it changed it's title to Thrills of Tomorrow with the advent of the Comics Code.

The title story itself was never published.

Content was watered down and it only lasted four issues.

And so ended the Golden Age of American comic books.

[vintagegeekculture]

A 1948 Maclean’s article that discussed the moral panic around comic books at the time (Maclean’s is essentially the Canadian version of Time magazine). They quote none other than the infamous Dr. Frederick Wertham. Easily the weirdest part of this panic is the belief that comics keep kids illiterate and unable to move on to normal books. 

Dr. Wertham is often misremembered by comics fans. He is often remembered by posterity as a “family values reactionary” who went after crime comics, when he was nothing of the kind. Among other things, he was politically progressive. For instance, his best known achievement in criminal law is to get juries to be aware of the background of the accused, since rich defendants were more likely to get off on the insanity defense than poor defendants. 

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Seeing even one reviewer (that's as many as I recall off the top of my head) noting that this book is "sympathetic to comics" is one of the funniest explanations of the power Wertham wanted to have versus what he has truly had over the last several decades. Because, the truth is, Dr. Wertham got very, very close to destroying comic books as a medium in the United States, and we are damn fucking lucky he missed a direct hit.

The thing is, Powell and Schechter aren't here to just talk shit on Wertham. They're here to look at the man as a wholly formed professional and point out how his incredibly important work to defeat segregation and his incredibly bullshit work to blame comic books for all of society's problems are both of the same man.

We got to Brown v. Board of Education partially because of Wertham's work with black children in Delaware, in a church basement where he tried to work for free but would take a quarter if anyone protested to the charity of his work. His goal was to provide needed and useful mental health services to the Black community, partially at the request of Richard Wright (Native Son, Black Boy), who read Wertham's works about mental health and the socially disenfranchised and sought him out to help the Black community.

And yet, Wertham is best known for calling all comic books violent and offensive and dangerous and nearly killing a young industry with his words.

This is where Powell and Schechter come in. They worked together on You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?--a factual breakdown of a murderer meant to dissolve any grandiose ideas of the man set forth by the continued pop culture response to his crimes (Powell was pissed at Ryan's Murphy's take on the case, FYI, and rightly so). And they bring their strengths to the story of Wertham. Schechter is an excellent researcher, and Powell is Eric Powell--a deeply talented and skilled comic book artist and writer who has made his life on The Goon, a horror and gangster comic of the mode Wertham tried to destroy. They tell a layered, nuanced story of Werthram from start to finish that gives him room to be kind and compassionate and progressive but also the same sort of reactionary puritan fuckhead we deal with to this day in leftist spaces.

Powell's art is exquisite as always, though I admit a bias because I just love his work so much. And Schechter's research is as obvious here as it was in Eddie Gein. I need to re-read Eddie Gein before I write a review like this, but I will say that Dr. Werthless definitely hits an issue you get with non-fiction graphic novels: Word vomit.

There's a fine line between letting a man's words speak for him and letting too many of the words on the page, and when dealing with a Wertham--who wrote many books and gave many testimonies--you can do your best to keep the page from getting overwhelmed, and there's just nothing else to do but try your best. Powell and Schechter did their best to use only the most important words, and Powell does his damnedest as a talented artist and letterer to keep from overwhelming the page, but there's no winning the visual-to-written ratio sometimes, and this is one of those times.

I think it's a fair appraisal of Wertham the likes of which he never gave the industry he blamed for all the social ills (there is unquestionable proof he never read the source material in some cases), and I think it's a good read to remind ourselves that the fears and shouts of Wertham are just a repeated chorus over and over again. In the 1950s, it was those violent comics books. Those sexual comic books. Those queer-hinting comic books (Wertham was certain Batman and Robin were in a homosexual relationship, pushing an age-gap and filthy queer pervert narrative that certain people on both sides would cream themselves over today). Today, it's people still pushing the idea that media they don't like or understand is the root of all evils.

Powell and Schechter give Wertham the fair shake that he never gave the art form of the comic book, and that of itself is worth the read if you don't know anything of the man, and even if you do. Understanding that Wertham was both a genuine social reformer and also a social boy who cried wolf requires one to hold nuance and complexity for the so-called bogeyman of comic books, and that's the very least any of us can do to not repeat his mistakes.

[charnel-grounds]

Dr. Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent in The Monster Times, May 1972.

[whatthehellamiwriting-blog]

AKA: That time when comics were nearly destroyed because some guy (the infamous Dr. Wertham) decided that rather than just not reading stuff he didn't like, he'd try to take it away from everyone else.

I am fascinated by this point in comics history, where the only thing that kept the industry from collapsing under public pressure and becoming a relic, the industry said, "Look, if we police ourselves and agree to not make certain comics, will you leave us alone?"

And it worked. We lost horror comics for decades, but comics pushed out from the huge restrictions of the comics code even when it still meant something (it was formally retired a couple of years ago after not really having meant anything for probably two decades before that), and they're continuing to expand into new ideas even now.

I literally have an entire novel plotted around these hearings and a version of the world where comics get outlawed, so I am sort of totally into it.