Covers the comic book scare and other parental panics over children's material culture. Presented Wednesday June 10th.

1. The Comic Book Scare

2. Since the development of mass
media, adults have sought to control
the media children consume.

3. Comstock Law, 1887
• Banned the interstate sale of pornography,
birth control information, and other obscenity
• Not targeted solely at children

8. “A Crime Against Children,” Ladies’
Home Journal, 1909
“Are we parents criminally negligent of our children, or is
it that we have not put our minds on the subject of
continuing to allow them to be injured by the inane and
vulgar “comic” supplement of the Sunday newspaper?
One thing is certain: we are permitting to go under our
very noses and in our own homes an extraordinary
stupidity, and an influence for repulsive and often
depraving vulgarity so colossal that it is rapidly taking on
the dimensions of nothing short of a national crime
against our children.”

9. The Golden Age of Comics
• Superman, 1938
• Batman, 1939
• Green Lantern, 1940
• Wonder Woman, 1941

10. “The comic strips in the newspapers of the time were
everything to me, as they were for every other kid I knew
then. They made me want to be an artist, and that was a
cause of great concern to my parents, because my father
was an elitist in his heart, and my mother was a peasant
and a very practical woman. . . . . My dream from the
time I was quite young was maybe someday to be a
newspaper cartoonist.”
~ Will Eisner

11. “Basically we were kids ourselves, so we were writing
what excited us, which our audience then related to. We
were inventing the language as we went along, and some
of us had an awareness of that. Every time we did
something that we didn’t think had been done before, it
was exciting.”
~ Jerry Robinson

12. “A lot of guys looked down their noses on comics - they
thought it was kid stuff. So it was kid stuff? It was work.
You can call it kid stuff, comic books, garbage, you name it
- labels like that, guys put on things so they don’t have to
think about them. That’s just the way I like it. Leave me
alone - I’ll go about my business and do what I want. If it’s
any good, somebody will pay for it, and a kid’s dime buys
the same cup of coffee.”
~ Mickey Spillane

13. “I decided when I was quite young that there was a
certain element of nonsense going on in the grown-up
world - a lot of people who were supposed to be older
and wiser but were really in a world of their own, and I
developed an inability to accept nonsense from people
just because they’re older and supposedly wiser.”
~ Al Jaffee

14. “I really loved comics . . . I’d have to say that I probably
loved comics so much, like I did, because my parents
didn’t give a damn about them. . . . My buddies and me
talked about them all day. If you didn’t know about
comics, you were a nobody.”
~ Martin Thall

17. Why these comics, and why
now? What was different or
special about this time period?

18. PRIMARY SOURCE: STERLING
NORTH, “A NATIONAL DISGRACE”

19. “The ‘comics’ magazines, in our opinion, are furnishing a
pre-Fascist pattern for the youth of America through
emulation. The chances of Fascism controlling the planet
diminish in direct proportion to the number of good
books the coming generation reads and enjoys.”
~ Sterling North

20. “The comic . . . is the folklore of the times, spontaneously
given to and received by children, serving at the same
time as a means of helping them solve the individual and
sociological problems appropriate to their own lives.
Comic books may be said to offer the same type of
mental catharsis to readers that Aristotle claimed was an
attribute of the drama . . . Well balanced children are not
upset by even the more horrible scenes in comics, as long
as the reason for the threat of torture is clear and the
issues are well stated.”
~ Dr. Lauretta Bender and Dr. Reginald S. Lourie, child
psychiatrists, 1941

21. What event interrupted this
debate? How did this event
change or shape comics?

22. “I worked at a couple of other places, and they were the
anything-goes kind of operation. The first thing I did for
Sheldon Mayer was the Green Lantern, which I created.
He ran a clean shop. Of course, the war came after that,
and things were fine and dandy as long as the bad guys
were Nazis and Japs.”

26. PRIMARY SOURCE: ARE COMICS
FASCIST?

27. “A large number of comic books depict the heroic
adventures of one or more characters whose philosophy
may only be described as un-American and in a few
instances, anarchistic. The vigilante spirit is rife in the
comics: the gestapo method is glorified . . . It is neither
Christian nor American to permit the young to be taught
in this way the pernicious totalitarian doctrine that the
end justifies the means . . . Even juvenile characters in the
comic books engage in un-American activities of this
nature. Fictitious ‘junior commando’ groups bear a strong
resemblance to the bands of child militarists in Nazi
Germany.”
~ The Case Against the Comics, 1944

28. 1944

29. “In a vulgar way, [Superman] seems to personify the
primitive religion expounded by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
“Man alone is and must be our God,” says Zarathustra,
very much in the style of a Nazi pamphleteer. Like it or
not, there are plenty of American children who know
more about the man-wonder Superman than they do
about Christ or any of the great characters of the Bible.”
~ Rev. Thomas F. Doyle

30. “Every month 25,000,000 comic books are published in
this country. Many portray crime, violence, gun-play, sex,
and are largely responsible for juvenile delinquency. . . .
what is to stop [young people] from getting ideas of
hijacking, smuggling, gang fighting, train wrecking,
robbery, racketeering, and murder?”
~ Fr. Southard

31. “A creeping rot of disintegration is eating into our nation.
I am not easily shocked or easily alarmed. But today, like
thousands of others, I am both shocked and alarmed. The
arrests of “teen-age” boys and girls, all over the country
are staggering. Some of the crimes youngsters are
committing are almost unspeakable. Prostitution, murder,
rape . . .
“These are not isolated horrors from another world. They
are danger signals which every parent—every responsible
American should heed. These are symptoms—of a
condition which threatens to develop a new “lost
generation,” more hopelessly lost than any that has gone
before.”
~ J. Edgar Hoover, “Youth . . . Running Wild,” 1943

34. United States Senate Subcommittee
on Juvenile Delinquency
1954 Comic Book Hearings
Sen. Kefauver: "Here is your May issue. 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's in good taste?”
Gaines: "Yes sir, I do - for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad
taste, for example, might be defined as holding her head a little higher
so that blood could be seen dripping from it and moving the body a
little further over so that the neck of the body could be seen to be
bloody."
Kefauver:(doubtful) "You've got blood coming out of her mouth."
Gaines: "A little."

35. Comics Code Authority, 1954
• No vampires, werewolves, or zombies
• Criminals must always be punished
• No “lurid, unsavory, or gruesome” illustrations
• Limit deaths of law enforcement
• Love stories should emphasize the sanctity of
marriage

36. What other forms of media
consumed by children have
concerned adults over time?

37. PRIMARY SOURCE: HOW TO TEACH
YOUR KIDS TO WATCH TV

38. Do Video Games Cause Violence?

39. Columbine
• http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/april-
20-1999-columbine-shooting-9541833

42. Harry Potter
& Witchcraft

43. Horror

44. PRIMARY SOURCE: WHY HORROR IS
GOOD FOR YOU (AND BETTER FOR
YOUR KIDS)