Sermons About Wertham
The Comic Book Police
Dr. Fredric Wertham, a prominent psychiatrist, made his mark in cultural history when he decided to take on the comic book industry in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He claimed there was a direct link between reading “crime comics†and juvenile delinquency. A number of magazines—Reader’s Digest and Scouting—published articles by Wertham and other comic critics warning parents of the dangers of the pulp stories. In the September 1954 issue of Scouting, the official publication of the Boy Scouts, Wertham stated his thesis: “The keynote of crime-comic books is violence and sadism. This is featured in the illustrations and in the text. In one typical crime comic . . . one story alone has ten pictures of girls getting smacked in the face, beaten with a whip, strangled, choked by hand, choked with a scarf. In addition, two men are killed and one man is crippled."
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