Comic Books Today and the Future
"When the remedy has been found, the next generation has difficulty in understanding how the old conditions could ever have been allowed."
-- Sir John Simon
When you first meet Dr. Payn, he is in his laboratory wearing a white coat. On a couch before him lies a blonde young woman with conspicuous breasts, bare legs and the lower part of her skirt frazzled and in tatters, as if she had been roughly handled in strenuous but unsuccessful attempts to defend her honor.
Next you see him lying in wait for another beautiful girl. He cuts off her shapely legs. You see her lying on the cobblestoned street without her legs while he rushes off on the sidewalk carrying them in his arms. Then you see him gloating over these lovely legs in his laboratory. The newspapers announce: BUTCHER-KILLER AT LARGE!
Two pictures show the police completely baffled. He stalks another beautiful girl and cuts her hands off: "Not my hands! Oh, No, Please Not my ... OHHHH ... "
Next you see the girl lying hand-less on the sidewalk and again: "Performing his deed of unspeakable horror, Dr. Payn scurried off carrying his GHASTLY BURDEN!"
His third exploit belongs to the psychopathology of hair fetichism. He cuts off a beautiful girl's long blonde hair: "HAIR! Lovely, perfect hair!"
Finally, through a most unlikely accident, he dies, and the police find him dead.
When the decision of Governor Dewey and the lack of decision of Senator Kefauver had given the green light to the comic-book industry, they went ahead full steam. Now no holds are barred. Horror, crime, sadism, monsters, ghouls, corpses dead and alive -- in short, real freedom of expression. All this in comic books addressed to and sold to children.
To whom is such a story as Dr. Payn addressed? This comic book has letters from readers. One says: "I enjoy your books very much and read them in bed at night before I go to sleep. I am eleven years old." When I read this I could not help being reminded of a typical defensive article about comic books in Parents Magazine in which the author says: "Maybe I just don't catch all these subtle symbols of erotism, sadism and worse which comics reputedly contain."
In the lust-murder story of Dr. Payn the criminal was a doctor. In another comic book the criminal is a police lieutenant. He kills his wife by deliberately running over her with his car. At the end he is undetected and completely unsuspected, and presumably lives happily ever after. Six pictures on one page show this policeman-murderer lighting and smoking a cigar, walking triumphantly, with the full knowledge that crime does pay.
He goes free because at the police station an innocent man is tortured into making a confession. The child reader is spared no details. The man is punched in the stomach, hit in the face, his arm twisted behind his back.
"It went on like that for hours! His clothes were torn -- his nose bleeding -- his face battered and bruised! Other detectives took over! They worked in shifts -- pummeling -- threatening -- cursing!"
"HE [the innocent man] LAY SPRAWLED ON HIS STOMACH, BLOOD TRICKLING FROM HIS TOOTHLESS MOUTH! THE BONES IN HIS NOSE WERE SPLINTERED! HIS SCALP HAD BEEN OPENED -- HIS HAIR WAS MATTED WITH STICKY OOZE! HE SOBBED --"
"N-NO-MORE! I ... I ... DID IT! P-PLEASE! sob ... sob! NO-MORE!"
The very last picture in this child's story shows the real murderer, the police lieutenant, smoking his cigar and "cleaning his wife's blood from his car."
Stories like this are now so typical that I could go on and on.
A very sexy-looking girl tells her husband that she is pregnant. He opens his jacket and the girl looks at him, horrified. He tells her: "You couldn't be expecting a child, now, could you? Not very well -- when your husband is a ROBOT!"
A young soldier "keeping watch in his foxhole in Korea" is exterminated by a ghost: "The fangs and talons of the evil witch sank deeper into the jugular vein and then came out, withdrawing rich red blood. The young man sank forward, face up, dead!"
A painter ties the hands of his model to the ceiling, stabs her and uses her blood for paint. (Flowing blood is shown in six pictures. )
An "autopsy" is performed on a man who is still alive and screams.
A man provides murder victims for his wife, who drinks their blood. He grabs a newsboy for her and she says over his bound body: "His throat is as white and soft as a swan's! So tender and youthful!"
Scholars will be interested in this new version of Shakespeare's Hamlet:
THE DEATH SCENE (Hamlet speaking):
Fear not, queen mother!
It was Laertes
And he shall die at my hands!
... Alas! I have been poisoned
And now I, too, go
To join my deceased father!
I, too -- I -- AGGGRRRAA!
In one comic book "the top horror artist in the entire comic book field" is confined in the "state home for mental defectives" where his little son goes to visit him. Dialogue at the gate between the guard and the boy:
Guard: "Yes, I know it's visiting day. But he's still too violent."
Little boy: "I -- I -- just wanted to tell him he's won the 'ghoul' for the most horrible comic book script of the year."
At a time when accusations of bacterial warfare cloud the international scene, children here in the United States and, through export, in many other countries, are instructed that the United States Government is carrying out secret researches on bacteriological warfare and that it is practiced on colored natives:
A man goes to a Government building marked "RESEARCH DIVISION." A scientist in a white coat tells him: "You are aware of the secrecy of these experiments. They are more deadly than the A-bomb!"
Showing him a syringe, he goes on: "There's enough minute bugs in this to kill everything in New York! Pollute drinking-water! Poison masses -- "
The man tells his girl: "Get a load of this Liz. Bacterial warfare!"
He goes to Africa to practice on the natives there what he has learned in the U.S. Government Research Building.
In one picture you are shown a book with the title Bacterial War. This is not propaganda abroad, but the comic-book industry at home.
The stories of murder go from the simple through the gruesome to the weird. One man kills his wife with a poker, another shoots a wolf which is his wife, a third becomes transformed into a huge crab and eats her.
The preceding examples are ordinary samples such as can be picked up at any newsstand or candy store. This is what the comic-book industry is putting out right now under what might be called the Kefauver-Dewey charter. Forgotten are the announcements of self-control and self-regulation. Anything goes. And all this is possible because many well-meaning adults live under the skilfully induced illusion that comic books have been getting better and better. Supposing you were to read in a history book that a distant nation in times gone by gave this kind of literature to its children to read. Would you not be forced to conclude -- whichever historian you follow, whether Gibbons or Toynbee, Spengler or Engels, Croce or Commager -- that here was a civilization poisoning its wellsprings?
One afternoon, after analyzing the content of the latest batch, I was riding on the subway. Across from me was a nice-looking little boy) totally immersed in one of the bloody thrillers I had just gone over. I found myself in a revery. In my fantasy I was addressing a huge audience of parents, doctors, legislators and officials. This is what I was saying:
Set the children free! Give them a chance! Let them develop according to what is best in them. Don't inculcate in them your ugly passions when they have hardly learned to read. Don't teach them all the violence, the shrewdness, the hardness of your own life. Don't spoil the spontaneity of their dreams. Don't lead them halfway to delinquency and when they get there clap them into your reformatories for what is now euphemistically called "group living." Don't stimulate their minds with sex and perversity and label the children abnormal when they react. Don't continue to desecrate death, graves and coffins with your horror stories and degrade sex with the sordid rituals of hitting, hanging, torturing. Don't sow in their young minds the sadistic details of destruction.
Set the children free! All they want is to play, to learn, to grow up. They want to play games of adventure and fun, not your games of wars and killing. They want to learn how the world goes, what the people do who achieve something or discover something. They want to grow up to raise families with homes and children and not revel in morbid visions of Batman and his young friend. They want to grow up into men and women, not supermen and wonder women. Set the children free!
But I caught myself. Ridiculous! Who would listen to that?
I had asked for a law, a simple sanitary law to protect children under fifteen. The children needed it, the parents wanted it, the legislators drafted it, the intellectuals opposed it, the pillars of the community slapped it down. What, I asked myself, happened in the past? How did the protection of children progress historically? I went to the library.
In ancient times children were sacrificed bodily. Henry Bailey Stevens writes in his book The Recovery of Culture: "The success of the blood sacrifice [of infants] was undoubtedly due to the fact that it was sponsored by the thinkers, the leaders. They could argue from evidence which they could claim to be scientific.... Instinctively no doubt many wholesome people recoiled from the practice. But the intellectuals could talk them down scornfully. Let us imagine ourselves in Carthage when the priests of Moloch are demanding the sacrifice of infants. Suppose that you object.... Your associates will suspect you of sentimentality and irreverence. All the political, the social, the educational and the religious world will be arrayed against you. You will be a part of a society that has become infected."
A century ago boys and girls of five and up had to work as chimney sweepers. They got skin diseases from the soot. The proposal was made that the practice of sending children up chimneys be stopped. You can well imagine what their employers would have answered if they had had the benefit of the type of experts the comic-book industry has now. They would have said that only those children who are predisposed get skin diseases, that it is the children's fault if they want to satisfy their need of motility by going up chimneys, that children who don't go up chimneys get skin diseases, too, and besides what better outlet for aggressive instincts is there than to climb up chimneys and do battle with soot? There being no such experts then, the Earl of Lauderdale stated that if something were done for the children by law through an Act of Parliament, private initiative for being benevolent and helping children would be affected and would disappear. And the Religious Tract Society joined in the anti-reform movement and urged these stunted and sick children to wash well on Saturdays, attend Sunday School and read the Bible: "Thus you will be happy little sweeps." It took the British Parliament ninety years to control this legally.
In 1892 children as young as six, and even five and four, had to work in coal mines in England. The parliamentary report about these conditions was illustrated with pictures showing children and nude adults doing their back-breaking work in narrow, low, mine passages. John W. Dodds, in his book The Age of Paradox, records how Lord Londonderry, a coal magnate, was indignant -- not at the facts, but at the pictures. He was afraid they might fall into the hands of refined young ladies. So, as Professor Dodds writes, "change came slowly."
The history of medicine records a controversy about whether young children who have to do industrial work at night need sunlight for their health. It is not yet a hundred years since a physician had to defend in detail that sunlight is good for the immature organism, and that at least part of the day children should have sunlight in order to remain healthy. He was in just such direct contradiction to the employers who made these children work long hours at night as I am to the comic-book publishers. Similar arguments took place on the question of whether children need regular meals, sleep, how old they should be for heavy work and how many hours they should work. Nowadays the intellectuals are just as anxious to guard the freedom of children to read crime comics. In those days, as Lord Elton writes, they were "eager to preserve the liberty of children of six to work eleven hours in the mines." Then they used to quote Bentham, now they quote Freud.
Huntington Cairns, in his treatise The Child and The Low, describes how difficult it was to make Federal laws regulating child labor, how a law involving interstate commerce was proposed, and how the Supreme Court held this unconstitutional. (Justice Holmes dissented, as did Justice Frankfurter in the Winters case.) Cairns quotes a poem published at that time referring to the 5 to 4 decision of the Supreme Court:
Five reverend, wise and gentle men
Have thrust the babies back again.
Child labor today is still a problem of legal control. One constitutional amendment on child labor has been waiting for the necessary state ratification for a quarter of a century. Only recently attempts were made in the New York State Legislature to introduce a law according to which children would have to work without provisions for any minimum age, maximum hours, or protection of health and welfare. The battle between profits and progress goes on.
The flood of new and bad comic books continued to rise. The psychological erosion of children continued. There was no denying the victory of Superman and the triumph of Dr. Payn. Then an important event took place. As reported by Life in "Newsfronts of the World": "The Pacific Fleet Command has banned the sale of most war comic books in ships' stores on the grounds that they are too gory for the American sailor." Military authorities had questioned comic books before, on the grounds of avoiding sale of material that "goes beyond the line of decency." There had been some question of control and some bickering with the industry. But this time there was a clear action, to protect adults. If these war comics which are widely read by children are too "gory" for sailors in an actual war, why is it permitted to display and sell them to boys and girls of six and seven?
We think it is progressive to follow the judgment of children and go by our own feelings of wishing not to be interfered with. In other words, we go by what children think and by what we feel, instead of going by what we think and what children feel. We neglect the corrosive effect of external factors, such as comic books, in favor of more and more abstract speculations about intrinsic factors. We pretend that hostility and destructiveness are ingrained in the child and need expression, and fail to recognize what is instilled in him from outside. We teach these wrong concepts to young doctors and teachers who on that basis in turn make wrong observations, confirming our false conceptions. At a conference of kindergarten and first-year teachers in New York, under the auspices of the Board of Education, this official recommendation was given: "It is necessary to stress the normality of hostility; all children feel it and it is psychologically and biologically sound. Teachers must appreciate also the importance of accepting hostility without attaching moral values."
You cannot accept hostility without moral evaluation. For hostility in itself causes a moral conflict in the child. A society which itself adopts the standards and point of view of comic books is bound to arrive at false conclusions.
Thus my studies had almost completed a cycle. I had started from comic books, had gone on to study the needs and desires of children and had come to adults. I had learned that it is not a question of the comic books but of the mentality from which comic books spring, and that it was not the mentality of children but the mentality of adults. What I found was not an individual condition of children, but a social condition of adults.
The conflict that I came across occurs on different levels. There is first the conflict between the child and the comic book. This becomes an emotional conflict within the child himself. While there are parents who are delighted that comic books keep their children quiet, that is a short-range view because comic books have led to many conflicts between parents and children. There is further the conflict between the mothers' good sense and the experts' dogmas. On a wider scale a conflict developed between active local groups of women's clubs, mothers' clubs and parent-teacher organizations and their inactive national leadership. In 1949 the president of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers described comic books "as a chief influence of today on the minds of the young." What have they done about it?
Underlying it all is the conflict between the surge of violence today, of which comic-book violence is just a reflection, and a new morality, as expressed in the dissenting opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Winters case, which wants to stem the tide of education for violence.
The way people reacted to comic books is how they often react to other things, too. First they did not know -- but they thought they did; then when told, they did not believe it; then, when shown, they said that's an exception; and when that was disproved, there was an endless stream of excuses: that things were getting better and better, that the evil would voluntarily improve itself, that singling out one evil was just looking for a "scapegoat." Thus they can keep not only their physical comfort but their intellectual comfort as well.
People neglect the pre-violent manifestations of the trend toward violence. They forget what the philosopher Erwin Edman said: "It does not take long for a society to become brutalized." Comic books are not the disease, they are only a symptom. And they are far more significant as symptoms than as causes. They shed some light on the whole foundation of moral and social behavior. That, I began to feel, was the most positive result of our studies. The same social forces that make crime comic books make other social evils, and the same social forces that keep crime comic books keep the other social evils the way they are. Even the arguments to defend them are the same for both.
Whenever you hear a public discussion of comic books, you will hear sooner or later an advocate of the industry say with a triumphant smile, "Comic books are here to stay." I do not believe it. Someday parents will realize that comic books are not a necessary evil "which, but their children's end, naught can remove." I am convinced that in some way or other the democratic process will assert itself and crime comic books will go, and with them all they stand for and all that sustains them. But before they can tackle Superman, Dr. Payn, and all their myriad incarnations, people will have to learn that it is a distorted idea to think that democracy means giving good and evil an equal chance at expression. We must learn that freedom is not something that one can have, but is something that one must do.
One evening at the Lafargue Clinic a young woman came to see me. She was the mother of a boy who after some delinquency had been referred to the Clinic and been treated there. She told me that the boy had got into trouble again, this time picked up with a switchblade knife. He was now in a youth shelter and she had been told he would be sent to a reformatory. I remembered her as a hardworking woman who had given the best care and education to her children that she could. She was very distressed and I tried to console her. Then I called in one of the social workers and we made plans to get in touch with the authorities, either to prevent his being sent to the reformatory or, if that did not work, to try to have him released from there as soon as possible. "I know your boy," I said to her, "and the Clinic will take full responsibility for him again." She thanked me and went out.
About an hour later when the Clinic was closed, I left the office. Walking through one of the corridors of the building I saw out of the corner of my eye a woman sitting on a bench crying. I recognized the mother I had spoken to. It was late, and I was tired, but I went over to her and took her back to the office.
By that time she had managed to control her sobbing, but she could not talk. So I consoled her again and told her we would do whatever we could. Then I added, "I know what you have done for this boy. Don't think that it's your fault."
At that she looked up, all alert. "It must be my fault," she said. "I heard that in the lectures. And the judge said it, too. It's the parents' fault that the children do something wrong. Maybe when he was very young --"
"Not at all," I interrupted her. "You have done all that you could. I have the whole chart here and we know it from the boy himself. You are a good mother, and you've given this boy a good home. But the influence of a good home is frustrated if it is not supported by the other influences children are exposed to -- the comic books, the crime programs and all that. Adult influences work against them. We have studied that, and we know good parents when we see them. So don't worry about yourself. It's not your fault."
She seemed to come out from under a cloud. She thanked me and got up to go. When she was halfway through the doorway she turned slowly. "Doctor," she said in a low voice. "I'm sorry to take your time. But please -- tell me again."
I looked at her questioningly.
"Tell me again," she said slowly and hesitantly. "Tell me again that it isn't my fault."
And I did.