Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Rapeutationists and DIRA zombies are preconditioned for violent behavior by cinema and video game violence.

Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Sat Nov 30, 2013 12:22 am

PART 1 OF 2

3. The Road to the Child

Methods of Examination

"And then one should search . . . for connections, conditions and situations that have acted at once or slowly, and with which perhaps the origin of the abnormal deviation may be justifiably linked . . . Moreover, it is necessary to understand why these conditions and situations have brought about such results in the patient, when in another person they would occur without the slightest effect; and furthermore, why they all lead in the case of one person to just such an abnormal complex, while in another to a totally different one."
-- Pavlov


The problem of what comic books do to children, or rather what they have already done to a whole generation, is three-fold. Its solution requires a knowledge of comic books, of the minds of children, and of the processes, the mechanisms, by which comic-book reading influences children. When, for example, a young child hangs himself and beneath the dead child is found an open comic book luridly describing and depicting a hanging (as has happened in a number of cases), the mechanics of the relationship between the two have to be investigated, e.g. the processes of imitation and experimentation in childhood.

To study the psychological effects of comics on children one must first have more than a superficial and scanty knowledge of what is in them. For if in children's nightmares or in their play or in their productions in psychological tests, any association or reference occurs to the "Venusians" or "Voltamen," to "a syntho-shade" or to the precise instructions on how to "case wealthy homes" for burglaries, you will not understand the response if you do not know the stimulus.

Several times when some of the earlier results of our research were presented, somebody from the field of child care would get up to state that he had never seen a child who was influenced by comic books. This statement in itself is preposterous, of course. For nothing that occupies a child for several hours a day over a long period can be entirely without influence on him. The trouble with these arguments was that these people had not studied the contents of comic books, had failed for years to take notice of their very existence as a potentially harmful factor, and had never examined children for their influence. Or the proud protagonists of negative results had -- without realizing the implications -- even encouraged children to read crime comic books as recreation and proper mental nourishment!

The same is true for superintendents of institutions for delinquents who have stated their opinion that there is no connection between the behavior of juveniles and crime-comic-book reading. How would they have found out, sitting at their desks far removed both physically and psychologically from the lives of the inmates, to whom for years in these institutions crime comic books have been fed as a steady diet? One Lafargue psychiatrist who worked for a time in a big state reformatory for boys has vividly described how many hours these confined children spend on crime comic books (with which the reformatory is filled to the brim) and his dismay at seeing how children who had got into trouble while reading many crime comics were sentenced to years of incarceration to read even more of them. That is one of the paradoxes of the social problem of crime comic books: that those with authority over children have for years neglected to pay any attention to this literature, which for many children is practically their only reading, have prescribed it for children in their charge as remedy and recreation, have paid no attention to the consequences, and now state as their professional opinion that comic books do not do any harm. Those are not the ways of science.

Such opinions show that these reformatory officials not only do not have enough contact with their charges, but also are not sufficiently acquainted with the observations of their employees. A number of psychologists and social workers employed in reformatories have told us over the years what an unwholesome influence comic books are in these institutions. Others have told us that supervisors in reformatories -- like many parents -- give lots of crime comics to children in order to keep them quiet. As an example of the problems comic books present in reformatories, one social worker stated that "when it came to drawing, the boys drew pictures from the comic books that showed violence or a preoccupation with unhealthy sexual attitudes."

The method we have used is to read, over the years, very many comic books and analyze and classify them from as many points of view as possible. Many different patterns can be discerned in them, according to publisher, writer, draftsmen, the prevailing trend and the special genre. A lot of comic books have come to us from children themselves. And if it was feasible, whenever children referred to something they had seen in a comic book we asked them to bring us that particular comic book. When they no longer had it, we added its name to a list of "wanted" comics and tried to get it later on.

It is not scientifically sound to narrow down the problem to whether the influence of comic books is just "good" or "bad." That cannot be a sound starting-point. The question is, do they have a discernible influence, and if they have how does it work, how intense and lasting is it, and in what fields and regions of the child's mind does it manifest itself. This is exactly how I started.

When Time magazine, at one stage of my investigations, reported my statement that the violence of crime comic books is a contributing factor to the increasing violence in juvenile delinquency, the father of a boy of four wrote a critical letter to the magazine in which he said, "It occurs to me that Dr. Wertham takes a child's mind too seriously." Is it possible to take a child's mind "too seriously"? Is anything to be gained by the current cheap generalization that healthy normal children are not affected by bad things and that for unhealthy abnormal children bad things do not make much difference either, because the children are bad anyhow? It is my growing conviction that this view is a wonderful excuse for adults to do whatever they choose. They can conceal their disregard for social responsibility behind a scientific-sounding abstraction which is not even true and can proceed either to exploit children's immaturity or permit it to be exploited by whole industries.

In the ordinary process of education children are told that they should listen and learn. In the psychiatric investigation of children's minds just the opposite is true: it is we who have to listen and learn. And this is what I and my associates have tried to do throughout our research.

Child psychologists often publish results of studies based on the questionnaire method. They take a group of children and ask them: "Do you do this (or that)? How often do you do it? Do you read this (or that)? What do you like better (this or that)?" -- and so on. This questionnaire method is inadequate. To ask children a series of simple questions and expect real enlightenment from their answers is even more misleading than to carry out the same procedure with adults. The younger the child, the more erroneous are the conclusions likely to be drawn. Children love to express themselves, but giving hard and fast answers to hard and fast questions is neither their favorite nor their natural method. Even if they do their best, the procedure is crude and leaves out all the finer shades of the dynamics of childhood thinking. On this premise we decided from the very beginning not to rely on any single method, but to use all the methods of modern child psychiatry which were suitable and possible in the individual case.

If one wants to go beyond narrow formal questions and intends to include the largest variety of different children, it would be a top-heavy procedure to start and execute a study devoted to one factor such as comic books alone. For this reason we have from the beginning integrated our studies of comic books with our general routine work in mental hygiene and child psychiatry. Good clinical work is good clinical research. In other words, in doing thorough clinical work the psychiatrist cannot help reaching into unexplored no-man's land. It will happen again and again that in cases that seem baffling in their symptomatology, refractory to treatment or show unusual manifestations, he will come up against new factors that are not in the books.

Starting on such a wide basis, the material available for this study covered the largest cross-section of children as they are seen in mental hygiene clinics: children who were referred by every variety of public and private child-care agency; who had come to the attention of the juvenile part of the Police Bureau or the Children's Courts; who were seen in the course of private practice or were confined for observation in psychiatric wards for adolescents, or were confined for physical diseases in pediatric wards, or seen in pediatric clinics. A large proportion of children were normal children who came to our attention for some social reason, including children of superior endowment, who were candidates for scholarships for special educational facilities. The upper age limit of children in whom we were most interested (although we did not adhere to it rigidly) was sixteen. Data were obtained also from older teen-agers and adults referring to their earlier comic-book-reading stage.

The reasons given why contact was sought for these children with physicians or psychiatrists or psychologists or social workers usually did not include any reference to comic books. But from the very beginning there were cases where the reading of comic books was part of the complaint. In these cases the main complaint was what the Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, an authority on juvenile gangs, called the "extreme avidity" of their comic-book reading. "These comics may be a counterpart of what youngsters see in the movies," he said, "but at least they cannot live with the movies day in and day out as they do with their comics. They take them to bed with them. They walk along the street on their way to school reading them. When they go on an outing for sheer fun, for vacation, along goes an average of five or six magazines per child, and an abnormal amount of attention is given them. They read them going; they read them there; they read them coming home; they swap them; so that the whole thing borders on extreme and abnormal avidity."

If all the children who pass through a period of this "extreme and abnormal avidity" were really sick children in the first place, as experts of the comic-book industry would have us believe, this would be a sick generation. But such arguments are so superficial, and so evidently special pleading, that the only thing worth noting about them is that so many adults are naive enough to give them credence. It is necessary to analyze the comic books themselves, the children in relation to them and the social conditions under which these children live.

The cases in which comic books figured in the original complaint can be illustrated by a typical statement that we have heard many times. A social acquaintance asked me about his nephew: "My sister has a little boy. He reads comic books all the time. And I've seen him -- it is all the time! He lives in one of those dream worlds. He's always interested in these books. All his concentration goes to that. All his excitement comes from these comic books. He doesn't even go out to play ball." I have never heard such a complaint about harmless animal comics.

The very fact that in the beginning we did not know the best advice to give in such cases was an added incentive to keep up our studies. The common assumption that the child must be "unhealthy in the first place" proved in most instances to have no relation at all to the facts. What was unhealthy in most instances were the comic books when we inspected them. Children, like adults, without necessarily being sick or neurotic, are different in their powers of resistance to such stimulations.

Another typical case where comic books figured in the reasons for referral was an eight-year-old boy who had suddenly begun to take money in his home. This boy was brought up in a cultured and secure home. He had been reading comic books, some of which he bought in a nearby candy store where large quantities of them were alluringly displayed. His father, a physician, told me, "He says he knows he's doing wrong, but he wants the money for comic books. He hasn't spent it on anything else. He has comic books all over the house. He reads them at the table and doesn't eat properly. Last summer when he went to camp every child had comic books and he brought a big bundle home with him. These books distract him from doing his lessons. Why, he's even gotten a sex angle from them. He told his mother that if she'd take off her blouse she'd be as pretty as a comic-book girl! What shall we do about him?" The father himself, a gentle person, had taken the drastic step of burning up all the comic books he found in his house.

Over the last few years cases of this type have greatly increased: the young child in the grip of the lure of comic books, the frustrated parent who is baffled by this invasion of his home by a powerful industry. But even so, cases that came to our attention just on account of comic-book reading form only a small proportion.

The psychiatric study of children is in general not nearly so standardized as that of adults. The so-called mental status, that is to say the formal examination for the more gross symptoms, such as disorientation or defects of judgment, or mood disorders, is not very productive. In adults we can take the life history of a patient and learn a great deal about him from his reactions to typical outer events. And we can proceed to study his inner life history as a sequence unfolding according to a certain pattern. The life history of children is not only briefer, but presents the paradox that while one can understand it only if one has a good picture of the child's environment, the story itself is an inner life history.

I have gone over many psychiatric charts of children taken in hospitals, in clinics and by consultants of private agencies. And I have often been astonished how few quotes, if any, they contain, of what the children themselves actually say.

We have given routine psychiatric examinations to children where they are interviewed by a psychiatrist. We have taken the history of the child's development from his parents, or from those with whom he has lived and who brought him up. Whenever possible, social workers have studied the child's social environment, obtained school reports, interviewed teachers, and relayed information from other agencies who had contact with the child or his family. In the same way, pertinent information was obtained from hospitals, private doctors and clergymen. In cases where courts were involved, probation reports were added to the record or probation officers interviewed.

In cases where children confided to us that they belonged to gangs and gave us permission to speak to other gang members, we made an attempt to hear their story. As much as possible we tried to ascertain the recreational influences to which children are exposed: games, community centers, radio, television, books. It is in that setting and with that perspective that we began to realize and ascertain the influence of comic books.

To establish proper circumstances which give a child the chance to express himself is difficult. Children do not like doctors' offices any more than adults do. Nor do they like being asked embarrassing questions in front of their parents. The way to gain their confidence is to treat them as persons in their own right. The paradox that this goes beyond examination and in itself is a step in therapy should not deter one. All child psychology worthy of the name is very close to educational and re-educational methods. It is in the very process of education that the child is best understood.

If one wishes to obtain the spontaneous expressions of children, it is only the amateur who attempts to exclude himself and then observe some pseudospontaneous reaction of the child. Children do not dislike authority. On the contrary, they have a strong inner urge to find and follow authorities whom they can trust. They may not always understand what is best for them, but they learn that, and a large part of a child's inner life consists in this search, disappointment, finding and retrospective correction. If the examining psychiatrist tries to eliminate himself as a personality and as an adult whom the child knows to be older and therefore more experienced, he will get only artificial results.

In children's lives other persons, parents especially, of course, but also older and younger siblings, play an important role. So it is necessary to obtain a picture of these other dramatis personae, not only as they are reflected in the child's mind, but as they really are. Interviewing younger children to hear what they have to say of a child is often very enlightening, sometimes more so than what parents say. Yet I have rarely seen in charts a quotation of what brothers or sisters have to say about a young patient. In our study of crime comic books it was interesting to see siblings because comic books are often a family affair. Younger children clandestinely or openly read the comics of their older brothers and sisters.

The application of psychological tests is apt to be overdone in a mechanical way. Yet they are indispensable to child psychiatry. The Rorschach (ink blot) Test, if expertly and judiciously interpreted, was an important tool in our study. This test consists of a series of ten ink-blot pictures. The subject is asked what he sees in them. It should not be given by itself, but should always be correlated with clinical findings and other tests. We have noticed that in Rorschach tests children may see forms that adults usually do not see. Investigated, they often turn out to be forms related to what they have seen in comic books, especially weird and horror comics, e.g. ghost forms, fantastic hands, etc. These are apt to be misinterpreted by psychologists as meaning complex-determined anxieties and phobias, whereas actually they are just reminiscences from comic-book illustrations. Here according to our findings an important inroad has been made into children's imagination and imagery, and of course also into their actions.

A boy of ten came to the Clinic with the main complaint that "he won't concentrate on his schoolwork." He had previously had a psychiatric examination through a public social agency where he received the customary cliche diagnosis of "deep emotional disorder" and where it was noted that "his mother is seductive and stimulating to him." A Rorschach report stressed his "underlying feelings of hostility and destructiveness" and stated that the boy "is attempting to repress his hostile and destructive tendencies at the expense of spontaneity."

When we studied this boy carefully, we found that he had a difficult father, but the imagery of his destructiveness came mainly from the fact that he was an inveterate reader of "murder comics." His real life difficulty was that he could not read. ("I don't read comic books. I only look at pictures.") Thus the correct interpretation of the Rorschach Test responses needs a knowledge of the whole picture and of the period in which the child lives. Circumstances in the United States today are different from those in the Switzerland of decades ago when Dr. Rorschach devised and worked out his test.

When pronounced hostile and threatening images are found in the Rorschach Test, they usually come from one of three causes. First, a special atmosphere of hostility in the early environment, parents' fights and family discords, or gang-dominated schools or neighborhoods. Secondly, such images occur in a relatively very small number of really psychotic and psychopathic children. Thirdly, they are derived from outside influences such as comic books. In the frequently hackneyed routine of the examination of children, ingrained tendencies or the narrower family situation are usually held responsible. But careful examination of factors shows usually a combination of the first and third groups. An eleven-year-old boy of superior intelligence showed in the Rorschach Test (and in his drawings) strife, hostility and threatening images. He lived with parents who for years had gone from battle to battle, and from court to court. In addition, he was steeped in crime-comics lore:

"My mother doesn't like me to read crime comic books, but I see them anyhow. I like Superman, Penalty. I like the Jumbo books. They have a lot of girls in them. There is a lot of fighting in them. There are men and women fighting. Sometimes they kill the girls, they strangle them, shoot them. Sometimes they poison them. In that magazine Jumbo they often stab them. The girl doesn't do the stabbing very often, she gets stabbed more often. Sometimes the girls stab the men, sometimes shoot them. I read one comic book where they tie people to the trees, tie them in front of stampeding herds. They tie them to the trees, then cut the trees and the sap runs over that person and the bugs are drawn to that sap, then they eat the people. Sometimes they torture girls the same way, by stabbing and beating them. They throw them in rivers and make them swim where alligators come. Sometimes they hit them with weapons on the back. They don't have much on when they hit them with weapons. It excites me a little bit."

Is it not natural that the Rorschach of the boy shows hostility and aggression?

The Rorschach Test is a valid scientific method. I was one of the first psychiatrists to use it in this country and published research on it over twenty years ago. In my experience with children and adults I have found it a revealing auxiliary method. But in recent years it has been too often used uncritically, interpreted with the bias of a purely biological determinism, leaving out all social influence, and given by psychologists with either faulty clinical orientation, or with no clinical orientation at all. Under these circumstances, the Rorschach Test like any other wrongly applied scientific method has given wrong results. It has been used, for example, to bolster the conception of more or less fixed psychological-biological phases of childhood development. And this is a conception which has caused parents whose children do not conform to textbooks a great deal of anxiety. It has led psychologists to socially unrealistic generalizations. A recent text on children's Rorschach responses describes as the "essence" of the average normal seven-year-old child a most abnormal preoccupation with morbidity, mutilation, pain, decay, blood and violence. But that is not the normal essence of the average American child, nor of any other child! You cannot draw true conclusions from any test if you ignore the broad educational, social and cultural influences on the child, his family and his street. These influences, of which comic books are just one (although a very potent one), favor, condone, purvey and glorify violence. The violent meaning of the Rorschach responses is not the norm for the age of seven; unfortunately it seems to be becoming the norm for a civilization of adults.

A popular syndicated column for parents on child behavior (emanating from the Gesell Institute) processes these findings for the popular consumption of parents. It concludes that "the environment -- the radio, movies and funny books" have nothing to do with the child's lust for gore, his love of the horrible. "We believe these preferences to be the normal expressions of the child's likes at his age." Parents who read such a misleading column are of course disarmed by the supposed evidence of such a scientific method as the Rorschach Test. They tend to blame their child or themselves and in so doing they give the industries that peddle stories and programs of violence for children a free hand.

In. the Thematic Apperception Test the child is shown a series of pictures depicting various scenes and is asked to tell stories about them. We found in some children preoccupation with stories of murder, blood-letting and violence in one form or another. But if one does not appreciate that this kind of production occurs much more in avid crime-comics readers than in other children, one is apt completely to misinterpret the test. This test also showed us that comic-book reading leaves definite traces in the child's mind which crop up as spontaneous manifestations in a projective test.

The Mosaic Test we give routinely to the children. The child has a choice of a large number of mosaic pieces of different colors and shapes. He is asked to put them on a tray and make any design he pleases. The test is very useful in a diagnosis or for ruling out of psychotic conditions, even inconspicuous and incipient ones. These tests revealed in a large series of cases that there is nothing intrinsically abnormal about those children who either became very addicted to reading crime comics or are influenced by such reading to delinquent acts. As a matter of fact, the Mosaic Test -- in conjunction, of course, with clinical findings -- indicated or confirmed our finding that those children who suffer from any really serious intrinsic psycho-pathological condition, including those with psychoses, are less influenced by comic-book reading.

Intelligence tests and aptitude tests were of course given routinely in all cases where there was any question of the adequacy of intellectual endowment and resources. For the study of the effects of comic books, complete tests for reading ability were found to be of crucial importance. Many statements about children's reading have been made off and on which are not based on a really full and specific study of reading by the various tests devised for this purpose. The harmful effect of comic-book reading on children's ability to read is a special chapter and a sorry one.

A test which is no longer used as much as it should be, the Association Test, we found particularly useful. The associations to words which are complex indicators may reveal preoccupations and fantasies which cannot be obtained on a conscious level, certainly not by questioning. In cases where children are accused of serious delinquencies, the Association Test functions like a "lie detector" test and has helped us to reconstruct what really happened.

A boy of ten was referred to the Clinic after he had been accused of pushing a younger boy into the water so that the small boy drowned. Another boy had seen him do it, but since he himself denied it the authorities felt it was one boy's word against another and the case was dismissed as "accidental death." The Clinic was asked to give the suspected boy emotional guidance. He had previously thrown stones at windows and on one occasion had hit and almost injured a woman in this way.

He was a voracious comic-book reader. His mother stated that he read whatever comic books he could get hold of. He said, "I like all the crime comic books. I like all kinds, science, everything that is ever in the house. I buy quite a few. I get them from my friends. Some of them give them to me and some of them loan them to me. I like crime comics such as Clue. It is all about when this man, he and three other men, they robbed jewelry and broke windows and they took the rings and ran away and a cop's car comes and shoots them. Sometimes they get killed, the gangsters, the cops kill them. Sometimes they hit each other when one of them does something wrong. Sometimes they use knives."

He was known to be a bully. He had bullied the boy who was drowned to such an extent that the boy's mother had gone to the authorities to ask for protection for her boy. Steeped in crime-comics lore, his attitude was a mixture of bravado and evasiveness. Nothing indicated that he had any feelings of guilt. The Association Test showed a definite blocking to key words such as drowning, water, little boy and pushing. After careful study of the whole case we came to the conclusion that the little boy would not have drowned if our boy had not pushed him in, and that our patient would not have been pushed to the murder if his mind had not been imbued with readiness for violence and murder by his continuous comic-book reading.

Another useful method for closer examination of young children is the Duess Test, which has been worked out in Switzerland and used in France. It is indispensable for the correct understanding of some children. With its help one can sometimes unearth subtle psychological factors not brought out by other methods.

The test consists in ten very brief fablelike stories. They are incomplete and after they are told to the child he is asked what the end of the story would be. In this way the child can complete the story in any way he likes. This test should be used in an elastic way. It should not be applied rigidly and should not be scored like a test. One can modify the original stories and can even add new ones to adapt them to the original case. I give the test in a way that is a mixture between telling a story, playing a game and asking a question. The Duess Test is often an interesting starting-point for further talks with a child.

The Duess Test can be given only to young children, the upper age limit being, in my experience, about eleven. In suitable cases the child projects himself into the story and identifies his own situation with that in the fable. In this way typical emotional complexes may be elicited, but, as in other tests, one should be careful not to view the child as if he were an adult neurotic or read too much abnormality into him.

Two contrasting examples will illustrate the method. A boy of ten was treated at the Clinic for a behavior disorder. He gave inconspicuous answers to the first nine fables. The tenth fable goes like this:

A child wakes up tired in the morning, and says: "Oh, what a bad dream I had!" What did he dream?


This boy replied, "He dreamed about something he didn't like. It might have been something like a murder. He's gonna get murdered and he woke up."

Study of this boy did not reveal any special hostilities or resentments. During one talk with him he told me that he liked Classics comics. "What are they?" 1 asked. "The Classics," he explained to me, "are the kind that tell a story, like under the water. -- I can't remember them." When 1 told him I was very much interested in all kinds of comic books he confided in me that what he really liked and read a lot was crime comics. "I got a whole pile of Crime Does Not Pay!" Would it not be surprising if such a child did not have murder on his mind?

The other case is a girl of nine, referred to the Clinic because she has a severe reading problem and was described as "very nervous." She also was a great comic-book reader. These are her responses to three fables:

FABLE I

A father bird and a mother bird and their little baby bird are asleep in their nest on the branch of a tree. But there comes a big storm. It breaks the branch of the tree and the nest falls to the ground. The father bird flies quickly to one tree, the mother bird to another tree. What will the baby bird do? He knows how to fly a little.

HER ANSWER

He will die because he can't fly so well.

FABLE III

A mother sheep and her little lamb are in a field. Every evening the mother sheep gives the little lamb good warm milk, which the little lamb likes very much. But it can already eat grass. One day the mother sheep has a new little lamb which is hungry for the mother to give him milk. But the mother sheep has not enough milk for both little lambs, so she says to the first lamb: '"I haven't got enough milk for both of you, go and eat some fresh grass."

What will the lamb do?

HER ANSWER

Eat the grass. Get mad because he doesn't want the other little lamb to drink the milk.

FABLE IV

Somebody in the family has taken the train and has gone very far away and will never return home.

Who is it? Who can go away in the family?

HER ANSWER

The mother. She can go out in the country. Maybe she doesn't come back because she is mad at the father. Maybe she liked it there better. Or they could get hurt by a car. They could be dead. The mother could be dead.


The test results show indications of intrinsic psychological factors. The extrinsic situational influence of comic-book reading played only a minor role. Further analysis of this child showed that she had ticlike movements at times and suffered from compulsions. For example, she had to touch the ground with her hand. She had death wishes and profound feelings of hostility. Comic books did not intrude in her emotional life because she was too preoccupied with herself and had already built up such abnormal defenses as compulsions. All this started five years previously at the birth of her baby sister, of whom she was intensely jealous.

Children are apt to express themselves more easily and naturally when other children are around. Playroom observation is an indispensable adjunct of scientific psychiatric studies of children. It is almost the opposite of the questionnaire method. There are no questions, but only answers. There are no inquisitive adults, but only fellow children. One or two adults observe inconspicuously -- but not pretending that they are not there. They participate only as catalysts. A group of children for the playroom does not have to be of the same age, and the sexes should be mixed. We have found that the most suitable age is from about five to ten, but children up to twelve can also be included.

Playroom techniques have been criticized because they are at once a diagnostic and a therapeutic tool. But in my experience this is actually a great advantage. Play technique is frequently successful in both areas. And it is theoretically a sound principle to do psychological exploring studies on a child in the process of treatment, education and re-education. Pedagogy, psychotherapy of children and child psychology should become recognized more and more as closely related and inseparable disciplines.

With a grant from the Child Neurology Research Foundation to work out methods for the observation and treatment of children, I organized a playroom in the middle thirties, while I was director of the Mental Hygiene Clinic at Bellevue Hospital. The case material and our methods in general were the same as those on which these studies are based. One of the main differences in the outer circumstances of the children is that until the end of the thirties there were no crime comic books to speak of, whereas in the forties they had, with respect to the time they take up, become one of the most important influences on children's lives.

In our play observations and therapy, children are engaged in spontaneous play activity of a type that permits them to express themselves as fully as possible. Any games with set rules or reading of books are considered an obstacle. The children construct buildings with mechanical building sets of wood and metal, draw, paint, make mosaics with colored stones, and work with clay.

Watching children in this setting, one learns how false is the idea that if left to themselves, with opportunity for constructive play, they will pay no attention to that and will instead seek outlets for "aggression."

In the early forties one of the activities children sometimes wanted to keep up instead of engaging in spontaneous activity was reading comic books. Protocols of the play group would contain entries like this: "Entered playroom with his own comic book and kept looking at it," or "Greeted the others, friendly, then took a comic book and sat down to read it." This was in the early period of the rise of the crime comic book. In this atmosphere of the playroom it is easy to ask a child why and what he reads.

Comparison of our continuing observations led to definite conclusions. Of course young children are apt to be "wild," and I saw plenty of them in the thirties. But it was a natural wildness. Many children in the period some ten years later showed a kind of artificial wildness, with a dash of adult brutality and violence far from childlike. From comic books they derive ideas of activity and excitement not in the form of concentrated imaginative play, but in the form of crude and combative action. Of course this kind of thing is not found by those who work with questionnaire methods or with preconceived conclusions.

A boy of seven suffered from asthma and was "inattentive" in school. He improved with play therapy. It was noted that instead of playing he liked to pore over comic books a lot of the time. We weaned him away from them by giving him material to draw and paint with. But the comic-book spirit was very evident in his art productions. He drew Donald Duck with a gun and his drawings always showed "the robber shooting the cop." (That the opposite could also occur never seemed apparent from any of his numerous drawings.)

A number of children whom I had observed at an early age in the playroom I followed up later as adolescents. That provided a good background for evaluating the later impact of comic books and other factors. After I had convinced myself that comic books like this are a bad influence, I had to face the question, Why not advise parents to forbid children to read crime comics in the very beginning, to forestall adverse influences? But that is not so simple. Crime comic books are not an individual problem, they are a social problem. While it is not true that every child is a crime comics reader, crime comic books are available nearly everywhere children go. To forbid what is constantly and temptingly available is bad pedagogic practice. Moreover, children come constantly in contact with other children and get the effects from them, either with or without comic books. As far as abstaining from reading them is concerned, that is not easy for any child in this comic-book-selling and promoting world. It is unfair to put that task on their shoulders. They need the help of adults, not only in one family at a time but on a much larger scale.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Sat Nov 30, 2013 12:22 am

PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 3 CONT'D.)

To advise a child not to read a comic book works only if you can explain to him your reasons. For example, a ten-year-old girl from a cultivated and literate home asked me why I thought it was harmful to read Wonder Woman (a crime comic which we have found to be one of the most harmful). She saw in her home many good books and I took that as a starting point, explaining to her what good stories and novels are. "Supposing," I told her, "you get used to eating sandwiches made with very strong seasonings, with onions and peppers and highly spiced mustard. You will lose your taste for simple bread and butter and for finer food. The same is true of reading strong comic books. If later on you want to read a good novel it may describe how a young boy and girl sit together and watch the rain falling. They talk about themselves and the pages of the book describe what their innermost little thoughts are. This is what is called literature. But you will never be able to appreciate that if in comic-book fashion you expect that at any minute someone will appear and pitch both of them out of the window." In this case the girl understood, and the advice worked.

Play observation and therapy are sometimes misunderstood by those inexperienced in the method and by the public. Violently destructive play is interpreted as a natural phase of child development and the erroneous idea is propagated that it will be advantageous to the child to let him indulge in violence as much as he likes. For example, a recent popularized medical column is headed "Play Therapy Lets Child Vent His Anger On Toys." And then it goes on to describe, as if it were a common occurrence, how a little boy who hated his mother and sister strangled two dolls and tried to dismember them. The same boy stuck pins into another doll supposed to represent the doctor. The physician who writes the column takes for granted that the emotion which children express in the playroom should be hostility. He says, "The therapist accepts fighting and interrupts only when it is obvious that someone is going to be hurt." He takes it for granted that chairs will be broken! But this is all wrong. Most children do not engage in such violence, and certainly not from ingrained tendencies, and if they do, a good therapist would certainly analyze the causes for such violence early and help the child to understand and overcome it.

As another procedure of investigation, children were allowed to play with a marionette stage. They made up their own plays, usually with one child doing the outline and filling it in with suggestions from one or two other children. The plot outline was usually very simple, with the play consisting largely in improvisations. The marionettes represented such figures as permitted the child to symbolize a father-figure, a mother-figure, siblings and other dramatis personae in his life. Marionette shows sometimes reveal very well the psychological factors in the family constellation.

We used this method for children from five to twelve. Before joining this group children were not asked about comic books. It was interesting to see how the concrete inspiration for a plot, such as it was, came usually from a real event or from a movie, radio or comic book. Typical crime-comic-book methods appeared in the plays: knife-throwing, throwing somebody out of the window, stomping on people, etc. I later classified the productions (which were taken down by a stenographer) in two groups, constructive plays and destructive plays. The constructive plays were about parties, family reunions, lovers, dancing, painters in the house, etc. One production was entitled "A Day in Dr. Wertham's Office." Destructive plays were about crime, robbers, spies: "The Robbery in Your Neighborhood Store"; "A Night in Chinatown." Comic-book influences played a role only in the destructive plays. I have seen no constructive play inspired by a comic book. The language in the destructive plays sometimes came directly from comics. In the end the bad man went free or got killed. (He was never caught by the authorities and punished.)

When the performance of the play was over, the child audience of about eight or ten was asked to discuss it and ask questions of the author. This audience reaction had a great deal of spontaneity and was often very revealing with respect to both the child who asked and the child who answered. For example, one child in the audience asked, "Why didn't you make the robber kick the cop?" Or a child author answered a question about where he got the idea for his play, "I got part of it out of a comic book -- the part where they throw the Chinaman into the river. The rest I made up for myself."

The children drew their own sets. These sketches were a supplementary source for psychological interpretations. For instance, in a constructive play an eight-year-old boy drew a "playground," a "house" and "on the street." Children who produced destructive plays often made correspondingly aggressive sketches.

I regard it as a major finding that no good marionette-show plots ever came from comic books, although the children read so many of them. The "inspiration" from comic books was never artistic, literary or even a good story. It was a precipitate of fragmentary scenes, violent, destructive and smart-alecky cynical. This was in marked contrast to the inspiration children derived from movies, of which they had seen a much smaller number. It might be objected that a young child is not capable of absorbing and retaining a really good and artistic story from a movie or a real book. Even very young children get something out of a good story and can make something of it. During one of the audience reaction periods after a marionette show, an eight-year-old boy gave his account of the movie The Grapes of Wrath:

"I saw The Grapes of Wrath. It was very good. It was about a man who got out of prison. He was in Sing Sing, I think. He walked to a place where he heard music. A man came along in a car. He asked for a ride. The man said, 'Don't you see that sign?' Then he said, 'Hop on till we get around the bend.'

"They were walking to the barnyard. A big storm was coming. All the people were gone from the house because the cats came -- big tractors. The people had to go to Uncle George. They had to get off the land, and travel, and travel, and travel. The oldest man died. The woman died. They were riding and riding. You see them in the dark without lights, and then it shows the end.

"Only in the end they were happy. They weren't happy at first because they had to get off the land."

Like a good child's drawing, such an account gives essentials in very simplified form. It is children with beautiful minds like this, who can summarize The Grapes of Wrath by telling how the people in it "travel and travel and travel," whom we corrupt by throwing them to the 100-million-dollar enterprise of the comic-book industry.

With adolescents, group methods are also useful, as play therapy is for younger children. With the younger children in a group we give more attention to what they do; with older children we get more from what they say.

At the beginning of World War II, I started a special form of group therapy for delinquent and predelinquent children in the Mental Hygiene Clinic of the Queens General Hospital. This was intended primarily for treatment, but it turned out unexpectedly to be one of the most revealing channels of information about the influence of comic books. When this group started I had no intention of taking up that problem, but the subject turned up spontaneously again and again.

The usual age range of members of this group was from thirteen to sixteen. The majority were boys, but there were always some girls. As therapy, the club was more successful than any other method of child guidance, especially of delinquents. This was attested by probation officers and juvenile law enforcement authorities. Some 90 per cent of all those who attended the sessions for prolonged periods (that is, at least one year) are no longer problems to their families, the authorities or themselves. Only children who had got into some kind of trouble were eligible, and the minimum trouble was playing hookey. In many cases much more serious offenses were involved. Most of the children came from one-family-house, middle-class sections of the population.

The name Hookey Club started in this way. I was confronted with several children one day who were truants. While interviewing them as a group, they began questioning one another. This went so well that I asked them to return in a group. Little by little, whenever children with truancy problems came, my assistants would feed them into the group-therapy class. Once, before one of the weekly meetings, I said to a social worker, "I see the Hookey Club is coming in today." She laughed and repeated the remark, and the name stuck. The Hookey Club developed into a regular institution. The sessions were strictly secret, with only myself and usually a stenographer present. All details remained confidential. At each session the case of one boy or girl or some general topic on someone's mind was discussed. One child functioned as chairman to maintain order. Every boy or girl at the session could question the child whose case was taken up. And everyone could express his opinion about the case. Among the children were always some experts in various forms of delinquency who questioned the child who was up for discussion. Whatever a child might have learned from comic books for the commission of a delinquent act, the group never accepted that as an excuse. Nor did any child ever spontaneously bring it up as an excuse.

Children are more isolated than we think, and have few in whom they can confide without fear of misunderstanding or recrimination. Adults rarely realize how serious children are about their conflicts. They want to be straightened out. They shrink from a judge; but in the Hookey Club, where they were even more severely questioned by their peers, they could speak out fully and openly about anything whatsoever. When children question one another, one can readily see how the troubles of children reflect the troubles and conflicts of society. My experiences with the Hookey Club have confirmed me in my opinion that valuable personality assets slumber in delinquent children. By regarding these children as inferior or emotionally sick or psychopathic, we miss the constellation of social and individual forces that leads to delinquency and deprives these children of really scientific help. To characterize them merely by negative qualities is both unjust and scientifically inaccurate.

Forms of delinquency that adults know little about and children frequently encounter, like juvenile extortion rackets, were discussed. "Why did you steal the five dollars?" the thirteen-year-old chairman of one session asked. "I'll explain it to you," answered the fourteen-year-old whose case was being probed. "The older kids in school were getting up a mob and if I did not pay them some money they'd get after me and beat me up." To an adult this may sound like an untrue excuse, but there were always some juvenile experts in the Hookey Club who recognized a social reality when they saw it.

Often boys who practiced the extortion racket themselves were questioned by the group:

Q.: Where did it happen?

A.: In the schoolyard.

Q.: How did you know he had money?

A.: I asked him how much money has he got, he said a dollar.

Q.: How old was the boy?

A.: About thirteen.

Q.: How did you know he couldn't beat you?

A.: I took money from him before, two weeks before that. I got a wallet and fifteen cents before that.

Q.: Did you do anything worse than the other things?

A.: Yes. I stabbed a boy.

Q.: When was that?

A.: That was last year. The boy was about twelve years old. I stabbed him with a knife, a pocket knife. I stabbed him in the back. They put me in the shelter for two weeks.


In such cases I often found that the whole comic-book ideology and methodology were apparent in both those who answered and those who questioned. The boys evaluated this influence in a matter-of-fact way. A boy replied to questions about a burglary he committed:

"I read comic books where they broke into a place. I got the idea to break into the house. I wanted the money. I couldn't go through the front door because I didn't have the key. I didn't think of the comic book."

Questioner: "You don't have to think of it, it is in the back of your mind, in your subconscious mind."

A boy who had been arrested because he kicked another boy was questioned:

Q.: What did you do?

A. : We were pitching pennies in school. This kid was cheating. One guy grabbed me and pushed me against a water faucet. He bent down to get the pennies. I took my foot and kicked him in the head. He had two or three stitches in the head.

Q.: It wouldn't have been so bad if you had punched him in the head, but kicking is not right. When you see a comic book, the point is with most fellows, they see that a certain fellow in there does that, they want to be like him and think they are tough and can do the same. In the comic book they might get away with it, in this case you don't.

ANOTHER BOY: The guy who thinks he is a tough guy, he isn't really tough.


The effect of comic-book reading was scrutinized by the club members, because there were always some who had reading difficulties. The members were more critical than some of the pseudo-educators who proclaim that comic books are good for reading. At a session where classics comic books were mentioned, a fourteen-year-old boy said in reply to questions:

"I don't read the comic books. I just look at the pictures. I can read, but I just don't take the time out. Sometimes, when it is a good story, I read it. You would be surprised how much you can learn just by looking at the pictures. If you have a good mind, you can figure things out for yourself. I like the horror science-fiction ones. I just look at the pictures."

In the Hookey Club the group was both judge and jury. I functioned merely as advisor. The children could recommend that a boy be allowed to leave school and be given his working papers, or that he should stay in school. They could suggest that a boy should not be taken off parole or that he should be. When I had to make a report about a child, the Hookey Club members discussed whether the child should be referred to the Children's Court or should receive supervision by the Juvenile Aid Bureau or should just be left under Hookey Club jurisdiction. Sometimes they suggested that no report be made until they had seen the child in question longer.

Going over the protocols of the Hookey Club it is hard to see how adults can be so naive about the role comic books play in the lives of children. The accounts of the sessions bristled with revealing bits about comic books, a topic that came up again and again in very different connections: a boy bought his switchblade knife through an advertisement from a comic book; a girl bought some phony medicine from a comic book to reduce her weight, which she was self-conscious about; different methods of stealing, burglarizing and hurting people were learned from comic books; comic books were cited to justify cunning, distrust and race ridicule; and so on. The excuses of the industry's experts that comic books show methods to hurt, wound and kill people in order to teach children self-defense did not go with the experts of the Hookey Club. They knew better. Nor did they believe that comic books taught not to commit delinquencies. They knew that what they demonstrate is that one should not make mistakes in committing them. A girl of fourteen who had been stealing had a comic book with her at one session:

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD-CHAIRMAN: Which comic books do you read mostly?

A.: Girls read mostly Crimes by Women.

Q:: Which crimes do women commit?

A.: Murder. They marry a man for his life insurance and then kill him, then marry another man and then just go on like that until they finally get caught. Or they will be a dancer and meet the wrong kind of a guy and get involved in a bank robbery.

Q.: What's the fun for you in reading that?

A.: It shows you other people's stupid mistakes.


Here are some samples from Hookey Club proceedings:

A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD DELINQUENT GIRL: In some of the crime comic books kids pick up ideas. They give them ideas of robbery and sex....

Q.: Sex?

A.: Yes, plenty of sex. They show you unexposed [sic] women, men beating up girls and breaking their arms. The fellows see that and they want to try it. They try to wrestle with them and get ideas. I know of fellows who do imitate comic books. When I was young I used to read comic books and I watched the fellows and how they imitated what they did in the books. They tried it with the girls around my way. They tied them up. The boys were around ten or twelve, the girls were the same age. They used to always read the comic books. I asked them what made them do that. They said they saw it in the comic books. They read Crime, Murder Inc., Crime Does Not Pay, most of those crime books.


A boy who burglarized stores explained, "I read the comic books to learn how you can get money. I read about thirty a week. I read Crime Does Not Pay, Crime and Punishment, Penalty, Wanted. That is all I can think of. There was this one case. It was in back of a factory with pretty rich receipts, money. It showed how you get in through the back door. I didn't copy that. I thought the side door was the best way. I just switched to the skylight. I carried it out practically the same way as the comic book did it, only I had to open two drawers to do it. I didn't do every crime book, some of them were difficult. Some of them I just imitated. I had to think the rest out myself. I know other boys who learned how to do such jobs from comic books."

From the discussion of the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who had been caught shoplifting:

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD BOY: I saw a comic book where they do shoplifting. This girl was shoplifting and she was caught. They took her down to the Police Department. It was a love story. When she got married she still shoplifted and she broke down and told her husband. I didn't like it. It was the only thing I had to read. It might give a girl ideas to shoplift.

FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY: They get the idea, if she gets away with it, why can't I get away with it. I saw a book where a man has a hanger in his coat with hooks on. He opens his coat and shoves things in and it disappears. It was a crime comic book. ... The kids see that these men get away with it. They say, let's try it. They learn the method of putting it in a jacket. They teach you how to do it in the comic book. They didn't notice it until somebody jumped on this man and the things fell out. Otherwise they would not have caught him.


From a discussion on fighting in school:

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY: I learned from crime comic books when you want to hit a man don't get face to face -- hit him from the back.

FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD (contradicting): In comic books they hit them in the eye!


From an all-round discussion on fairy tales:

Superman is a fairy story.

No, it is not a fairy story. It is a comic book. The comic books, they are mostly murder or something funny, but the fairy tales, they are just stories.

The comics like Superman are not true, they don't happen, but they might happen or could happen. The fairy tales, they just can't happen.

In the fairy tales they don't get killed.


At one Hookey Club session I had another psychiatrist present as a guest. The question of comic books and my criticism of them came up:

FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD (addressing Dr. W.): I think it is stupid. You are the only psychiatrist who is really interested. Maybe there are five others ... out of five thousand -- how can you get any headway? You spend close to maybe a thousand dollars and it is stupid. You can't stand a chance against these comic-book publishers.

FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD: That is right, because they got the police to put in a good word for the comic books. Like before, they used to have policemen and policewomen say it is a good influence for the children. They had a police lady and a police chief in every edition of Crime Does Not Pay. That is one of the reasons why you have no chance.

THE FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD: I noticed in Crime Does Not Pay they give two dollars a letter for what's on your mind. People write beautiful letters saying this comic book is good for children -- anything to earn two dollars.

ANOTHER FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD: Gals don't approve of guys going to poolrooms in Brooklyn. They pay for protection. They take a switchblade and if a guy don't pay them a dollar, they will rip up the table.... I have been in with them.... You could learn that from a comic book, too. ... I read some of that in Crime Does Not Pay.

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD: The guys, the big racketeers and stuff, they pay the guys maybe to put something in crime comic books that is good. The other boys think it is a good idea. So they start doing it and get into the Youth House, and when they get back they work for the racketeers. They make a lot of money and everything and stuff. They want the young boys to read the crime comic books to get ideas. The boys are about seventeen when the racketeers use them for dope and stuff, to peddle it, and to run the numbers.... I think crime comic books are there to make the kids into bad boys, so that they can make some money. I figure maybe these gangsters they say: a couple of years from now, when these guys grow up, I'll give them a number racket and I can be the big guy then. Sometimes they need gunmen to eliminate the other big guys. The comic books show about that, too, about racing and stuff.

GUEST PSYCHIATRIST: What was that you said about Youth House?

THE SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD: The racketeers want to send you to Youth House, and Warwick, too, so that you get really bad.... They want you to go there so that people will be scared of you.... If you have a record, everybody will be scared of you. You know how people are in the neighborhood, people say so-and-so was in Youth House and in Warwick.... If you walk in with a gun, they are scared of you.

THE FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD: (addressing the psychiatric guest): This is no insult to you. If you got a thousand dollar check for these funny books, would you talk against them? They give some people side money, so they write, "Approved by Dr. So-and-So: Good Reading Matter for Children."


My psychiatric guest felt that the Hookey Club was a little rough.

An indispensable method in psychological studies of children is to let them draw. There is an extraordinary discrepancy between all the details, especially sexual details, found by psychologists in children's drawings, and their having overlooked the much grosser, endlessly repeated sexual symbolizations in countless comic-book illustrations. Had they analyzed comic books as searchingly as they analyzed children's drawings, the results would have shown an utterly abnormal and unhealthy literature.

Sometimes I have asked children to copy anything they like out of their comic books. Then I have shown these productions to psychologists (without telling that they were copies from comic-book illustrations) and asked for interpretations -- routine interpretations such as they make of other children's drawings. Here is a psychologist's interpretation of a drawing made by a boy of a typical comic-book illustration of a pirate:

This drawing is bristling with phallic symbols -- the sword, the outstretched arm, the big gun stuck under the belt, the conspicuous belt buckle and the shirt opened down to the belt; the way the legs are posed and the boots are drawn has some phallic quality, too. The actual genitals are extremely accentuated. The figure is that of a very glamorous man. He looks seductive. The whole body is emphasized more than the head, and there is very little attempt at control.

This child was preoccupied with sexual ideas. He is very aggressive sexually -- not someone who would ask nicely, but who takes (rapes).


This drawing was a more-or-less exact copy of a comic-book illustration. All the features mentioned in the psychologist's report were present equally -- if not more so -- in the original comic-book picture (which, incidentally, had right next to it the picture of a sexy girl with half-nude and bulging breasts). This was just a run-of-the-mill comic-book illustration. If the psychologists find in the child who makes such a drawing an excessive and aggressive preoccupation with sex, why should the same description not apply to innumerable comic-book illustrations? And does one get rid of excessive preoccupation with sexual aggression by just looking at a lot of pictures like this?

Spontaneous children's drawings which are not copies are often influenced by the pictures in comics. As a matter of fact, the child psychologist who does not take into account these subconscious reminiscences of imagery is apt to fall into error. If he disregards the comic-book influence, he misinterprets the result. He will ascribe to early subconscious complexes of the child what really are late and extraneously produced impressions.

Comic-book-inspired drawings show how imbued children have become with the special forms of sadism dwelt on in comics, pictures of horror with glorified gangsters, with superman types, with "mad scientists," with sexual confusion.

The finer analysis of children's drawings gives us important leads with respect to a child's development in two significant areas: his relation to authority, disturbance of which may lead to other disorders such as jealousy; and his capacity for male and female identification. It is in these two fundamental areas that comic books do a great deal of harm.

In addition to all the other methods, the most important one is to treat the child and observe what progress he makes. How can one understand a troubled child fully unless one has tried to help him? The establishment of a proper transfer relationship is essential. Pre-adolescents and adolescents, like other people, want to be appreciated. In the first place, one must take their side in their struggle for self-expression, for recognition, for emancipation. But at the same time one must give them guidance on the strength of one's authority of more experience and more knowledge. It is an error to do only the one without the other. By treating a child, or guiding him or educating him, one learns about him. And that alone clarifies the real diagnosis.

These are the main methods used in our investigation. One of our problems was to scrutinize how children read comic books. The purpose was to determine what goes on in the child when he reads them. The first question was, what is actually reflected in the child's mind, what picture of the world does he get from comic books? It is with comic books as with any life experience. Not the experience itself, as an observer records and evaluates it, but the way it is reflected and experienced by the person himself, is what counts and what explains the psychological results.

Just to learn what children retain from comic-book reading is enlightening for anybody who really wants to become acquainted with the question. A boy of seven and a half is studied at the Clinic because he was "bad in school" and daydreams a lot. Previously psychiatrists at a public agency had made the diagnosis of "schizophrenic tendencies." Getting on the subject of comics he says, "Sometimes I read a comic book ten times a day. I look at the pictures a long time. I just imagine as if they are real. They go around stabbing people. They have eight knives, and they rob a liquor store. They stab a woman with a knife. They stab two women with a knife. One man started killing people: five cops, six women and eighteen others. If anybody ever crossed him, he didn't give them no chance. This famous artist painted this picture and it was smuggled. Then it said the picture was tom up but then I found out it wasn't. Everybody got swindled. I like adventure." This boy was successfully treated and even steered to good literature. He has now been followed up by personal interview for six years. We could never discover any "schizophrenic tendencies," that convenient snap diagnosis for troubled children.

Such statements from children, which are or should be the raw material of any comic-book study, can be obtained only if you get the child's confidence and show him that you are interested in him. Often children talk at first about the policemen; but then when they warm up and get more confidence they talk about the ones they really admire and think about -- the crooks. This preference does not come from any moral perversity, but results directly from the fact that the criminal is depicted as more glamorous and dominant.

By and large much younger children read crime comics than is commonly and conveniently assumed. Even children under six look at the pictures. Younger children do not see so many new comic books because the child of six or seven does not have so much money at his disposal as the child of ten or eleven.

Crime comic books are available almost anywhere. Any child who meets other children has access to them. They are in kindergartens, pediatric clinics, pediatric wards in the hospitals. They are in playgrounds and schools, at church functions and, of course, in the homes of the child or his friends. Again and again I have found quantities of comic books in my own clinics, although I certainly did not want them there. Many children, owing to their life circumstances, are less able to resist this ingeniously contrived seduction to read more and more crime comics than are others. The question should not be so much why children get the habit as how are so many of them able to protect their integrity against them. Often there is a typical vicious circle: the comic books lead the child into temptation to commit delinquencies and stimulate him sexually. Then this is followed by fears and worries -- as a result of which he reads even more comics to forget them.

During the first few years of our investigation it was easy to obtain information from children about which crime comics they prefer and how many they read. But since criticism of comics has spread and parents have begun to make some protests against them, children are apt to be on the defensive when asked about them. It has often happened that when I ask a child in the presence of his mother he replies promptly that the comics he prefers are "Donald Duck, animal comics and jokey books." But if I see this child alone on a subsequent occasion he corrects his previous statement, "What I really like are the murder ones!" -- and he will go on to enumerate the usual list. So it is no longer so easy to obtain quickly accurate results.

What children expect and find in comic books is well illustrated by the case of a nine-year-old boy. He was excellently brought up in a cultured and intelligent home. He got twenty-five cents weekly for spending money and he nursed it very carefully. One day he turned up after school and said, "I just spent three cents today." He displayed with satisfaction a tabloid newspaper he had bought. "They had some marvelous pictures of that gangster up in the Bronx that killed the policeman. And they had a suicide!" His father asked, "Why did you buy that?" and was answered by the boy, proud of his discovery, "It's just as good as the comics -- and costs much less!" Without realizing it, however, this small boy was a spendthrift; comic books have many more murders and acts of violence than two for three cents. He also forgot to take into account what more experienced crime-comics readers know, and what was pointed out by a boy on the New York Times Youth Forum: "Comic books tell more than newspapers about the details, and show how the murders were committed."

How and why children stop reading comics, when they do, is as important a study as how they came to read them and how they keep it up. Any child psychiatrist will miss an avenue to the child's superego if he fails to let the child tell him why he gave it up. New influences come into his life, real reading may commence, sadistic fantasies may be outgrown. Many children give up crime-comics reading like a bad sexual habit.

I have frequently asked children who talked about the good and bad things in comic books to tell me what the worst is that they have seen. That is often very enlightening as to the child's psychology. Usually they have an ambivalent attitude about these "worst" things. They abhor them and yet have been fascinated by them. Usually they point out scenes of torture and/or murder. A thirteen-year-old boy told me once that he saw in a comic book a picture of gangsters tying two living men to their car and dragging them to death on their faces over a rough road. He could not remember which comic book it was in, but said it was one of the most popular ones.

At first I did not believe him and thought that this must be his own spinning-out of a cruel fantasy, perhaps stimulated by something similar. What he had told me about was one of the cruel, primitive, bloody rites which did exist in prehistoric times, but disappeared at the dawn of history. In Homer's Iliad, Achilles, after slaying Hector, ties the dead body to his chariot and triumphantly races around the city of Troy. Homer described with repugnance and pity the bloody rite of dragging a dead body behind a war chariot -- repressing the earlier, still bloodier one of dragging a living captive to his death.

Could a popular comic book for children, I asked myself, return to pre-Homeric savagery to stimulate children's fantasy to such barbaric cruelty?

Later the boy remembered that he had swapped this comic book along with other choice ones with another boy, and he brought it to me. Underneath the title a little enclosed inscription reads: "Every word is true!" Then comes the picture of a car that is speeding away. Two men are tied by their feet to the rear bumper and lie face down. One has his hands tied behind his back and the lower part of his face is dragging in the road. The other man's hands are not tied and his arms are stretched out. The text in the balloons indicates that three men in the car are talking:

"A couple more miles oughta do th' trick!"

"It better! These #--"**!! GRAVEL ROADS are tough on tires!"

"But ya gotta admit, there's nothing like 'em for ERASING FACES!"

Next to these balloons is a huge leering face, eyes wide and gloating and mouth showing upper and lower teeth in a big grin:

"SUPERB! Even Big Phil will admire this job -- if he lives long enough to identify the MEAT!"

The boy who brought me the comic book explained to me that of course these men were still alive: "They may have been roughed up a little, but they are being killed by being dragged to death on their stomachs and faces." You can see that very plainly, he pointed out to me, from the carefully drawn fact that they both desperately try to hold up their heads -- the one with outstretched hands still succeeding at it, the other still jerking his head up but now failing to do so enough to keep his face off the gravel road. "Corpses," my young expert explained, "couldn't do that."

Two years later this story was reprinted. This time the story was promoted from the middle of the book to first place, and the dragging-to-death illustration was the frontispiece.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Sat Nov 30, 2013 7:10 am

PART 1 OF 2

4: The Wrong Twist

The Effects of Comic Books on Children

"A man who gives a wrong twist to your mind, meddles with you just as truly as if he hit you in the eye; the mark may be less painful, but its more lasting," -- Santayana


A typical comic-book drawing shows a blonde young girl lying in bed. She says: "Then I was dreaming, of murder and morphine." This is a crime-comic-book dream. Murder, crime and drug traffic are offered to children in a literature which the defenders of comic books call the modern version of the stories of the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen or Mother Goose. But are there heroin addicts in Grimm, marihuana smokers in Andersen or dope peddlers in Mother Goose? And are there advertisements for guns and knives?

A counterpart to the girl who dreams about murder and morphine is the equally blonde girl in another comic book who muses over a cigarette: "I like to remember the past! ... It was so wonderful!"

What was "so wonderful"? This girl was the young wife of a Nazi concentration-camp guard. You see him hit a half-nude prisoner with a truncheon while she says: "Hit him again, Franz! Make him bleed more! Hit him!"

Evidently the industry thinks that some children learn slowly, for the same scene is repeated in a close-up: "Hit him some more, Franz! Hit him! . . . Make him bleed more, Franz! Make him bleed!"

And later she says: "I like to remember the prisoners suffering, the beatings and the blood!"

In one of the pictures of this story there are three balloons with the exclamation "HEIL HITLER!" This comic book appeared at about the time when a group of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys had a "Nazi stormtrooper club" in which every prospective member had to hit a Negro on the head with a brick.

I undertook and continued the study of the effects of crime comics on the minds of children in the face of an extraordinary complacency on the part of adults. Typical of this attitude is the Committee on the Evaluation of Comic Books, which has existed now for several years. It uses methods which are amateurish and superficial and, from the point of view of the mental hygiene of children, its classification is most lenient and unscientific. It divides comic books arbitrarily into four classes: a) no objection, b) some objection, c) objectionable, d) very objectionable. At one time the Committee reported that it found "only" thirty-nine comic books "very objectionable." This committee distinguishes fifteen categories of comic books, failing to realize that for most of them the harmful ingredients are the same, whatever the locale. Of "undesirable effects" the committee in question mentions only three: "bad dreams, fright, and general emotional upset." How they know that one comic book causes that and not another, and why they fail to mention the really serious harmful effects is not explained. No wonder that these evaluations lend themselves to gross misstatements in which those not rated "very objectionable" have been lumped together with other categories as if they were all right. What has made the committee's evaluations even more confusing to the public is the fact that the Children's Bureau of the Federal Security Agency has given its findings as the only statistics in an official statement about comic books.

Children's minds are at least as sensitive and vulnerable as a man's stomach. Supposing you divide eggs into such groups and say that to some you have "some objections," others you find "objectionable" and still others "very objectionable." You can grade good eggs. But what sense is there in grading bad eggs? Isn't a bad egg bad, especially if one child eats hundreds of them? Even with this questionable yardstick, this committee found at one time that almost half of the comic books were not "satisfactory." Imagine that your neighborhood grocer would sell you eggs for your children, almost half of which were bad!

This leniency toward what adults sell to children is in marked contrast to the severity of adults when children commit minor moral infractions. If a comic book is classified as "some objection" it is called satisfactory and "suitable for children." But let a child commit a delinquent or sexual act to which there is "some objection" and the enormous machinery of children's courts, police, social agencies, psychiatrists and child-guidance people goes into action and the child is crushed. I have observed that many times.

The distinction of a greater from a lesser evil is an old one. But the committee inaugurated the practice of distinguishing between a greater, a medium and a lesser evil. The resultant confusion has done a lot of harm.

Some time ago the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene issued a press release. It spoke of "the much-maligned comic book" and said "the universal appeal of the comic book stems from its color, action and drama." Modern psychopathology, however, teaches that it is not the form but the content that is dynamically important. This release reminds one of the old story of the boy called into conference by his father to receive sexual enlightenment. After listening to a tedious discourse about the flowers, the birds and the bees for some time, the little boy interrupts his father impatiently, "And there is no intercourse at all?" So one might ask about crime comic books: And nobody gets shot? Or stabbed or tortured? And no girls are beaten or choked or almost raped?

Anyone wishing to study scientifically the psychological causes of human behavior must always be on guard against the error of assuming that something has causal significance just because it happened in the past. He must think in terms of psychological processes and developments which connect cause and effect. And he can hold a new factor responsible only if he has taken into account all other possible factors, physical, individual, psychological and social. On the other hand, he should not be deterred if the same factor affects different people differently and some people seemingly not at all.

Improper food deserves attention not only because it may cause indigestion, but also because it may cause totally different mild or serious manifestations of malnutrition. The mind is not something that grows by itself; it is nourished. Some nourishment is good, some is bad. Before one knew about vitamins one could not make the diagnosis of avitaminosis. The same reasoning should apply to scientific psychiatry. In order to diagnose the operative cause of any disorder, two requirements are necessary: one must know the nature of the factor that may be a possible cause, and one must think of it when confronted with a case. That is the essence of clinical thinking.

A young mother came to see me about her ten-year-old son. "He has wild imaginations," she complained. "When he plays with the children on the block, all younger than he, he takes a knife and says, 'I'll take your eyes out!' He slashed a girl's doll carriage with the knife. I caught him with a three-year-old boy. He was saying to him, 'Now I must gouge your eyes out!' Then he said to the boy, 'I must hang you!' Then he said, 'I must rope you up!'''

What you read in the usual books of child psychiatry or child guidance, or in Freud's works, is just not adequate to explain such a case. This is a new kind of harm, a new kind of bacillus that the present-day child is exposed to.

This boy was an inveterate reader of comics. This fact came out accidentally when he saw comic books on my desk and asked me, "Doctor, why do you read comic books?"

"I read crime comics," he went on. "In some they tie up the girls. They tie their hands behind their backs because they want to do something to them later.

"Once I saw in a science comic where this beast comes from Mars. It showed a man's hand over his eyes and streams of blood coming down. I play a little rough with the kids sometimes. I don't mean to hurt them. In a game I said I would gouge a child's eyes out. I was playing that I was walking around and I jumped out at him. I scratched his face. Then I caught him and sucked the blood out of his throat. In another game I said, 'I'll scratch your eyes out!'''

In one of our later sessions this boy told me that younger children should not read comic books. "If I had a younger brother," he explained, "I wouldn't want him to read the horror comic books, like Weird Science, because he might get scared. I don't think they should read Captain Marvel. Look at this one with all the pictures of the man without his head! The boy downstairs is six years old. Whenever he sees any monsters he always starts crying. He thinks it's real. It is bad for children because after they read that they keep on thinking about it. When they buy the comic books they start thinking all sorts of things, playing games. I played such games because I got them from the comic books. That's why I think younger children shouldn't have them."

To overlook the comic-book factor often means great unfairness to children -- and of course to their parents, whom it is so easy to blame. Taking money away from younger children by threats or use of force is nowadays a frequent delinquency which often does not come to the attention of the authorities. A girl of eleven hit a six-year-old girl, pushed her and took her money out of her pocket. An official psychiatrist, after a routine examination, made the drastic and, under the circumstances, cruel recommendation that she be sent to a psychiatric hospital first, then be taken from home and placed in an institution. He wrote the usual cliche that she had "deep-seated problems" (which he did not specify) and remarked that she had "very little awareness of the consequences and implications of her action."

But on closer study we found that she had very definite ideas about these "consequences and implications." She and her friends were imbued with the superman ideology: the stronger dominates the smaller and weaker. She told us a comic-book story of a bank robbery which ends in a Superman rescue. She laughed because she knew that the bank robbery was real while the Superman rescue was not. The man-hating comic-book figure, Sheena, was her favorite. And no other vista of life except the ideal of being stronger than the next one was presented to her.

"I read more than ten comic books a day," she said. "There was a girl who stole in a department store and nobody saw her. So she is going out of the store, so this man he grabbed her. When she got to her home she thought nobody was following her. Then they took her to the police station and said if she did it any more they'd have to put her away. That shows if you steal anything you never know who follows you or whoever is watching you. If she was more clever maybe it could have been different."

In other words, this girl was well aware of consequences and implications as demonstrated to children in comic books. The "consequences" are that you may be caught. The "implications" are that you should be clever and not get caught.

I have found the effect of comic books to be first of all anti-educational. They interfere with education in the larger sense. For a child, education is not merely a question of learning, but is a part of mental health. They do not "learn" only in school; they learn also during play, from entertainment and in social life with adults and with other children. To take large chunks of time out of a child's life -- time during which he is not positively, that is, educationally, occupied -- means to interfere with his healthful mental growth.

To make a sharp distinction between entertainment and learning is poor pedagogy, and even worse psychology. A great deal of learning comes in the form of entertainment, and a great deal of entertainment painlessly teaches important things. By no stretch of critical standards can the text in crime comics qualify as literature, or their drawings as art. Considering the enormous amount of time spent by children on crime comic books, their gain is nil. They do not learn how to read a serious book or magazine. They do not gain a true picture of the West from the "Westerns." They do not learn about any normal aspects of sex, love or life. I have known many adults who have treasured throughout their lives some of the books they read as children. I have never come across any adult nor adolescent who had outgrown comic-book reading who would ever dream of keeping any of these "books" for any sentimental or other reason. In other words, children spend a large amount of their time and money on these publications and have nothing positive to show for it. And since almost all good children's reading has some educational value, crime comics by their very nature are not only non-educational; they are anti-educational. They fail to teach anything that might be useful to a child; they do suggest many things that are harmful.

Since murder is the mainstay of crime comics, you might expect -- provided you think education about murder is educational -- that children would learn something positive about that. They do not. Here is a typical statement made by a fourteen-year-old boy: "First degree is when you kill for no reason at all. Second degree is when you kill for a lame excuse -- like when you think somebody talked about you. Third degree -- you have a reason, but it still isn't very good. . . . Manslaughter is when you kill a person with a knife or any weapon except a gun."

Where crime comics pay a hypocritical obeisance to educational demands they show their true colors even more clearly. For example, under the lame pretext of self-defense, they show pictures of "Vulnerable Areas" in the human body with such notations as:

EYES: finger jab or thumb gouge
BRIDGE OF NOSE: edge of hand blow


When I pointed out this anti-educational aspect of crime comics, the industry answered by inserting occasional educational pages of advertising for organizations advocating better schools or some health campaign. Some of the worst crime comics contain notices about the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, or mention in the stories the Damon Runyon Fund or the Red Cross. This, of course, does these organizations no good; but it camouflages the comics. So the characteristics of crime comic books might be summed up as violence in content, ugliness in form and deception in presentation.

The most subtle and pervading effect of crime comics on children can be summarized in a single phrase: moral disarmament. I have studied this in children who do not commit overt acts of delinquency, who do not show any of the more conspicuous symptoms of emotional disorder and who may not have difficulty in school. The more subtle this influence is, the more detrimental it may be. It is an influence on character, on attitude, on the higher functions of social responsibility, on superego formation and on the intuitive feeling for right and wrong. To put it more concretely, it consists chiefly in a blunting of the finer feelings of conscience, of mercy, of sympathy for other people's suffering and of respect for women as women and not merely as sex objects to be bandied around or as luxury prizes to be fought over. Crime comics are such highly flavored fare that they affect children's taste for the finer influences of education, for art, for literature and for the decent and constructive relationships between human beings and especially between the sexes.

A boy of eleven who reads his own crime comics and his sister's love comics has this conception of girls: "In the love comics the girls have dresses and wearing apparel. The girls in the crime stories are always on the gangsters' side. The gangsters pick them up, like. They just roam around with the gangsters. They are always dressed up in new clothes; practically every day they buy new clothes. The dresses have a V-shape in the front. The girls are in the room. They do something bad or something, and then a man slaps them and beats them up."

When children confide in you, they will tell you that younger children should not read comic books. Here are notes of a typical dialogue with a boy of thirteen:

Q.: Why do you say that younger children shouldn't read them?

A.: Because.

Q.: Can't you explain it?

A.: No.

Q.: Tell me your reasons.

A.: It gives them ideas.

Q.: What kind of ideas?

A.: Things they shouldn't do.

Q.: But a very young child couldn't do these things that are in comic books anyhow.

A.: Maybe. But when they read these books they don't think right.

Q.: What do you mean by that?

A.: I mean they don't know what is right.


That is precisely the point. Psychiatrists in court cases often have to answer questions about a person's ability to distinguish right from wrong in an individual act or in general. And yet it is astonishing how little concrete and systematic work has been done on the ethical equilibrium of the person as a whole. We know that every person has in his brain a picture of his body, the so-called "body image." I believe that individuals also have a mental self-knowledge in a form that one may call an "ethical image." It is this that makes possible a stable and yet not rigid ethical equilibrium. Speaking of the mildest disorders of the personality, of adults or children, this "ethical image" which a person has of himself unconsciously is a cornerstone of mental health.

Discussion of ethics is not popular in psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature. It smacks too much of a moralistic attitude and a lack of the objectivity of natural science. It is true that in a society like our own in which ethical norms are undergoing great changes, the psychiatrist or psychoanalyst inevitably introduces a personal, socially conditioned factor in this sphere. But that does not prevent his patient from having ethical problems. Many if not all sexual conflicts, for example, are fundamentally ethical difficulties. Such an acknowledgment may of course open the door to obscurantism and bigotry, but there is no reason why it should not also open the way to a socially oriented science.

Clinical psychiatrists used to pay very little attention to the examination of ethical feelings or ethical judgment. A new departure was the "Fernald Method." This Ethical Discrimination Test consisted of rating ten misdeeds, such as throwing hot water on a cat or taking apples from another man's orchard, in the order of their gravity. The idea was to measure a supposed natural moral attitude independent of general intelligence, judgment and other mental faculties, and also independent of the environment. Both the method and these general assumptions have proved too primitive. But Fernald did achieve an extension of the previously more restricted schemes of personality examination. It was found that the results of his test are not so significant in themselves, but often led the person tested to fuller statements about his ethical and social views which are revealing for the psychiatric estimate of his personality.

This line of inquiry was later considered too old-fashioned and has been much neglected. I have found that in modified form, more adjusted to the individual's special life circumstances, his ethical judgment in comparing two or several acts can be used almost as a projective test.

The greatest impetus to the study of the ethical aspects of behavior came of course from psychoanalysis, especially from Freud's discovery of the influence of unconscious guilt feelings. But conservative psychoanalysis has not progressed much further. It seems to regard the glib distinction between normal feelings of guilt and neurotic feelings of guilt as the solution of a question, when actually it is merely the statement of the question. And it got into real logical complications when it attempted to regard the tendencies to aggression from a purely biological point of view. In reality the whole significance of aggressive attitudes for the organism becomes of less and less significance with social progress. If we carry out experiments on the brains of cats, aggression is a biological problem. If we study the minds of children it is preponderantly a social and ethical problem.

The cultural background of millions of American children comes from the teaching of the home, the teaching of the school (and church), the teaching of the street and from crime comic books. For many children the last is the most exciting. It arouses their interest, their mental participation, their passions and their sympathies, but almost entirely in the wrong direction. The atmosphere of crime comic books is unparalleled in the history of children's literature of any time or any nation. It is a distillation of viciousness. The world of the comic book is the world of the strong, the ruthless, the bluffer, the shrewd deceiver, the torturer and the thief. All the emphasis is on exploits where somebody takes advantage of somebody else, violently, sexually or threateningly. It is no more the world of braves and squaws, but one of punks and molls. Force and violence in any conceivable form are romanticized. Constructive and creative forces in children are channeled by comic books into destructive avenues. Trust, loyalty, confidence, solidarity, sympathy, charity, compassion are ridiculed. Hostility and hate set the pace of almost every story. A natural scientist who had looked over comic books expressed this to me. tersely, "In comic books life is worth nothing; there is no dignity of a human being."

Children seek a figure to emulate and follow. Crime comic books undermine this necessary ingredient of ethical development. They play up the good times had by those who do the wrong thing. Those who at the tail end of stories mete out punishment use the same violence and the same lingo as those whom they punish. Since everybody is selfish and force and violence are depicted as the most successful methods, the child is given a feeling of justification. They not only suggest the satisfaction of primitive impulses but supply the rationalization. In this soil children indulge in the stock fantasies supplied by the industry: murder, torture, burglary, threats, arson and rape. Into that area of the child's mind where right and wrong is evaluated, children incorporate such false standards that an ethical confusion results for which they are not to blame. They become emotionally handicapped and culturally underprivileged. And this affects their social balance.

Whatever may give a child some ethical orientation is dragged down to the crime-violence level. Inculcation of a distorted morality by endless repetition is not such an intangible factor if one studies its source in comic books and its effect in the lives of children. It is of course a question not of pious slogans like "Crime never pays" but of the emotional accents within the stories themselves.

In one comic an old man is killed during the hold-up of his jewelry store. He had not obeyed the order to back up against the wall quickly enough. After other crimes and murders the captured criminal says: "It was not right to kill him.... That man couldn't have obeyed me! ... That old man was STONE DEAF!"

The moral principle is clear. If you hold up a man and he does not obey quickly enough because he is deaf, you are not supposed to shoot him. But if he is not deaf, shooting him is all right.

In one comic story called "Mother Knows Best," the mother advises her children: "I brought you kids up right -- rub out those coppers like I taught you!"

One son answers: "Don't worry, ma! We'll give those flatfeet a bellyful of lead!"

Several boys have shown me this story. They themselves condemned and at the same time were fascinated by this anti-maternal story.

In the same comic book, a man attacks a high school girl ("All I want is a little kiss! C'mon!") and chokes her to death.

What in a few words is the essential ethical teaching of crime comics for children? I find it well and accurately summarized in this brief quotation:

It is not a question of right, but of winning. Close your heart against compassion. Brutality does it. The stronger is in the right. Greatest hardness. Follow your opponent till he is crushed.


These words were the instructions given on August 22, 1939, by a superman in his home in Berchtesgaden to his generals, to serve as guiding lines for the treatment of the population in the impending war on Poland.

In modification of the Fernald method of letting children judge the severity of offenses, I have often asked them about punishment. Why do people get punished, what is just punishment, how does it come about that people get punished? Frequently the reply is that it serves the criminal right, whatever the punishment may be: "He got caught, didn't he?" My clinical findings leave no room for doubt that children learn from crime comics that the real guilt is getting caught. They have little faith in any ordinary public processes of having an offense evaluated and justly and humanely dealt with. The law enforcers are criminals in reverse. They use the same methods. If they are also stronger and there are more of them, they win; if not, they lose. In many subtle and not so subtle forms the lynch spirit is taught as a moral lesson. Many children have told me that lynching is all right and have shown me examples from their comic books. In one such story the townspeople get together, hunt the criminal and he is finally shot and killed. The lesson is in the last sentence: "The story of Lee Gillon proves that fearless people banded together will always see that justice triumphs."

In the same book, a man slaps a girl's face and says: "Give me trouble and you'll have a board full of spikes smashed into your kisser!"

The form in which this distrust for democratic law and the morality of taking punishment -- or rather vengeance -- into one's own hands has done most harm to the ethical development of young people is the superman conceit. Analyzing children's fantasies and daydreams, I have often found in them a wish for overwhelming physical strength, domination, power, ruthlessness, emancipation from the morals of the community. It may show in various half-repressed ways or openly as admiration for these traits. Spontaneously children connect this with crime comic books of the Superman, Batman, Superboy, Wonder Woman type. In the individual case this superman ideology is psychologically most unhygienic. The would-be supermen compensate for some kind of inferiority, real or imagined, by the fantasy of the superior being who is a law unto himself. I have had cases where children would have had a good chance to overcome feelings of inferiority in constructive ways at their disposal if they had not been sidetracked by the fancied shortcuts of superman prowess.

The superman conceit gives boys and girls the feeling that ruthless go-getting based on physical strength or the power of weapons or machines is the desirable way to behave. When I have had to examine young adults at the Clinic off and on for driving recklessly, I was interested to find the same attitude. Particularly dangerous is the superman-speed-fancy in girls who in turn influence boys. One young girl told me that she would only go out with boys who would not let other cars pass them on the road. That was the idea of the proper male behavior that she had got from comics.

In these children there is an exact parallel to the blunting of sensibilities in the direction of cruelty that has characterized a whole generation of central European youth fed on the Nietzsche-Nazi myth of the exceptional man who is beyond good and evil. It is an ethical confusion. If such persons are analyzed psychiatrically, it is found that the trouble lies not so much with the impulse to do the wrong thing as with the false rationalization which permits the impulse to grow and to express itself in deeds. The very children for whose unruly behavior I would want to prescribe psychotherapy in an anti-superman direction, have been nourished (or rather poisoned) by the endless repetition of Superman stories. How can they respect the hard-working mother, father or teacher who is so pedestrian, trying to teach common rules of conduct, wanting you to keep your feet on the ground and unable even figuratively speaking to fly through the air? Psychologically Superman undermines the authority and the dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children.

When I described how children suffer in their ethical development through the reading of comic books, the industry countered by pointing with pride to the "moral" lesson imprinted on many crime comics, that "crime does not pay." In the first place, this is not true. In comic books crime usually does pay, and pay very well, until the last picture or two. The crimes are glamorous; the end is dull. Frequently the ratio of "crime" to "does not pay" is as high as fifty to one. More important, the slogan "Crime does not pay" is not moral, but highly immoral. It is strange how responsible adults have accepted this slogan and refer to it on platforms, over the radio and in articles as admirable. Great harm has been done by teaching children that they should not play hookey, that they should not steal or lie, that they should not hit girls (as comic-book figures so often do) -- because it "doesn't pay"! I have seen many children who were confused by this vicious crime-comic-book morality. The reason why one does not hit girls, even if comics have made it so attractive, is that it is cowardly and that it hurts them; the reason why one does not steal or break into stores is that that is not how one lives in a civilized community; that whether crime pays or does not pay, it is not what a decent person wants to do. That should be the lesson for children.

When I pointed out the hypocrisy of the "Crime does not pay" slogan and its bad effect on children, the industry accused me of "unfairness" in attacking their highest endeavors and introduced some more slogan morality. In one comic book are two pages by a police captain attacking me: "Don't let reformers kid you!" He is "shocked by what I read today about the people who condemn crime comics. These people are the menace." He goes on: "Children don't like to be kicked around by reformers who want to decide what's good for them to read." And he extols "the strong moral force" that comics exert on children.

Frequently I have been in the position of having to defend children who have received harsh judgments in courts and on psychiatric wards and equally harsh treatment in places of detention and reformatories. There is no better illustration of the state of affairs where we first victimize children and then put all the responsibility on them, the victims, than this same comic book. It has a story where two policemen are killed -- and a real police captain pointing out what a "strong moral force" such a book is!

In the midst of bloody scenes in another book are two full-page announcements, one advocating "better schools" and the other with an oversized headline in capitals: "WITH GOD ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE!" advocating "a new way of prayer." If one tried to set out deliberately to create ethical confusion in children, better ways could hardly be devised. No wonder that a minister heard his young son exclaim: "Hands up, in the name of the Lord!"

The detrimental effect on character is if anything worse on girls than on boys. Their ego-ideal formation is interfered with by the fascination of the sadistic female comic-book heroines. Comic books do not permit these children even in their imagination to view a non-violent life. A girl of eleven examined because of stealing showed in her Thematic Apperception Test a profusion of stories with murder and hostility. Her drawing of a woman showed a masculine type with violent aggressivity. Of average intelligence, she had a reading retardation undoubtedly caused by constant reading of comics. She had incorporated the comic-book morale into her character.

"I read about ten a day," she stated. "I like the stories when you get in trouble and everything. You learn like it does not pay if you kill a person for nothing that isn't right[!]. They have to go to prison for a certain length of time, then they come out and do it all over again. Then they go up the river again."

Without rationalization and without an ideal image of oneself one cannot learn to exert self-discipline. That is why good reading is such a character-building influence. Comic books work in the opposite direction. A thirteen-year-old girl examined because of "truancy and disobedience" said about her reading, "I used to buy a love comic every day. I like to read Sheena because I like the way she fights. She fights like a man, swings on the vines and kicks people in the face."

Ethical development of children, so intimately bound up with their mental development, has to do not only with relations with an individual but also with integration in groups. The development of the superego, of conscience or, more simply, the sense of decency, takes place not only on the basis of identification with parents but also with successive parent-substitutes who are at the same time representatives and symbols of group demands and group responsibilities. In this sphere, comic books are most pernicious. They expose children's minds to an endless stream of prejudice-producing images. This influence, subtle and pervasive but easily demonstrable by clinical psychological methods, has not only directly affected the individual child, but also constitutes an important factor for the whole nation. It is currently fashionable to speak of "inter-group tensions," "group adjustments" and so on. The old term race hatred (or race prejudice) is more honest and more to the point. What we call "minorities" constitute the majority of mankind. The United States is spending at present millions of dollars to persuade the world on the air and by other propaganda means that race hatred is not an integral part of American life. At the same time, millions of American comic books are exported all over the world which give the impression that the United States is instilling race hatred in young children.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Sat Nov 30, 2013 7:11 am

PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 4 CONT'D.)

If I were to make the briefest summary of what children have told us about how different peoples are represented to them in the lore of crime comics, it would be that there are two kinds of people: on the one hand is the tall, blond, regular-featured man sometimes disguised as a superman (or superman disguised as a man) and the pretty young blonde girl with the super-breast. On the other hand are the inferior people: natives, primitives, savages, "ape men," Negroes, Jews, Indians, Italians, Slavs, Chinese and Japanese, immigrants of every description, people with irregular features, swarthy skins, physical deformities, Oriental features. In some crime comics the first class sometimes wears some kind of superman uniform, while the second class is in mufti. The brunt of this imputed inferiority in whole groups of people is directed against colored people and "foreign born."

When the seeds of prejudice against others first appear in a child, or when he first becomes aware of belonging to a group against which there is prejudice, depends on many diverse factors: family, education, community, social stratum. From my studies, the second apparently appears later. But in general both feelings appear much earlier than is commonly supposed. A four-year-old can imbibe prejudice from comic books, and six- or seven-year-olds are quite articulate about it. Sometimes their feeling of dislike for a group ("They are bad." "They are vicious." "They are criminals." "They are dirty." "You can't trust them.") is derived from crime comic books. In other cases, distorted stereotypes acquired at home, on the street, in school, are given new nourishment and perpetuation by comic-book reading. These conclusions are based entirely on what the children themselves say.

The pictures of these "inferior" types as criminals, gangsters, rapers, suitable victims for slaughter by either the lawless or the law, have made an indelible impression on children's minds. There can be no doubt about the correctness of this conclusion. For example, when a child is shown a comic book that he has not read and is asked to pick out the bad man, he will unhesitatingly pick out types according to the stereotyped conceptions of race prejudice, and tell you the reason for his choice. "Is he an American?" "No!"

Attacks by older children on younger ones, inspired or fortified by the race prejudice shown in comic books, are getting more frequent. I have seen such cases (which do not always come to the attention of the authorities) with victims belonging to various minorities. For the victims, this is frequently a serious traumatic emotional episode. Some juvenile gangs make it a practice to beat dark-skinned children, and they do it with comic-book brutality. So comic books provide both the methods and the vilification of the victims.

Comic books read with glee by many children, including very young ones, teach the props of anti-Semitism. There is the book with the story of the "itch-ray projector," with illustrations which might be taken directly from Nazi magazines like Streicher's Stuermer. One particularly popular comic book features the story of "Mother Mandelbaum, A True Story." Depicted as an unmistakable and repellent stereotype, she "aspires to be the biggest fence in New York." She finances bank robberies, starts a school for pickpockets, and also has a class for safecrackers and another to teach assorted kinds of violence. She personally orders and supervises the beating up of "slow payers."

When you see groups of children reading this and hear them chuckle and fill in the derogatory epithets and appellations, the result of the indoctrination is clear. It partially explains some recent episodes of vandalism and attacks on children.

As for counteracting prejudice, which some publishers claim to achieve through their heroes-who-fly-through-the-air, we have yet to see a single child who was even remotely influenced in this way by a comic book. Even the comic-book version of Uncle Tom's Cabin has been characterized by a pupil in a school magazine like this:

The Classics Comics version of Uncle Tom's Cabin gives the impression that the Negro is still that stereotyped man who sings about "going to glory" all day. Mrs. Stowe's book shows the Negro to be a human being.


Some children take for granted these comics standards about races, with more or less awareness of their implications. For others they constitute a serious traumatic experience. For example, a twelve-year-old colored girl said at the Lafargue Clinic: "I read a lot of comic books, sometimes about seven or eight a day. Love Comics, and Wonder Woman, Sheena, Superman, Archie. I don't like the jungle. She don't have no peace. Every time she turn around, she'd be fighting. I don't think they make the colored people right. The way they make them I never seen before -- their hair and big nose and the English they use. They never have an English like we have. They put them so dark -- for real I've never seen anybody before like that. White kids would think all colored people look like that, and really they aren't. Some of those children in my school don't like no white people. One girl's face was scratched up. I seen the girl, but not the fight."

The depiction of racial stereotypes in sadistic actions makes a great impression on children. It is not difficult to find out why that is so if one bothers to analyze children's psychological processes in this sphere. One effect of this fomenting of race hatred is the fact that in many children's minds mankind is divided into two groups: regular men who have the right to live, and submen who deserve to be killed. But the deeper psychological effects are more subtle. A comic book has a picture of a white girl held with her arms seized from behind by a dark-skinned man. A picture like this stands out in a child's mind quite independent of the story. The picture alone becomes the starting point for fantasy. Its sexual effect has been built up by previous pictures showing her, front and back. There is another story showing a subhuman caveman grabbing a blonde heroine.

We know that the dreams of adults often contain images of forbidden acts in which one of the participants belongs to a group of people considered socially inferior by the dreamer. In this way the forbidden act itself can break through the psychic censorship. Through such psychological mechanisms comic books give children a feeling of justification for violence and sadism, frequently in fantasy and sometimes in acts. They supply a rationalization for these primitive impulses. A large part of the violence and sadism in comic books is practiced by individuals or on individuals who are depicted as inferior, subhuman beings. In this way children can indulge in fantasies of violence as something permissible.

In many comic books dark-skinned people are depicted in rapelike situations with white girls. One picture, showing a girl nailed by her wrists to trees with blood flowing from the wounds, might be taken straight from an illustrated edition of the Marquis de Sade.

In another specimen the editorial viciousness is carried to the extreme of showing a white girl being overpowered by dark-skinned people who have tails. In another comic book the hero throws bombs and a Negro from his airplane. A picture shows the bombs and the Negro in mid-air while the hero calls out: "BOMBS AND BUMS AWAY!"

One of the most significant and deeply resented manifestations of race prejudice in the mores of the United States is the fact that in books, movies and magazines photographs of white women with bared breasts are taboo, while the same pictures of colored girls are permitted. Comic books for children make this same distinction. One such specimen had half-nude girls in all kinds of suggestive positions. Other pictures show typical whipping and flagellation scenes such as are found, outside of this children's literature, only in pornographic books. When the girls are white, there is always some covering of the breasts. Only colored girls have their breasts fully exposed.

This is a demonstration of race prejudice for children, driven home by the appeal to sexual instincts. It is probably one of the most sinister methods of suggesting that races are fundamentally different with regard to moral values, and that one is inferior to the other. This is where a psychiatric question becomes a social one.

War comics, in which war is just another setting for comic-book violence, are widely read by soldiers at the front and by children at home. It seems dubious whether this is good for the morale of soldiers; it certainly is not good for the morality of children. Against the background of regular-featured blonde Americans, the people of Asia are depicted in comic books as cruelly grimacing and toothy creatures, often of an unnatural yellow color.

False stereotypes of race prejudice exist also in the "love comics." Children can usually pick the unsatisfactory lover just by his looks.

In addition to their effect on children's ethical growth, their character development and their social maturation, comic books are a factor in a host of negative behavior manifestations: dreams and daydreams; games; nightmares; general attitudes; reactions to women, to teachers, to younger children; and so on.

Comic books act clearly as a trauma or the precipitating circumstance in nightmares and other sleep disorders. I have observed this in many cases. Nightmares occur in children under very different circumstances, of course. Often they are more or less harmless; sometimes they are premonitory signs of more serious developments. A seven-and-a-half-year-old boy was brought to the clinic with a complaint of nightmares. He told his parents he could not remember what had frightened him. Psychological examinations had uncovered nothing. Later, routine questions about comic books elicited merely that he read Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and liked them. When I saw him alone I told him a little about what nightmares are, and that grownups have them too. And that if one remembers what they are about one has more chance not to have them any more.

"Don't you remember the least little bit of any of them?" I asked him.

"You know," the boy said, "what I really like is the Blue Beetle [a figure in a very violent crime comic book]. I read that many times. That's what I dreamed about. I don't have it at home; I get it at another boy's house."

"Who is the Blue Beetle?"

"He is like Superman. He is a beetle, but he changes into Superman and afterwards he changes into a beetle again. When he's Superman he knocks them out. Superman knocks them out with his fist. They fall down on the floor."

"If you say it is like Superman, how do you know it is?"

"I read the Superman stories. He catches them. Superman knocks the guys out."

It is not difficult to understand that a child stimulated to fantasies about violent and sadistic adventures and about a man who changes into an insect gets frightened. Kafka for the kiddies!

The recent output of horror comic books, a refined or rather debased form of crime comics, is especially apt to interfere with children's sleep. In a typical specimen a man-eating shark changes into a girl. You are shown the gruesome picture of an arm bitten off by the shark with blood flowing from the severed stump. And the moral ending?

"No one would ever believe ... that the ghost of a lovely girl could inhabit a shark's body ... "

All kinds of monstrous creatures inhabit these comic books. They have in common that their chief pastime seems to be to kill people, eat them or drink their blood. A boy of eight read many comics during the day without any ill effect being apparent to his family. But after a while he demanded that after dark his comic books be securely locked away. He insisted on this every night because, he said, "I am afraid that these horrible creatures would come out and attack me in the night."

A common clinical syndrome in comic-book readers is rough and blustering conduct during the day, associated with fear dreams at night.

Sleep disorders also occur of course in children who say they do not read comics, though they know what is in them. Sometimes this is their method of telling you that they read those books, too, but either feel spontaneously guilty about it or know that their parents do not want them to do it. A girl of eight had been taken by her mother to the family physician because her sleep was disturbed. The physician had prescribed a sedative, but that had not helped the situation.

When I was alone with the girl, without her mother, she said, "Sometimes I dream that something happens to me. I read comic books, but only funny ones, not mystery ones. Some of my friends read mystery ones." When I asked her what "mystery ones" are, she answered eagerly, "When somebody shoots somebody! Sometimes they try to shoot the hero and they shoot people who have money when they want their money. They shoot anybody they want to. Sometimes there are girls in the mystery comic books. The girls, sometimes they shoot and sometimes they get shot. Sometimes the girls have a lot of money. They are dressed in pretty clothes, fancy clothes, diamonds, sequins, pearls. Sometimes a lady works with a killer and when the lady is going to tell the police, the men will shoot her. Sometimes they do bad things to girls. Sometimes they shoot them, sometimes they strangle them. I don't know what they do, I don't read those comic books." In the ordinary statistics based on the primitive questionnaire method such a girl would appear as reading only harmless funny animal comics, and the sleep disorder would be ascribed to some other cause.

The time when children read comics has something to do with the causation of sleep disorders. Many children read them before they go to sleep, often unknown to their parents, until very late.

Some typical attitudes in children, particularly pre-adolescent children, are caused, stimulated, encouraged or rationalized by comic-book reading. For example, there is a kind of arrogance and bravado sometimes combined with a tendency to cruelty or to deceit and trickery. Such attitudes are by no means always either fixed personality traits or deeply ingrained characteristics caused by early childhood experiences, or the natural expressions of an abnormal temperament. I have often found that such attitudes, however serious they may seem, may be merely a facade, the psychological structure of which cannot be understood without a full knowledge of the mass seduction by comic books.

An important aid in understanding these attitudes and their relation to comic books is our finding that frequently the influence of comic books is not exerted directly, but comes through other children. The influence of children on children is generally underestimated. Parents have sometimes told me that what I have said about comic books may be true, but that doesn't affect their children because they do not read such trash. One of my answers to this is generally, "Don't you think your child will later on, either in school or in other places, meet other children who have been steeped in comics and have absorbed their attitudes concerning sex, violence, women, money, races and other subjects that make up social life?"

In many cases where there is no question of a definite neurosis or of serious delinquency, comic books have exerted a tangible and harmful influence. This always takes place, of course, in the setting of other factors. It should be self-understood that the effect of a stimulus -- any stimulus -- on a child's life is not so simple as the impact of one billiard ball against another. A child's life, unlike a billiard ball, stores many memories and the game of life is not played on a smooth, green, level surface.

An attitude which I have found most frequently engendered by crime comics is an attitude of brutality. Of course that is sometimes connected with sadism, with sado-masochistic tendencies, with cruelty, with sex, with hostility and aggressiveness. But we may not be seeing the forest for the trees if we start right off analyzing brutality into its supposed components. Nor does it help to say that children have always been cruel -- with the implication that they always will be cruel and that cruelty has no cause, but is a natural attribute of children.

Many children are so sheltered that they have not come into contact with real brutality. They learn it from comic books. Many others have had some contact with brutality, but not to a comic-book degree. If they have a revulsion against it, crime comics turn this revulsion into indifference. If they have a subconscious liking for it, comic books will reinforce it, give it form by teaching appropriate methods and furnish the rationalization that it is what every "big shot" does.

The variety of different kinds of brutality described and depicted in detail is enormous. Children have told me graphically about daydreams induced by them. Brutality in fantasy creates brutality in fact. Children's games have become more brutal in recent years and there is no doubt that one factor involved in this is the brutalizing effect of children's comics.

An eight-year-old boy was examined and treated because he "wakes up at night scared." His Rorschach Test showed that he was "concerned with Superman kind of things and with supernatural things. A good bit of blood in the pictures." "The kids around the block," he told us, "have millions of comic books. In school there is a gang, they are littler than me. Once I was walking to school. They sneaked behind me and they held my hands behind my back. Once the whole gang knocked a girl's head against the wall. They jabbed a needle into her lip. They kept jabbing it in. Once a boy played sticking a penknife into my back."

A Lafargue social worker investigated the case of an eleven-year-old boy who "played" with a boy several years younger. He put a rope around his neck, drawing it so tight that his neck became swollen, and the little boy almost strangled. His father happened to catch them and was able to prevent the incident from turning into a catastrophe. About a month later the eleven-year-old beat the younger child so that his mouth was all bloody. He did not know that one should not hit a younger and smaller boy. What he did know was that this sort of thing was done in innumerable comic-book stories about murders and robberies.

Realistic games about torture, unknown fifteen years ago, are now common among children. To indicate the blood which they see so often in crime comics they use catchup or lipstick. A boy of four and a girl of five were playing with a three-year-old boy. With a vicious look on her face the girl took hold of the younger boy and said, "Let's torture him!" Then she pushed him against the wall and marked him up with lipstick and said, "That is all blood!" One must know children's games to understand their minds, and one must know comic books to understand the games.

Violent games may be harmless enough, but only a hairline divides them from the acts of petty vandalism and destructiveness which have so increased in recent years. Camp counsellors have told me that with regard to some particularly destructive and ingenious schemes the inspiration came directly from comic books brought to the camp in plentiful numbers by the parents on Sundays.

The act most characteristic of the brutal attitude portrayed by comic books is to smack a girl in the face with your hand. Whatever else may happen, afterwards, no man is ever blamed for this. On the contrary, such behavior is glamorized as big-shot stuff in the context, and enhances the strength and prestige of the boy or man who does it.

In a comic book "Authorized by the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers" this lesson is driven home. A young girl is being initiated as a confederate into the slot-machine protection racket. She sees how her friend beats up an old man, knocks off his glasses, etc. At first she does not like it. But later, after she had seen such brutal treatment repeated as routine in the racket, she says: "One gets accustomed to brutality after a while!" That is one instance where I agree with a comic-book character.

In another comic book the murderer says to his victim: "I think I'll give it to yuh in the belly! Yuh get more time to enjoy it!"

Is shooting in the stomach to inflict more pain really a natural tendency of children?

Often the ending of the stories, which is generally supposed to be moral, is an orgy of brutality like this ending of a horror comic-book story: "His body was torn to shreds, his face an unrecognizable mass of bloody and clawed flesh!"

In many comics stories there is nothing but violence. It is violence for violence's sake. The plot: killing. The motive: to kill. The characterization: killer. The end: killed. In one comic book the scientist ("mad," of course), Dr. Simon Lorch, after experimenting on himself with an elixir, has the instinct to "kill and kill again." He "flails" to death two young men whom he sees changing a tire on the road. He murders two boys he finds out camping. And so on for a week. Finally he is killed himself.

The injury-to-the-eye motif is an outstanding example of the brutal attitude cultivated in comic books -- the threat or actual infliction of injury to the eyes of a victim, male or female. This detail, occurring in uncounted instances, shows perhaps the true color of crime comics better than anything else. It has no counterpart in any other literature of the world, for children or for adults.

According to our case material the brutalizing effect of this injury-to-the-eye motif is twofold. In the first place, it causes a blunting of the general sensibility. Children feel in a vague subconscious way that if this kind of thing is permitted then other acts are so much less serious that it cannot be so wrong to indulge in them either.

An eight-year-old girl said to her mother, "Let's play a game. Someone is coming to see us. I'll stamp on him, knock his eyes out and cut him up."

But it has also a direct effect. Children have done deliberate harm to the eyes of other children, an occurrence which before the advent of crime comics I had never encountered among the thousands of children I examined. On a number of occasions I have asked juveniles who used homemade zip guns what harm they could do with so little power. I received prompt reply: "You shoot in the eye. Then it works."

The children of the early forties pointed out the injury-to-the-eye to us as something horrible. The children of 1954 take it for granted. A generation is being desensitized by these literal horror images.

One comic shows a man slashing another man across the eyeballs with a sword. The victim: "MY EYES! I cannot see!"

In a run-of-the-mill crime comic a man with brass knuckles hits another man (held fast by a third man) in the eyes, one after the other. Dialogue: "Now his other glimmer, Pete! Only sort of twist the knuckles this time!"

In a Western comic book the "Gouger" is threatening the hero's eye with his thumb, which has a very long and pointed nail. This is called the "killer's manicure." He says: "YORE EYES ARE GONNA POP LIKE GRAPES WHEN OL' GOUGER GETS HIS HANDS ON YOU!. . . HERE GO THE PEEPERS!"

In one comic book a gangster gains control over another man's racket and tapes his eyes "with gauze that has been smeared with an infectious substance!" He says: "When I get through with ya, ya'll never look at another case of beer again!"

When a policeman is blinded, the criminal says: "Well, he don't have to worry about them eyes no more!"

Girls are frequent victims of the eye motif, as in the typical: "My eyes! My eyes! Don't! PLEASE! I'll tell you anything you want to know, only don't blind me! PLEASE!"

It is a pity that such quotes are never mentioned in discussions by the expert defenders of comic books who "have never seen a child adversely affected by a comic book."

One of the best avenues to the unguarded minds of children, as of adults, is the study of their dreams. Investigation of children's dreams, especially in relation to various maladjustments and delinquencies, has been greatly neglected. From many years of study one definite statement can be made in connection with the eye motif. In children's dreams eyes often play a role, just as with adults. But injuries to the eye and gouging out of eyes in dreams used to be of extreme rarity. Even where it existed in nightmare dreams, it occurred in disguised form. Nowadays after years of comic-book indoctrination, such dreams in children or young people are not so rare.

There is an interplay between the stimuli from comic books and from life. A twelve-year-old girl was referred to the Clinic. She told us:

"Me and some girls and boys were playing. A boy said he was going to hit me in the eye. He did it with an umbrella-spoke."

Her mother confirmed this. One might expect -- if one did not know the comic-book atmosphere in which American children grow up -- that such a child might shy away from violence. But she told me she liked to look at killing, especially "how men kill ladies."

In such a case it is hard to say where the tendency to female sado-masochism comes from -- from the violent play in the streets or from crime comic books or from the temper of the times which breeds both and affects individual lives so deeply and so early.

In children who read a lot of comic books there is a typical comic-book syndrome. It has these features:

1) The child feels spontaneously guilty about reading the violent, sadistic and criminal stories, and about fantasies stimulated by them.

2) He is made to feel guilty about them by others.

3) He reads them surreptitiously.

4) He lies and says he does not read crime comics, but only "Walt Disney comics, Looney Tunes and Merry Melody comics." Typical is the remark of an eight-year-old child at the end of our interview: "Please don't tell my mother that I read Crime Does Not Pay and Superman! I keep them always on the bottom of the heap."

5) He buys comic books with money which he is supposed to use for something else, or he steals to get comic-book money.

This comic-book syndrome occurs in children in all walks of life who are in no way psychologically predisposed. Of course in children in bad social circumstances it is apt to occur more frequently. Child psychologists who do not know that these children read crime comic books secretly and who do not gain a child's confidence fully cannot diagnose it.

Since comic books may have such diverse effects on children, from distortion of human values to nightmares and violent games, one must make clear to oneself what psychological mechanisms are involved. The influence consists in a continuation or repetition of the contents of the stories in life, either in thought or in action. The simplest mechanism is just plain imitation.

This factor of copying in action a detail from a comic book has been brought home by the cases where children hanged themselves.

It is in the youngest children that one can see the process of imitation most clearly at work. A four-year-old boy in Florida looked through his brother's comic books and his mother found him under a tree stark naked, with a long knife in his hands. Stunned, she asked him why he had undressed himself, and what he was doing. He replied, "The man in the comics did it." Later he showed her pictures where some "Mongols" had a white man stripped naked and one of them had a long knife to cut out the American's tongue.

In California a very handsome six-year-old boy on his way home from school one day trudged to the top of a steep cliff. An ardent comic-book reader, he had translated his reading into practice and made for himself a flying cape or magic cloak. Taking a brisk run he jumped off the cliff to fly as his comic-book heroes did. Seriously injured, he told his mother, "Mama, I almost did fly!" A few days later he died from the injuries he had received.

How the comic-book defenders can deny the role of imitation in good faith is hard to see. During one of the debates in the British House of Commons, where the defense of English children against American comics was discussed, one member, a former judge, mentioned a case he had tried. Some juveniles had attacked another child on Hampstead Heath in London. He summed up his opinion: "Their crime was in fact imitative. They had seen the glorification of violence as illustrated in these comics; they had seen how the heroes used the rope, the dagger, the knife and the gun; they had seen how they were glorified, and they simply imitated the example of the heroes portrayed in these lurid publications."

Sometimes it is contended that imitation is far too simple a mechanism to explain anything in the behavior of children. Does not modern psychology know much more now about the complex behavior of human beings, about unconscious factors, infantile experiences and similar factors? This argument is pseudoerudite and utterly false. A similar misunderstanding is sometimes found in popular writings about modern physics. It is true that the general theory of relativity embraces complex happenings in the physical world. But that does not mean that for innumerable simple happenings the laws of gravitation are not adequate. If an apple falls from a table, Newton is enough for our understanding of how to keep the apples on the table next time. For that we do not need Einstein. Newtonian physics is a special case of Einstein's physics. Just as the laws of gravitation were not abolished by Einstein, so the psychological mechanism of imitation is not abolished in its field of application by the deeper psychology of Freud.

Conscious imitation is only a small part of the psychological processes initiated by comics reading. Beneath is a kind of subconscious imitation called identification. The bridge of associations that links a child in this way to a comic-book figure and causes identification may be very slight. Rational resemblance or logical comparison has relatively little to do with identification. What is important is the emotional part of the reaction. The child gets pleasure from poring over what a comic-book figure does, is emotionally stirred and identifies himself with the figure that is active, successful, dominates a situation and satisfies an instinct, even though the child may only half understand what that instinct means. He looks for the same sensation again and becomes conditioned to identify himself with the same type that stimulates him to seek and satisfy the same pleasure again.

In investigating the mechanism of identification in individual children with individual comic books, it became clear to me that comic books are conditioning children to identify themselves with the strong man, however evil he may be. The hero in crime comics is not the hero unless he acts like a criminal. And the criminal in comic books is not a criminal to the child because he acts like a hero. He lives like a hero until the very end, and even then he often dies like a hero, in a burst of gunfire and violence.

Identification, which is part of the conditioning process, is of course greatly influenced by a child's other or earlier experiences. So that even when one studies such a factor as comic books in relative isolation, one must take into account many other factors in a child's life. The mechanism of identification, therefore, is at the same time a cause and a result. Identification itself may or may not lead to imitative action. The reading of crime comics is not a release in action, but leads more to passivity and daydreams. Where it does result in activity, the actions are never constructive. The scenes of sadism, sex and crime in comic books arouse the child's emotions, but leave him only a limited scope of release in action. These actions can only be masturbatory or delinquent.

Since the heroes of crime comics invariably commit violent acts of one kind or another just as the criminals do, the child must identify himself with violent characters.

It has been claimed that if a child identifies himself with a violent character in a comic book it shows the individual child's psychological need to express his own aggression. But this reasoning is far too mechanical. Comic books are not a mirror of the individual child's mind; they are a mirror of the child's environment. They are a part of social reality. They not only have an effect, they also have a cause. When we level a constant barrage of crime and violence at young children, it leads them inevitably to preoccupation with these subjects. Subjective and objective factors are closely interwoven in a reciprocal relationship. In this preoccupation there is an element of projection of inner factors and an element of selection from the environment. The very fact that crime comics are socially tolerated shows how much expression of hostility we tolerate and even encourage. The more hostility there is in a child's home, the more threatening he finds his school and social environment, the more likely he is to show identifications with people who fight each other as they do in comic books.

I had occasion to follow the development of a girl from the age of two to nine. Before she had learned to read, she began to pore over comic books. Her favorites were Westerns. She got them from her older brothers who had stacks of all kinds of crime comics. There was considerable conflict in their home, which this little girl witnessed. In conversations with her, as well as on projective tests, it was noteworthy that she was mostly preoccupied with people and animals being "mad" at each other. You might say that this preoccupation with hostility could not come from the comic books because so many children who do not have it read comics. You could also say that her preoccupation could not come from the conflict at home because so many young children have a similar home environment and do not have such fantasies. The correct interpretation is that both factors were operative, interacting with each other, and reinforcing each other.

The general lesson we have deduced from our large case material is that the bad effects of crime comic books exist potentially for all children and may be exerted along these lines:

1) The comic-book format is an invitation to illiteracy.

2) Crime comic books create an atmosphere of cruelty and deceit.

3) They create a readiness for temptation.

4) They stimulate unwholesome fantasies.

5) They suggest criminal or sexually abnormal ideas.

6) They furnish the rationalization for them, which may be ethically even more harmful than the impulse.

7) They suggest the forms a delinquent impulse may take and supply details of technique.

8) They may tip the scales toward maladjustment or delinquency.

Crime comics are an agent with harmful potentialities. They bring about a mass conditioning of children, with different effects in the individual case. A child is not a simple unit which exists outside of its living social ties. Comic books themselves may be the virus, or the cause of a lack of resistance to the social virus of a harmful environment.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Sun Dec 01, 2013 11:27 pm

5. Retooling for Illiteracy

The Influence of Comic Books on Reading

"reading maketh a full man." -
-- Bacon


While we were carrying out our investigations on the effects of comic books, gathering more and more cases, following up old ones and analyzing the new comic books themselves, there were changes going on. Not that crime comics got any better -- that was believed only by those who did not study them.

One interesting new development was that whole comic books and comic-book stories appeared in other publications that did not look like comic books from outside. Sometimes a comic book would be sold as a comic as usual, but would also appear, without its cover, in an ordinary magazine. Thus the reader is relieved of the trouble of tackling connected text and can peruse at least some of the stories in the magazine by the simple picture-gazing method appropriate to the comic book format. Or maybe the idea is that the young adult readers of such a magazine have barely graduated from comic books and find regular reading too hard. A regular twenty-five-cent pulp magazine, for example, has in the middle of it a whole sexy science-fiction comic book, which alone and under a different title sells for ten cents. When the enticing blonde heroine says: "Keep those paws to yourself, space-rat!" the magazine reader can save himself the effort of reading. It is clear from the picture what is meant. The magazine prints some enthusiastic responses from-readers to the comic-book section innovation.

"Your comic section is wonderful," writes one. "Being only 16 years old," writes another, "I just love your illustrated section. Please make it longer."

This undercover extension of the comic book format has also spread to what on the outside appear to be regular magazines in the children's field. Children's Digest, published by Parents' Magazine at the stiff price of thirty-five cents, contains sections in typical comic-book form with bad colors and crowded balloons. The text has the comic-book flavor, too.

A similar children's magazine, Tween Age Digest, at twenty-five cents, also looks like a regular magazine, but has comic-book sections. One of these is a supercondensed comic-book version of Don Quixote. You see him lying on the ground: "The servants beat Don Quixote mercilessly and although he swore vengeance he was helpless as a beetle on his back."

When a publisher was asked recently about this spreading of the comic-book style to regular publications he answered: "That is simple. We are retooling for illiteracy."

All the negative effects of crime comics on children in the intellectual, emotional and volitional spheres are intensified by the harm done in the perceptual sphere. Comic books are death on reading.

The dawn of civilization was marked by the invention of writing. Reading, therefore, is not only one of the cornerstones of civilized life, it is also one of the main foundations of a child's adjustment to it.

Children are like flowers. If the soil is good and the weather is not too catastrophic, they will grow up well enough. You do not have to threaten them, you do not have to psychoanalyze them, and you do not have to punish them any more than wind and storm punish flowers. But there are some things you have to bring to them, teach them, patiently and expertly. The most important of these is reading. A readiness to learn to read is developed by healthy children spontaneously. But for the reading process, and especially for the habit of reading, comprehending, assimilating and utilizing the printed word, the child requires the help of his elders.

When we indulge in huge generalizations in discussing such questions as why people act this way or that, why they believe or tolerate this or that, or the other, we usually forget the simple question of why it is that so many people cannot read properly. Statistics on illiteracy indicate not only that many people do not read books, but also that many cannot read well enough to absorb a book or an average magazine article. According to Ruth McCoy Harris, in an article on reading, one out of twenty-five Americans cannot read at all, and three out of five adults "do not read well. Millions read nothing but the comics."

Reading difficulties in childhood constitute one of the most important areas of mental hygiene. This has been recognized by the establishing of what Dr. Stella Center, a remedial-reading expert, calls "a new institution in the educational world," reading clinics. Reading clinics are unfortunately very few, children with reading difficulties unbelievably numerous. According to a survey made by a committee and presented at the Secondary Education Board in 1951, 5 per cent to 10 per cent of high school children and college students are so deficient in reading that they need individual remedial instruction, and an additional 10 per cent to 15 per cent read so poorly that small group instruction for them is desirable. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 12 per cent of all American children fail in learning to read as well as the average of their class.

A survey sponsored by the New York City Association of Teachers of English and the New York City Association of Teachers of Speech, made public in 1952, reveals these significant data: of students entering high school as freshmen, 33 per cent are retarded at least one year in reading; by the time these students have reached the fifth term the percentage has risen to 40 per cent. Of the children routinely referred to the Queens General Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic for any reason, every eighth child had a reading problem. Sometimes this had not been recognized before either by teacher or parents, and the child had been punished without the root of his difficulties being known to him or his guardians.

Reading troubles in children are on the increase. An important cause of this increase is the comic book. A very large proportion of children who cannot read well habitually read comic books. They are not really readers, but gaze mostly at the pictures, picking up a word here and there. Among the worst readers is a very high percentage of comic-book addicts who spend very much time "reading" comic books. They are bookworms without books.

Parents and other adults are often deceived into believing the children can read because they "read so many comics." In teaching children to read, the schools have to compete with the pictures of comic books. Low-grade literacy is the long-range result. One of the Lafargue researchers, a physician, visited the library of a public school. There were about thirty boys there. Two of them were reading newspapers and eleven of them were reading comic books.

Scientific understanding of reading disorders requires a knowledge of the research done on reading during the last few decades, of brain pathology, of the modern psychological tests -- general, projective and special reading tests -- a psychiatric understanding of children, and a concrete acquaintance with the social conditions of children and the educational process that affects them.

Reading is not a circumscribed, isolated function of the brain, but a highly complex performance. Visual comprehension contains many more abstract elements than, for example, motor behavior. Psychologically speaking, reading is a very high performance. To see a real apple and try to grasp it is much simpler than to read the word apple, which is on the one hand an abstraction and yet has potentially many associations not only visually but also in the sphere of hearing, touch, smell and taste.

Reading disorders are much more frequent in some countries than in others -- in the United States and England, for example, rather than in Germany. In a study of 51,000 children in the schools of Munich, contrary to expectation, only ten were found (ages ten to fourteen) with serious reading disorders. So it is not accidental that most of the research in this field has been done in England and the United States. The difference in frequency may have little to do with the methods of examination or the methods used in teaching reading, or with any differences between German and English and American children. It is the result of differences in the language itself. In the English language, spelling is much more difficult because the spelling and the sound may be so different. The child has to learn to pronounce a word differently from what it seems to be according to its spelling. The letter a, for instance, has to be pronounced differently in different words, while for the child learning to read in German the letter a has only one visual vocal association. In English, the letter u may represent twenty-four different sounds.

The process of reading requires intactness of complex brain mechanisms which regulate the functions of organization (putting things in order), direction, spatial orientation and association between different special sense data. If a child has a weakness in this respect, it will not show up in any simple performance. It may be outgrown, remedied by experience or compensated for. If, however, a very high level of performance is demanded, such as reading and knowing the spelling and sound of such words as through and trough, bow and bough, the symptom that appears on the surface may be a reading disability.

Many children whose trouble lies in the field of reading are wrongly diagnosed. This is due primarily to the fact that the frustration from the reading failure leads to all kinds of other emotional troubles. There is in fact a vicious circle. Emotional factors may lead to reading difficulties and chronic reading failure may cause emotional disturbances. Often behavior disorders clear up when the reading disorder is cured, and reading improves when emotional problems are straightened out. In my routine work over many years in mental hygiene clinics I have found children with reading disability wrongly committed to institutions for mental defectives, regarded as psychopathic or incorrigible without any regard for their reading disability, or given the facile and so often false diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia. These erroneous diagnoses, as well as the prevalent neglect of children's reading difficulties, are the more deplorable because most of these children could be helped.

The diagnosis of reading disorders is established by special reading tests, the selection of tests being adapted to the individual case, and the test results evaluated in combination with a general psychiatric and social study of the child.

There is a high correlation between intelligence, vocabulary and reading. Comic-book readers are handicapped in vocabulary building because in comics all the emphasis is on the visual image and not on the proper word. These children often know all that they should not know about torture, but are unable to read or spell the word. For practical purposes a basis for diagnosis, as well as therapy, is intelligence. The child with reduced intelligence whose reading level is up to the level of his intelligence, but below expectancy for his age and grade, is considered a case of reading retardation.

When the child's reading level is below his mental level, the condition is regarded as a reading disability. If the reading ability of a very bright child is average for his age and grade, he is actually functioning below his potentialities for learning and deserves special remedial attention, because he is not up to his reading grade level according to tests.

The word specific is sometimes added to reading disability and the diagnostic label "specific reading disability" used. But this addition means very little. Usually the disorder is not specific, although it does require specific treatment, that is, remedial-reading training. Lack of interest in reading is often a reaction to failure in reading, a symptom indicating that other causal factors are operating in the creation of a reading problem. It may be a reaction to dislike or fear of school, pointing to more serious underlying difficulties. Failure in reading occurs not infrequently because a child has developed the illusion that he can read because he can follow a comic-book story from the pictures with the occasional reading of a word or two in the balloons. The bad reading and/or language habits he develops from such reading interfere with laying the foundation for proper reading habits. The basis of a child's future reading career is usually laid down in the first and second grades. It is at this stage that comic books do the greatest harm with respect to reading. Children who may be most efficient in other spheres get more and more behind in mastering the reading process. Instead of learning good reading habits they acquire the habit of not reading. They become slow readers, meanwhile continuing to read their comic books.

The hereditary factor has been grossly exaggerated. The theories according to which reading disabilities are chiefly due to heredity express the most reactionary attitude. They relieve us of the responsibility, which is so necessary for purposes of prevention, to evaluate properly the psychological and social factors.

The most significant causes of reading difficulties are: visual defects -- particularly far-sightedness and poor fusion resulting from eye-muscle imbalance; auditory defects; speech defects; prolonged illness; frequent absences from school; frequent changes of school; emotional maladjustment; foreign language background; home conditions in their socio-economic and emotional aspects; poor teaching; lack of reading readiness.

Reading readiness is a most important concept. It is the acquired ability to profit from reading. In the British literature on reading disabilities it is spoken of as "timing." It is characterized by such factors as intellectual development, visual and auditory perception, language development, background of experience and social behavior.

This is precisely one of the points where comic books are so harmful. They retard or even interfere with reading readiness. In this they may act as a prime causal factor or merely as an aggravating influence. Comic-book reading is an inadequate experience. The child fastens on one experience at the expense of others. If he is given these wrong or harmful experiences, he loses out on constructive experiences.

An important area where comic books do specific harm is the acquisition of fluent left-to-right eye movements, which is so indispensable for good reading. The eyes have to form the habit of going from left to right on the printed line, then returning quickly to the left at a point slightly lower. Reversal tendencies and confusions are common among children at the age of six. As better reading habits are acquired, including the all-important left-to-right movements, reversals and other errors gradually diminish and may automatically disappear. It is different with the comic-book reader who acquires the habit of reading irregular bits of printing here and there in balloons instead of complete lines from left to right.

The best understanding of reading difficulties is obtained in the process of therapy. Success may be achieved by a variety of methods. The patient work of the remedial-reading teacher gets the best results if it is combined with understanding psychotherapy, constructive social service work and tactful family counseling. The reading teacher should work just a little below the child's level, so that the child will not get discouraged and will start emotionally with a successful and reassuring experience from the beginning. Comic-book reading is nowadays a real (though often not recognized) obstacle to therapy, for it is difficult -- if not impossible -- to keep a child away from comic books which are so temptingly displayed wherever he goes.

I have had occasion to study the reading problem specifically on over one hundred cases studied and treated at the Remedial Reading Clinic which I founded and organized at the Queens General Hospital and which functions under the direction of a trained remedial reading teacher. These children represented about every variety of reading disorder, and the results of their treatment were highly encouraging. The general gains they made were due chiefly to overcoming resistance to reading, increased security and confidence and amount of work accomplished. In the last respect comic-book readers are also handicapped. If a child can read good books, he can talk or even brag about it to his parents and others. The sort of community of interest established between children, and between them and adults, by reading and knowing the same stories and classics is one of the benefits derived by children from reading, and one that is lost to comic-book readers. They also lose the interest of being read to, because looking at pictures has robbed them of the art of listening. They cannot tell adults what they read and win approval by showing that they know by their own effort something that is interesting to adults. They are left with disjointed bits of reading about banks robbed and girls bound and beaten which are better left undiscussed with parents.

Reading disorders existed, of course, long before comic books. We know that they are due to a great variety of factors, but among these factors for the present-day child comic books have a definite place. Moreover reading difficulties among children have increased and are continuing to increase with the rise of the comic book.

The comic-book industry has successfully spread the fantastic idea that comic books are actually good for children's reading. So the fundamental question arises, How many children suffering from reading disorders are comic-book readers? The answer is simple. Most of them are. Comic books, especially crime comics, are a significant part of these children's lives. If anything, they read them earlier and in greater numbers than other children.

Twelve-year-old Kenneth was referred by his school. Reading tests showed him to be an almost total non-reader. He "reads" fourteen to twenty comic books a day. Questioned about this, he says proudly, "Oh, yes! I can read some words! I can read guns, police, Donald Duck and horse. That's all. When I'm on the subway I can read Times Square. But when I had to go to Floral Park once I couldn't read it so I missed the stop."

[img]Here%20is%20an%20unselected%20group,%20a%20whole%20class%20of%20the%20Reading%20Clinic:[/img]

Image

SEX: AGE: SCHOOL GRADE: READING GRADE: COMIC BOOKS

boy: 13: 8th: 3rd: A few comic books once in a while. Looks at pictures.
boy: 12: 6th: 2nd: About 15 comic books a week. "Reads" most of them.
boy: 12: 5th: 3rd: About 25-30 comic books a week. Looks at pictures; reads "sometimes."
boy: 12: 6th: primer; below 1st About 15 comic books a week. Looks at pictures.
boy: 12: 7th: 2nd: About 6 comic books a week. Looks at pictures; tries to read
boy: 11: 6th: 1st: 50-75 comic books a week, 10 to 15 at a time. Looks at pictures.
boy: 11: 3rd: 2nd: 5 to 8 comic books a week. Looks at pictures. Tries to read.
girl: 11: ungraded 2nd: 2 to 6 comic books a week. Reads and looks at pictures.
boy: 10: 5th: 2nd: 20 comic books a week. Looks at pictures.
boy: 10: 4th: 2nd: About 3 comic books a week. Looks at pictures. Now trying to read.
girl: 9 3rd: 2nd: About 5 comic books a week. Looks at pictures


An interesting sidelight on such a sample group is the fact that these eleven children coming from families screened by social workers for attendance at a free clinic were an economic asset to the comic-book industry to the tune of almost twenty dollars a week.

Severe reading disorders and chronic addiction to comic books are very often associated. That alone indicates that comics do not work in the direction of literacy. Norman, aged twelve, had a severe reading disability owing to a visual disorder for which he had received treatment. His drawings gave evidence of some disorientation and distortion. Such a boy is in need of a great deal of careful remedial training. But instead of giving him early diagnosis and treatment, society made a comic-book addict out of him: "I read all different kinds of crime comics. I read many of them. I get the point of the story by just looking at the pictures."

Raymond, aged nine, was in the fourth grade. His mother said, "He does not learn well in school and cries at night." It was found that he needed remedial-reading training at the grade-1 level. Comic books absorbed most of his time and attention: "My favorites are all of them. I like the escape stuff. I looked at comic books that had all about escape, like Batman, a prisoner escaping from the prison. I used to wake up at night screaming. Since my mother left the light on in the living room, I haven't had that so much. In the dream, when I scream, I can't remember anything in the morning. I read about five comic books a day. I keep looking at them."

Reading difficulties are of course common in the school classes for children with retarded mental development. We have therefore in our investigation made special studies in these classes. They afford additional conclusive proof that severe reading difficulties and maximum comic-book reading go hand in hand, and that far from being a help to reading, comic books are a causal and reinforcing factor in children's reading disorders.

Here is an abstract of a survey of a whole ungraded class made by one of my assistants, who is a teacher and a psychologist. This class was composed entirely of boys. They were unselected cases of a series. The teacher had considerable difficulty in teaching them to read. She felt that even the language in the comic books interfered with learning to read. They could not read the original words, so it did not help their reading power when in comic books the word was abbreviated or in dialect. For example, in comics the children saw th' when they did not know how to read the word the, or they saw gal when they could not recognize the word girl. The teacher also found that comic books emphasized the poor features of the children's environment. The favorite scenes in comic books were precisely what children in slum areas, for instance, see too often in real life: assault and brutality, women who are hit or beaten, pocketbook snatching, etc. The teacher found that comic books were a definite hindrance not only to the reading progress, but also to the acquisition of social principles by these handicapped children. Every child in this class had been studied for two years by the same teacher. The children who were transferred to other classes or were late admissions were not included in this survey. Such a survey shows how children who are both socially and psychologically handicapped have to face the added complication of crime comics.

Image
Image
Image

AGE: HIGHEST GRADE REACHED: I.Q.: READING GRADE: COMMENTS:

Tommy: 11 yrs.: 3rd: 72: 0: House where family lives is in a very deteriorated condition. Boy sleeps in same bed with brothers aged 6 and 12. He is considered "very wise in the ways of the street."

Comic books: "I like ghost stories and murder comics. They teach you not to curse nobody."

Ralph: 11 yrs.: 5th: 69: 1.5: Took money from children in the lower grades. Family lives in basement apartment with large rat-holes, broken floor boards, flies and leaking overhead pipes; furniture worn past recognition. Father unemployed; mother in poor health. Sleeps in one bed with two brothers aged 6 and 13.

Comic books: "In crime comics they murder people with guns and knife and strangle them. They stick up banks and stagecoach. My sister looks at murder comics and at night screams that she sees a man over there. Some men kill girls 'cause the ladies be rich. Men see lady walking down street and push them in front of train, sometimes tie them up. Some boys try to do like what's in the comic books. They take ladies' pocketbooks and beat them up and run off. Women kill the men, knife 'em, sometimes take men to dance and while dancing jook [sic] them in the back with a knife."

Harry: 9 yrs.: 3rd: 73: 1.3: Good home conditions. Spends a lot of time with television.

Comic books: "I like Gangbusters, Crime Does Not Pay, Batman and Superman. They do murders, like shooting. The girls do things to the men. Catch bad men and take them to the law. Bullets bounce off girls in Super Girl. She can fly and swing on ropes."

George: 10 yrs.: 3rd: 74: 1.3: Very tough little boy who will fight anyone of whatever size or age. Sleeps in one bed with three brothers aged 2, 5 and 11.

Comic books: "I don't remember the names of the comic books. They hold up coffee store and when girl reach for gun shoot them. Man make girls hold up stores. Other people learn about killing and taking ladies' pocketbooks. They learn about murders, but not me. I learn good stuff. Don't take nothing from no kid's house when you go up their house."

Henry: 10 yrs.: 2nd: 65: 1.2: Lives with foster parents who do not speak English. Basement apartment consists of kitchen and bedroom.

Comic books: "I like Superman. I forget the bad things. I forget all that's in the crime books. I forget about how they robbed the bank. The men want to kill the girls. Maybe because they have jewels."

John: 12 yrs.: 4th: 67: 2.1: Sleeps with 13-year-old sister in one bedroom. Parents separated.

Comic books: "Captain Marvel was fighting ants and the ants grow big. Had a lady and was going to kill her and he escaped and fought ants and saved the lady. An ant helped him. In mysteries and crime comics they poison each other, dynamite caves and blow people up. Girls play men for fools and when men rob banks they give money to the women and they buy mink coats and when men don't like it they kill them. Superman ladies hardly do anything."

Dick: 12 yrs.: 4th: 54: 1.4: Father left family when boy was very young.

Comic books: "I like the way they fight and when they kill people. The books tells about murder, killing and shooting and some love."

Peter: 11 yrs.: 3rd: 72: 0: Mother is dead.

Comic books: "In murder books men steal and throw the cop off the roof and kill about five men. Some make you scared at night. You dream about it and think somebody's coming to kill you. Some tells about stealing, killing people, some stick with knives, shoot with guns, beat them over their heads with sticks and stick them in the eyes, hit 'em over the head with a poker and string them up with ropes. I can read them now 'cause I know what's right and wrong. My aunt teaches me not to do bad things."

Jack: 12 yrs.: 2nd: 61: 1.5: Very neglected child. Has to get up early in the morning and prepare his own meals. Grandmother, this boy, his brother, aged 4, and sister, aged 3, sleep in the same room.

Comic books: Knows many comic books. "Cowboys are bad. They steal money out of the express office. The boys beat the girls up and Superman comes to help the girls. The boys are bad because they do things they shouldn't. They set houses on fire. The comics teach boys how to rob and join up in gangs."

Sam: 12 yrs.: 5th: 66: 1.5: Frequent family assistance from Department of Welfare.

Comic books: "I read all kinds of comics except love. I don't like them. The only time I read them is when I've seen all the rest of the comics."

Paul: 10 yrs.: 4th: 64: .7: Mother deserted family; father works nights.

Comic books: Knows the names of many comics and says they are all his favorites. "The Indians shot a man in the eye with an arrow. The soldier took his sword and stuck it in him. The Indian took the soldier's rifle, killed everyone in the fort and the boy was shot right in the back and a baby was shot with a bullet and then the troopers came and they warred. I don't like mystery comics any more 'cause I dream about them and I can't sleep."

Marvin: 9 yrs.: 3rd: 65: 1.1: Brother also in ungraded class.

Comic books: "Cops and robbers fight. Robbers don't have money. They buy a cheap gun or little guns and go rob a bank."

Jimmy: 9 yrs.: ungraded: 72: 1.5: Father in tuberculosis sanitarium. Children neglected. Truant.

Comic books: "I have no comics. I read my sister's. I like cowboy stories. They kill too much in the mystery comics. I don't like it because I dream about it. I dream ghost stories."

Bob: 12 yrs.: 3rd: 56: 0: One of 11 siblings. The boys sleep in one room in bunk beds, 4 brothers in the upper bed, 4 in the lower bed. The sisters have a bunk bed in another room.

Comic books: "I like Superman. A man be laying down in bed and the door be locked and the lady run outside for help and hollers. The man comes through the window. Girls are always getting hurt in comic books. Every time the girl goes with a man there is murder and the girl screams."


Reading disorders, whatever their cause, are profoundly disturbing in a child's life. These children have to perform on a level far above their functioning capacity in an atmosphere of competition, and under the critique of teachers and parents they are exposed to an ever-present threat. They have to cope with something they do not understand. Almost with the precision of an experiment they are placed in a situation of ever-increasing frustration and disorientation. Going over the records of such children, I find noted over and over again: lack of self-esteem; no self-confidence in school; "seems to lack interest in subjects he used to like"; estrangement from parents; shame; suspicion; hostility; feelings of inferiority; fear; truancy; running away from home; such characteristics as disruptive, unmanageable, rebellious, over-aggressive, destructive, discouraged; attitude of defeat; "doubts his learning ability in any field."

Over the years I have found a relatively high correlation between delinquency and reading disorders; that is to say, a disproportionate number of poor or non-readers become delinquent, and a disproportionate number of delinquents have pronounced reading disorders. Often such children are harmed by comic books in two ways. Comics reading reinforces the reading disorder, if it has not helped to cause it in the first place, and the child, frustrated by failure, is made more liable to commit a defiant act. At the same time comic books suggest all kinds of specific defiant acts to commit.

Judge Jacob Panken, a New York City Children's Court judge who has paid particular attention to reading, described the situation he found among delinquents in his court. "I have boys and girls -- fifteen, sixteen years of age -- who attend the high schools of our city, and some of these children cannot read one-syllable words! Yet they are in high school -- second term, third term ... Now I asked these children, 'What do you read?' and the answer is 'Comic books.'"

In cases of serious delinquency or crime the problem of severe reading disability sometimes comes up and usually receives little attention. It would be wrong to think that in such cases inability to read has driven an individual directly to the antisocial act. But it is equally wrong to disregard entirely such a severe handicap, which often in devious ways drives a young person to all kinds of emotional short circuits. In England recently a boy of sixteen shot one policeman between the eyes and wounded another. The case created a brief sensation. As a witness on the stand, the boy's father described his son as "a gentle boy." He was the youngest in a family of eight and attended school until he was fifteen.

Q.: In spite of that he never managed to read?

A.: No. He suffered from what I believe is known as word blindness.

Q.: As a result of that, the only reading matter he is familiar with is what are called comic books?

A.: Yes.

Q.: Eighteen months ago he went to a Bible class?

A.: Yes. But unfortunately he did not like that because he was very nervous of being asked to read a lesson and as he could not read, it would have been a very embarrassing experience for him, and for that reason he said he did not want to continue.


"Word blindness" constitutes a severe reading disability. According to my experience it can be greatly improved, and even cured, by competent therapy. Here then is a boy who has to struggle against a serious handicap. This creates a gap in his life which is filled for him by adult society with crime comic books. What he learned from them was apparent enough at the trial. It was testified that he had shouted at the policeman: "Come on, you brave coppers! Let us have it out!"

I can match this almost verbally: "Let's see you try to take me, you big brave coppers!" says a comic book on my desk.

This sixteen-year-old boy was sentenced to jail for life, his nineteen-year-old co-defendant, who was also illiterate and could not read anything except comic books, was hanged. It is, of course, easier to hang a boy than to give him remedial-reading instruction, and still easier to say he would have committed the crime anyhow. "Let us put out of our minds in this case any question of comics," said the judge. But who can say that the crime would have occurred if this boy's reading disability had been cured early and he had been given decent literature to read instead of comic books?

It is safe to say that it is almost impossible to exaggerate the havoc reading disabilities cause in a child's life. There is one redeeming feature. Reading disorders, of whatever cause, may be long-drawn-out affairs, but they need not be permanent. They are amenable to competent treatment. This must consist first of all in remedial-reading instruction, which preferably should be given three times a week, by trained instructors. It is not good enough if the newspapers carry an official announcement of a remedial-reading program giving teachers what is euphemistically called "intensive training" that lasts "one week"!

Competent remedial-reading teaching may show good results in a pupil even in four to six months. Not only does the reading itself improve, but often beneficial effects like the appearance of positive emotional attitudes may be observed. Sometimes the progress is stormy, with periods of increased aggressiveness and marked resistance. The children give up unfavorable attitudes eventually, though, and become aware of their ability to learn. Sometimes it is just as difficult to determine what makes these children well as to decide what caused the trouble in the first place. The relationship to the teacher and to the other children in remedial-reading teaching plays a big role. But the most important thing is the patient, competent actual remedial-reading training itself.

Only a very small percentage of the children who need it receive treatment. The United Parents Associations have estimated that there are 104,000 children in New York City schools who are poor readers and that of all these "only 2,500 are actually getting adequate remedial instruction." Even this is an optimistic statement. In 1943, before the establishment of the Queens General Hospital Reading Clinic I had a study made by psychiatric social service workers of the facilities available in Queens County for the many children there with reading disorders who could not afford private fees. The answers from the various authorities and public and private agencies were revealing in their vagueness. The result of this inquiry was the discovery that "there are practically no facilities"! This was true of a big, growing county in the richest city in the world.

The Queens General Hospital Reading Clinic, which employs one remedial-reading teacher, could of course take only a small number of children and quickly developed a long waiting list. It was the only reading clinic that was entirely free in the whole of New York City in the summer months.

Comic books harm the development of the reading process from the lowest level of the most elementary hygiene of vision to the highest level of learning to appreciate how to read a good literary book. Print is easy to read when the paper background is light and the printing a good contrasting black. Yet most comics are smudgily printed on pulp paper. The printing is crowded in balloons with irregular lines. Any adult can check on the eyestrain involved by reading a few comic books himself. We can produce the most beautifully printed books and pamphlets; every morning my mail has advertising matter expertly designed and handsomely printed on expensive paper. Yet to our children we give the crudest and most ill-designed products.

Reading the comic-book text is often difficult. For example, the reading material in the huge present crop of horror comics is hard to make out even for the average adult reader. But all the emotional emphasis of comics is on the pictures, and that is where they do the most harm to reading. The discrepancy between the easy appeal of the pictures and the difficulty of reading the text is too great to encourage anyone to try to follow what the characters are supposed to be saying.

Even the simplest comic book requires at least a third-grade reading ability. In the course of studying children with reading disorders who are at the same time great comic-book readers, I have found many who have developed a special kind of "reading," They have become what I call "picture readers." Later I learned that not only children with reading difficulties, but also those with good reading ability, are seduced by comic books into "picture reading." This is of course another point where comic books exert a pernicious influence on the general child population.

Picture reading consists in gazing at the successive pictures of the comic book with a minimal reading of printed letters. Children may read the title, or occasionally an exclamation when the picture is particularly violent or sexually intriguing. This kind of picture reading is not actually a form of reading, nor is it a pre-stage of real reading. It is an evasion of reading and almost its opposite. Habitual picture readers are severely handicapped in the task of becoming readers of books later, for the habit of picture reading interferes with the acquisition of well-developed reading habits.

The percentage of picture readers among children who read many comic books is large. Here is a typical example. Jimmy, a boy of fifteen, was referred to me on account of trouble in school. He was in the third term of high school. His reading grade level was 2.4. During one of the Hookey Club sessions, when the question of which children should be given working papers was being debated, he presented his own case: "I want to leave school. I'll be sixteen in January. I can't leave school until I have a job. I don't pay attention in school. I think it is boring. I was left back three times and put ahead twice. I would like anything but school."

Another Hookey Club member: "What was your last trouble in school?"

Jimmy: "I know I can't read. That's why I don't like school."

A third Hookey Club member gave him a schoolbook and asked him to read a few sentences. Jimmy, reading aloud, "... " He could not read a single simple sentence without making a mistake.

A girl in the group asked him, "Do you read comic books?"

Jimmy: "I don't read comics. I just look at the pictures -- Crime Does Not Pay, True Detective, Superman. I get the story by just looking at the pictures. Once in a while, when a good part comes, I read what I can, but the words I don't know I just pass over. When it is a short story and it looks interesting -- when it is bad and they shoot each other -- and when they get the woman -- then I try to read it."

Another eleven-year-old picture-reader has this to say: "I don't try to read them except once in a while if I know a word."

Schoolteachers and college authorities are becoming aware of increasing reading difficulties. Colleges have been forced to make reading classes available to their freshmen. Universities have instituted special courses which are actually nothing but remedial-reading courses, despite their high-sounding titles: "Communications," etc.

This low-grade literacy shows also in the fact that many people say they have no time to read a book, instead of giving the real reason: that they cannot read one. According to the Authors' League Bulletin, one-third of the people who leave school before high school never open a book for the rest of their lives.

The responsibility of comic books for reading disorders is manifold. They have prevented and are preventing early detection of reading difficulties, by masking the disorder and giving parents the impression that the child can read; they aggravate reading difficulties that already exist; they cause reading disorders by luring children with the primary appeal of pictures as against early training to real reading; they attack the child just at the age of six or seven when basic reading skills ought to be developed, and again at pre-adolescence when on a higher level good reading habits should be fostered. Discerning teachers are well aware of this.

There is not a single good psychological study based on scientific data that would show that comic books may help children to read. An article published by a member of the Board of Experts of the Superman publisher is based on elaborate word-counts and statistics. It comes to the conclusion that comic books "provide a substantial amount of reading experience" and "may have real value for the educator." What he describes as a "reading experience" is in fact mostly a non-reading experience. It evidently has not occurred to this Superman expert that most children do not read the many words which he has counted.

The general statement has been made that comic books might be helpful for children "who will not read anything else." That is certainly pedagogically unsound. Of course there are children who have been corrupted by comic books so that they do not want to read anything else, to the detriment of their ability to acquire proper reading habits. But is it sound to advise that addiction to comic-book reading be cured by addiction to comic-book reading?

While comic books harm children in acquiring the basic skills of reading, they harm them even more on the higher level of learning to appreciate and like the content of good reading matter. This has been recognized by literary critics and by librarians. Julia Todd Hallen, writing in the Tacoma Times, says, "Too many fail to realize that with a child's first books his appreciation of good books is begun."

In questioning hundreds of children I have found that comic-book reading and reading good books for pleasure are for all purposes opposites. Actually many children nowadays do not know what the word classic means; they think it means a "classics" comic book. For many children, the entire concept of book is concerned with comic books. I have yet to see a child who was influenced to read "classics" or "famous authors" in the original by reading them in comic-book versions. What happens instead is that the comic-book version cuts the children off from this source of pleasure, entertainment and education. Typical is the case of the eleven-year-old boy of superior intelligence, from a good social and economic background, who exhibited the "classics" comic-book version of Robinson Crusoe with these words: "Why should I read the real book if I have this? If I had to make a report I could use this. It would leave out all the boring details that would be in a book."

Image

Image

[The 10th Victim] [Olga] Not the classics, Marcello!

Image

[TV] The United Nations has decided ...

[Olga] Marcello, this is unacceptable. You must object!

Image

How can they take the classics? What will we read?

Image

[Man] Miss, this is a highly valuable collection, perfectly confiscatable.

Image

[Olga] Marcello, you talk to them.

-- Elio Petri: Notes About a Filmmaker, directed by Federico Bacci, Nicola Guarnei, and Stefano Leone



What is the experience of librarians? Ida M. Anderson, of the Providence Public Library, has written: "Many parents and educators have expressed to me their agreement with us on the stand that such reading of comic books has a pernicious effect on the reading habits of children .... That comic books encourage the reading of books is contrary to the experience of librarians. Circulation of juvenile books in libraries all over the country has decreased greatly since the reading of comic books has become so popular.... The representative of a comic-book publisher suggested that libraries have stimulated the circulation of children's books by posting a sign: 'Superman Recommends These.' The Providence Public Library tried this, but the chief result was a request for Superman rather than for the books listed."

What the comic books of "classics" and "famous authors" do shows our disregard for literature or for children or for both. In the comic books which go to millions of children, these mutilations are advertised with such phrases as "Told in the Modern Manner," "No longer is it necessary to wade through hundreds of pages of text ... preserve all the excitement and interest ... if it's thrills you want, then you'll find them a-plenty ... Ask your parents if they think you should read Shakespeare ..." Macbeth is offered to your child "Streamlined for Action," "... a dark tragedy of jealousy, intrigue and violence adapted for easy and enjoyable reading. Packed with action from start to finish ..." Shakespeare and the child are corrupted at the same time.

By looking at the pictures and reading sporadically a title or an exclamation, a child can follow to some extent the plot of one of these versions of "great stories," or at least what the editor and the child think the plot is. A fourteen-year-old boy in the eighth year at school, with a second-grade reading level, says that he has read the "classics" version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: "It is called The Mad Doctor. He makes medicine. He drinks it and turns into a beast. He kills a little girl. The cops chase him. Then he changes into a man. He comes to a famous home and falls in love with a girl. He keeps changing. Finally he gets shot. While dying he changes back to a human being. I like when he comes to the little girl and hits her with a cane."

On the highest level of reading, comic books influence the creative abilities of children. One can see that from the stories that gifted children write. Where good reading stimulates them to imaginative writing, under the comic-book influence their natural gifts are directed to a cheap killing-the-girl, electric-chair romanticism. In a recent school magazine edited and got out by the pupils themselves there is a typical story, showing comic-book influence. It tells graphically of a young man who rides in a car with his girl. Another car draws up alongside them and a man with a silencer on his gun shoots and kills the girl. The cab-driver thinks the young man did it, "the dirty rat," and calls the police. The young man escapes to Mexico. But he is arrested and charged with the murder. We leave him in jail waiting for the electric chair, although he is innocent. The story closes with this fittingly crude verse:

A flash of light,
The pull of a switch,
The chair in its might
Kills a son of a bitch!


Spelling in comic books is often faulty. "The Case of the Psycopathic [sic] Lady" is not good for children in either content or spelling. Comic-book writing is also extremely poor in style and language. It is no help to the child to learn such barbaric neologisms as suspenstories (the name of an "authorized" comic book). And the editorial comments are no better than the story text; e.g., this "cosmic correspondence":

"Greetings, humanoids! Drag over a cyclotron and crawl in! (If we'da known you were coming, we'da baked an isotope!)"

Comic books also have many words that are not words at all. For example, there may be a series of six pictures with violent scenes with no language, just sounds which have no real spelling. From one typical comic book alone, a Western endorsed by a psychiatrist on the first page, I have made this partial list:

OWW
ARGHH
OOOHHH
WHAM
GLURG
UGH
GLHELP
KURRACK
KAPOW
PING
THUNK
BLAM
YEOW
UNGH
BAM
ZING
AANGH
ARRGG
OOOOOO!
HAH!
GLUG-UGH


One Hookey Club boy called it "basic American."

Language reflects attitudes. In crime comics the language of criminals and their women companions is glorified. I have had referred to me quite a number of unruly children who expressed at home or in school a typical disobedient, arrogant, impudent, smart-alecky attitude. I found that one can help these children, and that many of their expressions were merely a superficial copying of the corresponding typical attitude repeated over and over again in comic books.

In one comic book is a sexy picture of a blonde female dressed in a string of beads and a scrap of material. She says: "A gentleman, he never blackjacked a woman. He hit them with his fists." Millions of children have been taught that this kind of thing is the smart thing to say.

All clean fun, say the spokesmen for the industry. But what children have told me does not bear this out. There are always some who absorb these attitudes. How insensitive must adults be not to realize that this language itself expresses an unfortunate attitude -- the attitude of the crime comic book.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Tue Dec 03, 2013 2:55 am

6: Design for Delinquency

The Contribution of Crime Comic Books to Juvenile Delinquency

"'We do not know the cause.' Is it not absurd to think of 'the' cause? Should we, over that, neglect the facts we have? -- Adolf Meyer, M.D.


The case was handled with the utmost secrecy. "The F.B.I.," the papers later proudly reported, "took no chances." Over twenty Federal agents armed with the latest weapons were strategically posted among bushes and along the road, ready to shoot it out with whatever violent enemies of society had sent the extortion note, with a threat to kill, to a Vanderbilt. They were waiting for the deadline, when the extortion money was to be handed over.

When it came, a slim schoolboy appeared from his hiding-place. In his pocket he carried a toy pistol. Quickly he was surrounded by the armed might of the United States Government which -- without being aware of it -- was fighting juvenile delinquency.

The boy was fifteen years old, was questioned three hours, was found "guilty of juvenile delinquency" and sentenced to six years in a Federal correction institution where, in the judge's words, he would be able "to adjust himself satisfactorily."

This is by no means an isolated instance. The fight of the armed might of the law against children has become routine. One Sunday night a patrolman in New Jersey reported to police headquarters that he had seen some suspicious movement in a meat market. Two squad cars sped to the scene and came to a screeching stop. Six policemen rushed out of the cars with drawn guns and surrounded the store. Then two of them entered it, ready for battle. Their quarry turned out to be -- a handsome, blond, curly-headed little boy of six. His companions, who had fled when the rope snapped as they were lowering him through a skylight, were twelve and thirteen. The little boy, too young even for a juvenile delinquency charge, had started his career as a burglar at five, rewarded by his companions with a steady supply of candy and crime comic books.

In California two police cars pursued an automobile in a mad chase. The car had been stolen, evidently by criminals who had previously broken into a store. As the cars were speeding along, the police fired a salvo of shots. When the car came to a stop, the policemen, guns in hand, walked up to it cautiously. Huddled in the seats were -- six children. The youngest was eight, the oldest thirteen.

The authorities are fighting juvenile delinquents, not juvenile delinquency. There is an enormous literature on juvenile delinquency. One might think that society hopes to exorcise it by the magic of printer's ink. It would seem that the real scientific problem is conveniently overlooked. Juvenile delinquency does not just happen, for this or that reason. It is continuously recreated by adults. So the question should be, Why do we continuously re-create it? Even more than crime, juvenile delinquency reflects the social values current in a society. Both adults and children absorb these social values in their daily lives, at home, in school, at work, and also in all the communications imparted as entertainment, instruction or propaganda through the mass media, from the printed word to television. Juvenile delinquency holds a mirror up to society and society does not like the picture there. So it goes in for all kinds of recrimination directed at the children, including such facile high-sounding name-calling as "hysteroid personality," "hystero-compulsive personality," and "schizophrenic tendencies."

I have seen many children who drifted into delinquency through no fault or personal disorder of their own. When they wanted to extricate themselves they either had no adults to appeal to or those who were available had no help to offer. One evening at the Lafargue Clinic a thirteen-year-old boy came to see me. He was the head of a gang and, as a matter of fact, it was one that had lately been involved in a fight with a fatal shooting. I found out later that while he was in the Clinic he had two much bigger boys stationed in the corridor and at the street entrance to function as bodyguards in case a rival gang might appear. He was much concerned: "I want to stop the bloodshed," he said. There had been some friction between his boys and some boys of another gang. At this particular moment, he told me, "the school is the most dangerous place," for that is where the boys would meet. "I am afraid they will fight with knives. We have our own meeting-place -- nobody can find it. It is in an abandoned house." He wanted some of his boys to stay away from school for a while and during that period wanted to arrange a real peace. "But," he said, "it can't be done because the truant officer gets you and, of course, you can't explain it to him, and you can't tell it to the teacher, and you can't tell it to the police, and you can't tell it to your parents."

When we checked the situation later we found that what he said was precisely true. Had any adult in authority been as earnestly concerned about these gangfights as this boy was, they could have been stopped. The secret meeting-house, incidentally, was stacked full of textbooks for violent fighting -- crime comics.

Delinquent children are children in trouble. Times have changed since the famous Colorado juvenile-court law of 1903. Now delinquency is different both in quantity and quality. By virtue of these changes it has become a virtually new social phenomenon. It has been reported that juvenile delinquency has increased about 20 per cent since I first spoke about crime comics in 1947. It is, however, not their number but the kind of juvenile delinquency that is the salient point. Younger and younger children commit more and more serious and violent acts. Even psychotic children did not act like this fifteen years ago. Here are some random samples of what today's juvenile delinquents actually do. A great deal that has been written and said about juvenile delinquency is invalid because the writers are obviously not familiar with today's cases:

1) Three boys, six to eight years old, took a boy of seven, hanged him nude from a tree, his hands tied behind him, then burned him with matches. Probation officers investigating found that they were re-enacting a comic-book plot.

2) A girl of eight, her six-year-old brother and a boy of thirteen threw a rock at the face of a three-year-old boy and beat him with a stick. Among other injuries the boy had "cuts inside his mouth."

3) A boy of eleven killed a woman in a holdup. When arrested, he was found surrounded by comic books. His twenty-year-old brother said, "If you want the cause of all this, here it is: It's those rotten comic books. Cut them out, and things like this wouldn't happen." (Of course, this brother was not an "expert"; he just knew the facts.)

4) An adolescent tortured a four-year-old boy, kicking him severely in the eye so that hospital treatment was necessary. Reason: "I just felt like doing it."

5) A seven-year-old girl broke into four homes and stole money, watches and jewelry.

6) A train was derailed by three boys, one of whom was eight, another ten.

7) A boy of thirteen committed a "lust murder" of a girl of six. After his arrest, in jail, he asked for comic books. "I refused, of course," said the sheriff.

8) A boy, who had participated when a group attacked and seriously stabbed another boy, was found with a knife which had a legend inked on the sheath: "KILL FOR THE LOVE OF KILLING."

9) A boy of twelve and his eight-year-old sister tried to kill a boy of six. They threatened to knock his teeth out, stabbed through his hands with a pocketknife, choked him, kicked him and jumped on him. The police captain said, "It is the worst beating I've ever seen, child or adult."

10) A ten-year-old boy hit a fourteen-month-old baby over the head with a brick, washed the blood off the brick and then threw the baby into the river.

11) A fourteen-year-old crime-comics addict killed a fourteen-year-old girl by stabbing her thirteen times with a knife. He did not know her.

12) Four boys, two of fourteen, one fifteen, one sixteen, carried out a comic-book classic. They beat the sixty-eight-year-old proprietor of a little candy store with a hammer and while he was lying on the floor one of the fourteen-year-olds drove a knife into his head with such force that the hilt was snapped off.

13) When a well-to-do surgeon received an extortion note demanding $50,000 and threatening harm to his young daughter, experts deduced from the note that it was the work of an "adult male psychopath under emotional strain." It turned out to be a fourteen-year-old girl.

14) There have been whole series of cases where children threw rocks and bolts and fired air rifles at passing trains, and automobiles. One eleven-year-old boy who informed the police about this got such severe comic-book torture-by-fire from a group of boys that he had to have twenty-three skin grafting operations and twenty-six blood transfusions.

15) At the age of eleven, one boy attacked another with a switchblade knife. Later he organized a "shakedown racket," demanding money from children at knife point. If a boy resisted, the miniature racketeers would knock him down and their chief would stab him several times in the chest and back. At fifteen this boy instigated an attack on another boy. "The victim lay on the ground, beaten to a bloody pulp, and died." When they found no money on him, they stripped clothing from his body, while he lay in his death agonies.

16) A boy of eight who led three other boys in nine safecracking expeditions had bought himself a new pair of sneakers after one job so the detectives could not trace his footprints.

17) Typical story: a fourteen-year-old boy shot a policeman with a shotgun.

18) While their parents were away, two boys, nine and eleven, hit their little sister (two years and eight months old) with a hoe handle and trampled her to death.

19) In one city within a few months there were five separate instances where very young children were tortured by boys from five to eight years old in comic-book fashion: a four-month-old had a rope tied around his neck and pulled tight until he was unconscious and his face was pierced with safety pins in several places; a little girl was found by a truck driver unconscious and bleeding, being poked with sticks and kicked by a group of young boys.

20) Two fourteen-year-old girls robbed a taxidriver while he was stopped for a traffic light. One of them pressed a knife into his back and demanded his money. Then the other grabbed the ignition key from the dashboard and both fled.

21) A boy of eleven poured kerosene over a boy of eight and a girl of twelve. He lighted the kerosene with a paper torch and burned the children to death.

22) A nine-year-old boy killed a five-year-old girl by stabbing her more than one hundred times.

Let us also lift the lid a little bit to show what is going on in some schools:

In a public school heroin is sold on the premises. (It also was sold on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital where juvenile drug addicts are detained to cure them of their drug addiction.) In two other schools, police officers circulate on the grounds and in the corridors to prevent violence. A mathematics teacher in still another school who had to give an examination needed a policeman present in the classroom to guard her. In several schools, pupils threatened younger ones with beating and maiming them, collecting money from them either once or regularly and taking their watches and fountain pens. Often the young victims do not dare to tell the names of their tormentors. In one such school when two victims were asked by the teacher they refused to answer, saying, "We don't want our eyes cut out!" In this particular school, one boy was beaten with a broken bottle from behind and cut so severely that seven stitches had to be taken around his eyes.

In still another school, a fourteen-year-old girl pupil was actually raped during the lunch recess in one of the corridors on the sixth floor. In a girl's school, a woman teacher was attacked and beaten by six girls aged twelve to fourteen. Police and radio cars had to speed to another school where two thirteen-year-old pupils attacked a teacher, one with a long stick and another with a picture taken down from the wall.

A regular race riot occurred in a metropolitan school. One teacher was punched in the eye, a police officer was struck and scratched. A police detail had to be sent to keep order in the building and the neighborhood. There are schools where one out of every five boys has been in Children's Court. To several high schools detectives have been sent disguised as porters or pupils to check drug addiction and/or violence. Wire-tapping equipment has been installed by police in school buildings.

In a letter to Time magazine (1953), James A. Michener, the well-known author, draws attention to a school where women teachers always try to stay near the door. Otherwise, as one of them put it, "the big boys might trap her in a corner and beat hell out of her." In a junior high school known to me, women teachers do not dare to go on the staircase alone for fear of being attacked or robbed by pupils. A policeman is permanently assigned on duty in this school. When questioned about his easy assignment, he answered, "Sometimes it gets real rough!"

In one school a pupil always functions as a monitor and is stationed next to a toilet. A teacher questioned about this routine answered that she did not know whether the monitor is supposed to suppress violence, sex acts, vandalism or drug addiction. The type of vandalism that occurs is exemplified by the high school where children ripped out a toilet and threw it out of the window.

A thirteen-year-old boy stabbed an attractive young woman teacher eight times in the back and again in the face when she had fallen to the floor. Authorities were bewildered by the behavior of this boy, who came from a good home background.

I could continue this list almost indefinitely. There is nothing in these "juvenile delinquencies" that is not described or told about in comic books. These are comic-book plots. In comic books, usually these crimes remain unpunished until the criminal has committed many more of them. Children are not so lucky. They face severe punishments whenever they are caught. Educated on comic books, they go on to a long postgraduate course in jails (with the same reading-matter). To every one of these acts correspond dozens of lesser ones, hundreds of minor ones and thousands of fantasies.

Up to the beginning of the comic-book era there were hardly any serious crimes such as murder by children under twelve. Yet there was a world war and a long depression. So we adults who permit comic books are accessories. Speaking of just such crimes, however, a Municipal Court judge defends crime comics in Parents' Magazine with these three standard hypocritical arguments: "First of all, censorship would be worse"; "second, there is danger in overprotecting our children"; third, "violence and brutality are a part of the pattern of our lives."

It is becoming more and more apparent that what all delinquent children have in common is unprotectedness. I have found in every delinquent child that at one time or another he had insufficient protection. That implies not only material things, but social and psychological influences. Of course children get hurt at home and by their parents. But the time when children in the mass are most defenseless, when they are most susceptible to influences from society at large, is in their leisure hours. And children's leisure is on the market.

Nobody knows exactly how many juveniles under twenty-one commit murder in the United States. But it is two or three a day. According to Federal statistics in 1948, about one in every eight persons arrested was a minor. The Federal Government does not have accurate statistics as to the number of homicides committed by children in the pre-adolescent and pre-teen group.

How unprotected children are is shown by the glib use of the word teen-ager in talk about juvenile delinquency, putting into one category such different age groups as that of a boy of thirteen and that of a young man of nineteen. One of the best-informed members of the judiciary, Judge Samuel Leibowitz, pointed out in a paper on "Crime and the Community" that "the defendants in crimes of violence in recent years are getting younger and younger, and nowadays they include mere children who should be in knee pants -- at the age when in former years they would have come into contact with the law only for swiping apples or upsetting pushcarts."

A New York magistrate stated in open court that "it is fantastic the way mere children are being brought into court." After having published over the years innumerable optimistic handouts from interested public and private agencies, the New York Times said in 1953: "It is difficult to think of children as burglars, gangsters, drug addicts or murderers. Such has become the reality, however."

Juvenile delinquency is not a thing in itself. It can be studied only in relation to all kinds of other child behavior. And it is a mass phenomenon which cannot be fully comprehended with methods of individual psychology alone. Children do not become delinquents; they commit delinquencies. The delinquency of a child is not a disease; it is a symptom, individually and socially. You cannot understand or remedy a social phenomenon like delinquency by redefining it simply as an individual emotional disorder.

It is on the basis of such an approach, however, that important mass influences on the child's mind have for years been completely overlooked. And it was precisely in this way that the comic-book industry could take over a large part of the time, the minds and the money of children from five to sixteen.

When I first made known the results of my studies about comic books, most people, including psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, teachers and judges, had paid no attention to their effects on children. A billion times a year an American child sits down to pore over a comic book. What is the attraction? As late as 1951 a liberal magazine, The Reporter, carried an article on "The Comic Book Industry" in which it gave what it thought was the answer: Children are charmed by comic books because in them they can follow "the fortunes of cowhands and mice." That is how we deceive ourselves and others. "Cowhands" do occur in Western comics; but Western comics are mostly just crime comic books in a Western setting. Animal comics may feature "mice"; but animal comics are only a small part and are not habit-forming.

The average parent has no idea that every imaginable crime is described in detail in comic books. That is their main stock in trade. When questioned more closely even experts who have defended the industry did not know what an endless variety of crimes is described in detail in story after story, picture after picture. If one were to set out to show children how to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault and break into houses, no better method could be devised. It is of course easy and natural for the child to translate these crimes into a minor key: stealing from a candy store instead of breaking into a bank; stabbing and hurting a little girl with a sharp pen if a knife is not handy; beating and threatening younger children, following the Superman formula of winning by force.

The way children transpose adult crime into their own sphere is illustrated by the protection racket so often described in comic books, where small shopkeepers have to pay to gangsters to keep their shops from being damaged. At a Hookey Club session a fourteen-year-old boy said,

"There was one fellow, he was a friend of mine. He got the bright idea on the protection racket. He got it from crime comic books. I know he read them a lot. He used to say, 'You know what would be a good business? Making protection out of shoeshine boys.' He put that scheme into working. There are about twenty-five shoeshine boys in that district. He figured this would be the perfect setup. He used to make them pay a dollar a week and if they did not pay, their boxes or other equipment would be broken. He asked me to go in on it. I didn't because it was pretty cheap. He kept it up for several months. Two or three boys worked with him. One had a zip gun, the other had a stiletto. He was the chief, he had nothing. In other words, he was smart. If they caught him he would be empty-handed. He learned that from comic books, too. One of the boys who was paying protection told his mother. They went down to the station house and told the police the setup."

The contempt for law and police and the brutality of punishment in comic books is subconsciously translated by children into conflict with authority, and they develop a special indifference to it. Gerald, a boy of eleven, stole from stores with a group of older boys. One night after such an exploit two policemen followed them. Gerald had a B.B. gun, turned around and shot at one of the policemen. He was charged with armed robbery. When the whole group was in Children's Court the judge talked to them very seriously. Gerald told us all about that. "Didn't you feel strange in court?" he was asked. "No," he replied. "I read the comics and I feel I am used to it."

Taking into account every conceivable possibility, comic books present the details of how to commit crimes, how to conceal evidence, how to evade detection. how to hurt people. In a recent comic book which has the "Seal of Approval of Comics Magazine Publishers," and is sold in New York subways, you learn that after a robbery you can escape more easily if you shoot out the source of light; you learn how to trade in guns; how to hijack ammunition; how to impersonate regular soldiers (I have had several cases of young people doing just that); and, of course, how to torture and kill a "squealer."

Anyone who has studied many truancy cases knows that children are tempted to use medical alibis. I know some who got the idea and even the methods of execution by transposing into their own childhood setting the lessons of comic books. In one which has the "Seal of Approval of Comics Magazine Publishers" young men fake disease to get out of the army. Coming out, as it did, during the Korean War, this lesson was directly useful to upper teen-agers and indirectly to schoolboys.

"Didn't I bluff my way out of the army?" says the hero-criminal. "Got a medical discharge without having anything wrong except indigestion! If you work it right, no doctor in the world can prove you're bluffing!"

A comic book appropriately entitled The Perfect Crime describes "an old and nearly foolproof scheme" to be worked on drugstores. You select one where the owner works alone, telephone him and ask him to deliver something for an emergency case. While he is out you rob his store.

"Pickin' a name from the phone book of somebody who lives in the neighborhood puts real class into this little gimmick! Hah!"

Variations of this theme are also described in comic books and of course quite often enacted in real life. In a case I am familiar with, a young man called a store to ask them please to stay open a little longer so he could buy something. Then he came late, when there was only one man in the store, and held it up.

One Western comic gives an illustrated lesson in foul fighting (he "chopped a powerful rabbit punch") and brutality (he "rammed his knee into Mossman's face with a sickening thud" and then, when his victim was on the ground, kicked him in the face).

One story gives a price list for hurting people in the protection racket:

EYES BLACKED: $ 4.00

ARM OR LEG BROKEN: $ 10.00

WHOLE JOB: $ 100.00 up


Another comic book shows how a youngster can murder for profit. He gets a job as a caddy, loses the ball, then kills the player when he goes searching for it.

Many comic books describe how to set fires, by methods too various to enumerate. In some stories fire-setting is related just as a detail; in other stories such as "The Arson Racket" the lesson is more systematic. There are other sidelights, like how to break windows so you cannot be found out; all this highlighted by the philosophy of the character who says: "From now on I'm making dough the easy way -- with a gun --! Only SAPS work!" That lesson, incidentally, is true of crime comics as a whole: glamour for crime, contempt for work.

"Fixing" of sporting events has recently been front-page news. I have one accused boy under psychotherapy right now. In comic books that is old stuff: "Here's 500 now, and you'll get 500 when it's over!"

Of course playing hookey from school is one of the smart things described by comic-book characters:

"But we better hurry or we'll be late for school!"

"Aw, the heck with school, Harvey! I'm not goin' today. Brains will never get you any place. It's MUSCLES that'll do it! Look at the easy duce-spot [sic] it made me just now!"

So varied are "the fortunes of cowhands and mice!"

In the spring of 1951 a teen-ager driving a stolen car tried to run down a policeman who had stepped out of his radio car to arrest him. People wondered at such cold-blooded brutality. How can a young boy get such an idea? For comics readers this is a lesson of the elementary grades, described and illustrated over and over again.

Junior may be too young to wish to forge checks, but many children whom I have seen have forged their parents' signatures for school purposes. Forgery is, of course, also described in comic books. The preferred method is to pick up a blotter which has been used and copy the signature with the aid of a mirror.

Stealing of automobiles has become a great nuisance. Any young boy who succumbs to temptation in this direction, although he may have been brought up not to do it, has seen in detail just how to go about it. Comic books describe it often and fully, from incidental thefts to the "hot-car racket."

From one book you can learn how to cut through the glass and break into a store and how to stop the noise when you do break in: "Pile the blankets on to smother the noise!"

In countless books, it is brought home that it is wrong not to kill -- because the victim may tell. Nothing is overlooked in these crime comics, however mean. One book shows how to steal the money box from the blind man who runs the newsstand. Of course, as in the vast majority of criminal acts depicted in comic books, this particular act is successful and not punished.

The very title of some stories makes it clear that there is a lesson in the story, and what the lesson is. For example: "Lessons For Larceny," with a sub-title, "Watch for Trouble when a Swindle Backfires."

I have seen many children, delinquent and not so delinquent, who kept their school report cards or absence notices from their parents. Comic books give visual aid about "the mailbox angle" used for stealing checks. In an apartment house "with self-service elevators" you let the elevator go to another floor. But how to get the letter out of the mailbox? "Yeah! It's coming out! This pencil and gum did the trick!" I have seen several children who did exactly that -- taking mail from their parents' mailbox -- and who had learned it from this source.

Many comic books explain in word and picture how to throw knives. In fact, I have learned from them quite a bit about the tricks of it myself. And lest the child might think -- as naively as the adult public which permits all this -- that the stories are just stories, not applicable in the next neighborhood gang fight, millions of comic books have illustrated advertisements:

THROWING KNIFE. Properly shaped and balanced for throwing ... Penetrating point ... Tool Steel ... Thrilling stunts ... Hard hitting ... Easy-to-throw ... 7 inches ... ($1.98)


Children who have thrown such knives have got into serious trouble. The adults who advertise them, supply them and show how to use them have not in a single instance been charged even with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

In the comic-book syllabus stealing of every variety is amply covered. A man's pocketbook is stolen on the subway. Millions of little boys learn how to do that: "Did someone shove a newspaper in your face? And were you shoved from the rear at the same time? I can see that's what happened. The pickpocket got it while you were upset by the shove." Lesson completed.

How to steal a woman's pocketbook is outlined, too. According to the stories it may be done skilfully and peacefully, but if that does not work, just hit them over the head. This sort of thing has been done by a number of children.

In some comic books it is shown how the youngest tots are picked up bodily, held upside down and shaken so that the coins will fall out of their pockets. Not only do I know from boys that they have practiced this, but similar cases have been reported, like the one where children invaded a settlement house, stabbed one of the workers, smashed equipment and "turned boys upside down to get the pennies from their pockets."

Often comic books describe real crimes that have been featured in the newspapers. In adapting them for children the following points are stressed: the daring and success of the criminals is exalted; brutal acts are shown in detail; sordid details are emphasized; if there are any sexual episodes they are featured. In 1952 three men escaped from a penitentiary. They stole cars, evaded the police, kidnapped people, held up a bank, and were finally caught in New York where they were living with three girls. A real children's story! In the first picture there is an unmade bed, a half-nude man and a girl. The prison break is described like a heroic feat. The ease with which you can steal cars in the country from a farmer is pointed out to youngsters who do not know that yet. One of the criminals boasts to a little boy that he has killed fifteen or sixteen people, "I lost count."

The girls living with the criminals are featured, two of them hiding behind a shower curtain. There are seventy-six pictures of exploits; in the seventy-seventh picture the police take over with a cheap wisecrack.

All this is only a small sample from my collection and an infinitesimal part of the whole story. Juvenile delinquency is not just a prank nor an "emotional illness." The modern and more serious forms of delinquency involve knowledge of technique. By showing the technique, comic books also suggest the content. The moral lesson is that "innocence doesn't pay."

If it were the aim of adults to tempt children as persistently, as clearly and as graphically as possible, they would have to invent the comic-book industry. When I first announced my findings that these comic books are primers for crime, I was greeted with these arguments:

1) It is not true. Only the rarest comic book does that.

2) It is not true any more, though it may have been true in the past. Now that is all changed.

3) If true, it was always thus.

4) Crime comic books have no effect at all on children's behavior.

5) Crime comic books are a major force in preventing juvenile delinquency.

6) Crime comic books are not read by children, but only by adults.

7) Comic books affect only "emotionally unstable" or "insecure" children and not the average child.

All these arguments have influenced the public. That they are self-contradictory was evidently overlooked or forgiven.

What is the relationship of crime comic books to juvenile delinquency? If they would prevent juvenile delinquency, there would be very little of it left. And if they were the outlet for children's primitive aggressions, this would be a generation of very subdued and controlled children.

Our researches have proved that there is a significant correlation between crime-comics reading and the more serious forms of juvenile delinquency. Many children read only few comics, read them for only a short time, read the better type (to the extent that there is a better type) and do not become imbued with the whole crime-comics atmosphere. Those children, on the other hand, who commit the more serious types of delinquency nowadays, read a lot of comic books, go in for the worst type of crime comics, read them for a long time and live in thought in the crime-comics world. The whole publicity-stunt claim that crime comics prevent juvenile delinquency is a hoax. I have not seen a single crime comic book that would have any such effect, nor have I ever seen a child or young adult who felt that he had been prevented from anything wrong by a comic book. Supposing you wanted to prevent promiscuous, illegitimate sexual relations, would you publish millions of books showing in detail where and how the man picks up the girl, where they go, the details of their relationships in bed and then how the next morning somebody breaks into their room and tosses them out of bed? A comic-book defender would say this teaches that "Sex does not pay."

The role of comic books in delinquency is not the whole nor by any means the worst harm they do to children. It is just one part of it. Many children who never become delinquent or conspicuously disturbed have been adversely affected by them. Pouring sordid stories into the minds of children is not the same as pouring water over a duck's back. One would think that this would be the most elementary lesson in child guidance. But child experts have overlooked this for years without really studying children's comic-book reading.

How can a doctor discover that a man's diet is a contributing factor to his illness when he omits to ask the man what he eats, approves of what he is eating (without looking into what it really is) and does not know what these foodstuffs contain? This type of guidance has been practiced on children for years.

In 1951, Harper's magazine, in a piece attempting to refute my comic-book conclusions, quoted triumphantly the statement of a judge that he "never came across a single case where the delinquent or criminal act would be attributable to the reading of comic books." Should not such a statement carry tremendous weight in my investigations? How could I disregard it if I wanted to be thoroughly scientific?

So I did look into it. I checked. How many juvenile delinquents had come into this judge's court, altogether? One single case! Could he really defend the millions of crime comic books as they are? He had this to say, "I am firmly convinced that children should not be permitted to read the more lurid type of comic magazines, those which portray crime, violence, killing and sex situations. I am opposed to those books which are sadistic in tone. An unrelieved diet of violence and crime can do no good even to those children who are well-adjusted. Some children might readily obtain ideas of violence from comic books. Many children lack in maturity and judgment to control their actions after reading such books."

What about this judge's probation department? One of his chief probation officers was asked whether they ever inquired of any defendant about his comic-book reading. He replied, "The subject played no part in our thinking of any great consequence, any more than the reading of the average run of publications such as Life."

Superintendents of reformatories also made the "not a single case" statement. What about them? Not only do their records show that they made no examination in this respect, but some institutions are filled to the brim with the worst kind of comic books which keep the inmates occupied and quiet.

Comic-book reading in child-care institutions and reformatories is particularly harmful because these children are so restrained otherwise. Superintendents may not take official cognizance of it, or may have the illusion that only Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are available in their particular institutions. A boy of thirteen was brought to me. He had just spent two years in a model reformatorylike institution. (Reformatories do not like the name reformatory, but they cling to reformatory methods.) This boy had got into trouble for stealing. He was a great comics reader, but in the reformatory "they would not allow the murder and mystery ones." The boy himself told me that the real practice was somewhat different from the rule. Reading crime comic books was "the only fun" he had had while in the institution.

Crime comics are certainly not the only factor, nor in many cases are they even the most important one, but there can be no doubt that they are the most unnecessary and least excusable one. In many cases, in conjunction with other factors, they are the chief one.

Edith was a delinquent girl of fourteen. Over the years the family had had contact with some twenty-five social agencies. It was a history of illness, vocational dislocation, disruption and financial difficulties. The girl, good-looking and anxious to get help, had serious aspirations to make something of her life. Surely in such a case one cannot disregard the social conditions, nor can one ascribe delinquency directly to them. One must search for the particular in the general, the individual in the social, and vice versa. There is no such thing as abstract frustration leading to abstract aggression.

What goes on in the mind of such a girl? Where does the rationalization come from that permits her to act against her better impulses? Her ideal was Wonder Woman. Here was a morbid model in action. For years her reading had consisted of comic books. There was no question but that this girl lived under difficult social circumstances. But she was prevented from rising above them by the specific corruption of her character development by comic-book seduction. The woman in her had succumbed to Wonder Woman. By reading many comic books the decent but tempted child has the moral props taken from under him. The antisocial suggestions from comic books reach children in their leisure time, when they are alone, when their defenses are down.

An official psychiatric report on a nine-year-old delinquent had summed up the situation as follows: "It is felt that the mother is neurotic and has been unable to afford Alfred the needed depth of feeling required for him to achieve a firm personality structure." This is the typical high-sounding doubletalk so widely employed these days with regard to troubled children. I saw his much harassed mother, who had been fighting a losing battle to protect her son from bad influences on the street and in the crime comics. What had society given him to provide him with a "firm personality structure"? Crime comics in an endless stream.

Judge Jacob Panken has observed three separate cases where children got hold of lighter fluid, saturated another child with it and set him afire. He found in these three instances that these children, coming from different boroughs, favored a particular comic book which has on its cover a burning human being in flames. He felt that in each instance the comic book shared the responsibility, that "it is the straw which breaks the camel's back."

A fifteen-year-old boy was accused of having shot and killed a boy of fourteen (the authorities chose to consider this accidental), of having thrown a cat from a roof, of having thrown a knife through a boy's foot, of sadistic acts with younger children, of having shot at a younger girl with a B.B. gun. After a full study of the psychological and social background, we came to the conclusion that the fact that he was an inveterate reader of comic books was an important contributing factor. His favorite comic book, read over and over, contained no less than eighty-one violent acts, including nineteen murders.

Even if the Howard Lang case had been the only one -- there were many others -- it should have been enough to make adults take steps against crime comics. This thirteen-year-old boy killed seven-year-old Lonnie in a dreadful fashion. In a lonely wood he stabbed him many times with a pocket knife, choked him, stamped and jumped on him, and then dropped on his face -- four times -- heavy blocks of concrete. After this, with the help of another boy, he hid the still-living victim under a heap of leaves. Lonnie lived another twelve to fourteen hours before finally dying in agony. The judge in the case, Judge Daniel A. Roberts, commented especially on the influence of crime comic books on Howard. He took judicial notice of twenty-six of the boy's comic books and stated that they showed "the homicidal, near-homicidal and brutal attacks upon the persons of the characters depicted by means of knives, guns, poison, arrows and darts, rocks off cliffs, etc." "It was testified," he went on, "that the defendant had observed or read these comic books since before he could actually read." Judge Roberts further characterized these comic books as "startling in the extreme, and nauseating and degrading to the moral sense. That these publications are permitted to be sold to the youth of the country is a travesty upon the country's good sense. The crime and horror comics are extremely ugly in appearance, caused by their creators' diabolic twist of mind ... sordid killings and gruesome plottings ... something must be done ... by law if the publishers will not properly censor their own work."

Glenn R. Winters, editor of the Journal of the American Judicature Society, a leading publication on jurisprudence, commented on Judge Roberts's observation that it "may be verified by an examination of practically any copy of any of the magazines." Mr. Winters further wrote in this connection that people are entitled to the cherished right to believe that comic books "had nothing whatever to do with making a potential murderer out of Howard Lang and that he would have been as likely to go the same way on a literary diet of The Bobbsey Twins and Pilgrim's Progress, but millions of American parents deeply concerned about surrounding their children with proper influences will not be so convinced."

At the retrial of the case Judge John A. Sbarbaro also referred specifically to the bad influence of comic books. The judge said, that in his opinion: "After much consideration of this evidence the Court feels it to be his duty to make certain specific suggestions for much needed legislation ... regulatory statutes restricting publication and distribution of harmful features of so-called comic books."

Despite all this, little Lonnie seems to have been forgotten and his horrible comic-book death has been in vain.

A very experienced youth counsellor in the course of group therapy in an institution asked two groups of delinquent boys whether and what they had learned about delinquency from comic books. From the first group, composed of nine boys from thirteen to fifteen, everyone said that he had received helpful suggestions from comic books:

1) Now listen to this. If you see a bathroom window lit up you know someone is at home. If it's still lit next day, no one is at home. They leave the key in the mailbox, under mats or in corners. If you see a milk bottle and a note in it, the note gives you a pretty good idea of the house. If you keep up with the notes, you know everything.

"Another thing: after a bride and groom get married they have a lot of presents they keep in the house, so the only thing you have to do is get two tickets to a show like Oklahoma, cost about $5.50 apiece. You send them to the bride and groom and they're pretty sure to go. On most tickets they have a date, so that you know when they go. When they're gone, you go in and take your time and help yourself.

"As smart as I am, I never thought of this. I got it all from the comics."

2) "I got my bad ideas from the comics, stabbing, robbing, stealing guns and all that stuff. In a comic book I read two kids rob a store and steal guns and get away and grow up to be bank robbers. So I did the same thing -- only I didn't grow up to be a bank robber -- yet!"

3) "I read about a perfect robbery and used parts of it. This was in a crime comic magazine and it said these three men were still at large and didn't get caught, so I figured I could pull the same stuff."

The second group was made up of ten boys, twelve to sixteen. Except for one boy, all described the delinquency lessons of comic books:

1) "In the comics I saw a cat kicked by a man so I kicked the cat because I saw it happen that way."

2) "I saw how to carry a gun in a suitcase and a shopping bag. If I ever had to do it, that's the way I'd do it."

3) "I learned how to break a seal off a freight car from the comics and how to put on another so you don't get caught."

4) "I learned how to rob cars from the comics. They tell you, if the door's open, how to switch wires."

5) "I got this from the comics. The patrolman would make his beat. We'd find out what time he goes past and back. We saw how they take a strip from a window and take out the window, and we did the same. Another idea we got was taping the windows and cracking them. Then you take the tape off and pick the glass out. When a train goes past, like the Third Avenue El, we'd crack the window with our fist. We got all this from comics."

Some members of the Hookey Club described some of their delinquencies which had not been found out. One boy told how he had snatched purses from women. "In the comic books it shows how to snatch purses. You should read them if you got the time [To me.]. It shows a boy going to a woman and asking her where the church is. She naturally drops her arm and goes waving. So you just grab the purse and run. Usually they can't run after you. She has the bag in her hand, waving to a certain place. You just grab her arm. It was in different comic books. They all build that stuff up. You pick desolate places, where nobody is around." If such delinquent fantasies are stirred in hundreds of thousands of children, it is inevitable that some of them will carry out their fantasies in fact.

There is no doubt that the impulse to commit a delinquent act is important. What counteracts the impulse, however, is equally important. In the children I have studied, I have endeavored to determine what perspective of life the child had and what it came from. Children, like adults, are impelled in different directions, good or bad. It is up to us to determine the factors which in the individual case tip the scales. To disregard the comic-book factor is unfair to children, particularly in the light of the severe punishments they so often receive, after they have become delinquent. A little attention beforehand would do away with a lot of detention afterwards.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Tue Dec 03, 2013 11:20 pm

7: "I Want to Be a Sex Maniac!"

Comic Books and the Psycho-Sexual Development of Children

"Give me good proofs of what you have alleged; 'Tis not enough to say -- in such a bush There lies a thief."

-- Shakespeare


A small boy who had made ample use of the reading and entertainment we provide up plentifully for children was once asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. His instant reply was enthusiastic: "I want to be a sex maniac!"

To describe the morbid aspects of sex as purveyed in stories which have no artistic justification may sound obscene. But it can hardly be objected to in this book for adults since it is the common subject matter of what we give children to read.

Does comic-book reading influence the sexual development of children? The question of sex education has been much discussed. Some preach almost unlimited openness and frankness, even at an early age. Others feel sex education must proceed very slowly, that it is best to begin with the birds and flowers. No correct answers can be given to such questions as, should sex instruction be given at home or in the school? because the questions are wrong. Children get it anyhow, and in both places. The problem is that what they get is so often wrong instruction. And even if nothing is said about sex, that is a form of sex instruction too. The greatest error is to think of sexual problems in isolation. They are part of life. They influence other aspects of life and are in turn themselves influenced.

One starting-point for a discussion of sex education should be the fact that sex in its subtle and crude aspects often causes a great deal of mental anguish to children. They could often be spared such painful preoccupations, worries, inferiority feelings and guilt complexes as frequently occupy them. Education has not only the positive aspect of imparting knowledge, but also the preventative aspect of warding off harmful influences. If harmful influences are widespread in the population, a formal course of sex instruction, separated from everything else, can achieve little.

Pre-adolescence and adolescence are manifestly the most difficult periods in children's sexual development. This is so not only on account of the maturing of the sexual instinct, as is commonly supposed, but also because of the awakening of social feelings at that time. All human beings have to learn a rationale of controlling, disciplining and, if you will, sublimating sexual impulses. Only a decent social orientation can lead to a decent sex life, for practically all psychological sex problems are ethical problems. In sexual education as in other education, one should also not forget that we are bringing children up not to be children, but to be adults.

Contrary to the opinion of unprogressive progressive educationalists, children like to be guided. When we adults disappoint them by not giving them any worthy models to follow, we theorize that children resent authority. They do not. Actually they have a natural need to be led and directed.

With the progress of scientific research, a road on which the names of Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Freud, Stekel and Kinsey are signposts, we have learned more and more that sexual behavior varies widely and that many patterns which used to be regarded as serious crimes, extremely immoral conduct or severe abnormalities do not deserve to be so seriously regarded. And yet education for a happy life must take into account that sexual irregularities in one way or another may spell great unhappiness and suffering. A liberal-minded attitude appropriate in dealing with fully grown adults is unfair when used as an excuse for not warding off harmful influences from children.

Comic books stimulate children sexually. That is an elementary fact of my research. In comic books over and over again, in pictures and text, and in the advertisements as well, attention is drawn to sexual characteristics and to sexual actions. As one boy expressed it to me when I was discussing with a group what is good and bad in comics, "The sexism is bad, but to tell you the truth, I like that most!" There are children -- and very young ones, too, according to our researches -- who get stirred up by this "sexism." That is not the free development of children, that is a sexual arousal which amounts to seduction.

One might speculate that children in good circumstances with strict ethical education would be immune against such temptation and seduction. But that is a naive and amateurish view although the comic-book industry has been able through its scientific spokesmen to put it over on the public. We studied, for example, comics reading in 355 children, boys and girls, from a parochial school. In this school ethical teaching played a large part and all the children had undergone this uniform influence. Economically, they came from better than average homes. Their grades ranged from 5B through 8B. Their identity was fully protected so that they felt completely free to express their real opinions.

The authorities of the school, who were very co-operative and interested, had opinions about comic books that differed from mine. They assumed that their children do not read the "bad" ones and that comic books were getting better and better, with fewer bad ones and those bad ones improving. They thought that if their children should see bad comics, their moral training and teaching would prevent them from reading them.

Our findings, based entirely on what the children themselves said, showed that, like most other adults, the school authorities had misjudged the comic-book situation, and that under their very eyes many of these children are being seduced by the industry. A large number "read" comic books from the age of four or four and a half, long before school age. Many know and read the "bad" comic books which we had found to be the most disturbing to ethical development. They named as "bad ones": Crime Does Not Pay, Mr. District Attorney, horror comics like Vault of Horror, Superman, Jungle Comics, crime, murder and mystery comics, Crime busters, Captain Marvel, Western Comics, Classics, Tales of the Crypt, True Love.

Their comments are revealing. One boy said about Superman, "It teaches 'crime does not pay' -- but it teaches crime." Another said, "Superman is bad because they make him sort of a God." Still another, "Superman is bad because if the children believe Superman they will believe most anything."

A ten-year-old said, "I think they're bad, but good to read!" What they mean by "bad" is interesting. One boy said, "Some are dirty, some give you bad thoughts." This was a common comment. A number of the children include love comics among "bad ones," thereby expressing much better ethical judgment than their elders.

Quite a few of the children indicated plainly that comic books affect them sexually. Many used the expression of a ten-year-old who said, "Some comic books lead us into sin." They used such phrases as "impure dress," "some have no clothes on," "indecency," "naked," "they are not modest." Many children have received a false concept of "love," thinking of it as something "dirty." They lump together "love, murder and robbery."

From comic books these children get just the opposite of what they learn at school or at home. They are taught, "Lead me not into temptation," but temptation in the form of comic books is offered them everywhere. Even if the ethical teaching they get should prevail, we place on them the burden of an intense emotional, moral conflict. An eleven-year-old jungle-book reader said that "comic books are very exciting and very bad and dirty." How is a child to distinguish between the excitement approved by the Child Study Association of America as good for children and the bad thoughts not approved by the parochial school?

Since I have written about comic books I have heard from quite a number of young adults who told me that their childhood emotional masturbation problem was started or aggravated by comic books. This has been borne out by our studies of children. Masturbation is harmless enough. But when accompanied by unhealthy -- especially sado-masochistic -- fantasies it may become a serious factor in the maladjustment of children. When I have presented my findings for discussion, I have often been told that children who had such comic-book sex fantasies were not at all harmed by them. But is it not one of the elementary facts of modern psychopathology. that childhood experiences very often do not manifest themselves as recognizable symptoms or behavior patterns in childhood, but may crop up later in adult life as perverse and neurotic tendencies?

One of the stock mental aphrodisiacs in comic books is to draw girls' breasts in such a way that they are sexually exciting. Wherever possible they protrude and obtrude. Or girls are shown in slacks or negligees with their pubic regions indicated with special care and suggestiveness. Many children miss that, but very many do not. In other run-of-the-mill comic books, as was first pointed out to me by adolescents who collected them, special emphasis is given in whole series of illustrations to girls' buttocks. This is a kind of fetichism and in some individuals leads to rigid fetichistic tendencies either in fantasy or in actual life later. Such preoccupations, as we know from psychoanalytic and Rorschach studies, may have a relationship also to early homosexual attitudes.

At some of the sessions of the Hookey Club, when there were only adolescent boys present, no younger ones and no girls, discussions about comic books were sometimes pretty outspoken. One boy discussed the comic book, Crimes by Women. "There is one that is sexy! Her legs are showing above her knees and her headlights are showing plenty! She has a smoking gun in her hand as though she had already shot somebody. When you see a girl and you see her headlights and she is beaten up, that makes you hot and bothered! If she will take a beating from a man she will take anything from him." Another boy defended Crimes by Women and showed a copy of Penalty which he said was worse. "It shows how to commit burglaries, holdups. A gangster has a hand on a girl's shoulder. He is working his way down to her headlights."

The keynote of the comic books' sexual message, drummed into children from a tender age on, is the admixture of sensuality with cruelty. The illustrations are, as the Art Digest called them, "perverted." It is a special perversion that they cultivate most of all, sadism. Sadism is defined as "the gratification of sexual feeling by the infliction of or sight of pain" (William White).

In very young children comic books set up confusion and create a sadistic interpretation of sex. Ronnie, a six-year-old comic-book addict attending the Clinic, often played with a boy a year or so older who lived downstairs in the same house. One day this playmate took a little girl and Ronnie into his room and proceeded to take off the girl's clothes. Ronnie watched a bit, then ran upstairs excitedly, told his mother all about what he had seen and asked her, "What's he going to do to her -- choke her?"

The short circuit which connects violence with sex is a primitive pattern slumbering in all people. It can easily be released in children if it is drilled into them early enough and long enough. It is to these primitive layers of the undeveloped mind, to this weak spot, that comic books appeal. The stories and pictures arouse vague yearnings and suggest ways in which sadism can be practiced or daydreamed about. Children transpose sadism into their own sphere. A fifteen-year-old boy who for a considerable time was given psychotherapy at the Clinic used to speed close to girls on his bicycle. Then he would stretch out his arm suddenly and hit them on the breast.

Running over a young girl on the sidewalk is described in a comic book. John, a boy of nine, put this sequence into practice, and deliberately knocked over a girl with his bicycle. He told me about it, "I got a thrill out of it -- a thrilling sensation ..."

Graphic description of sexual flagellation on the buttocks is frowned upon by the Post Office -- if it occurs in adult books. But in a typical comic book for children such erotic scenes are described in detail. The villain (a foreigner, of course) has the half-nude girl in his power. As an appetizer, she is hit in the face. Then: "I know that you shall love me and shall be loyal after you have taken a dozen or so lashes across your beautiful back!"

She is taken to the cellar, bound by the wrists to a tall post, her breasts conspicuously drawn, and pleads for mercy. The man stands behind her with a coiled whip in hand.

In Western comic books, the erotic spanking of a girl by a man is frankly featured. Beatings with a sexual connotation occur in many comic books.

A boy of twelve was brought to me a while ago because "he forced his sister to get undressed and tried to have sex relations with her." The sister was nine years old. Such occurrences are less rare than is generally assumed. And frequently one can straighten out a child like this if one diagnoses the whole situation. After I had seen this boy a number of times, he told me about it spontaneously. He said he had threatened to break his sister's arm if she told anybody. This is not the kind of thing that boys used to tell their little sisters. To break people's arms, or to threaten to do so, is one of the comic-book devices. It is even represented on comic covers.

If a medical student had to write a paper for his psychopathology class on the varieties of sadistic fantasies and sadistic acts, he could cover the whole field by studying just what is in our children's comics. In a comic book, typically full of blood, violence and nudity, the erotic hanging theme is exploited. The average reader, of a generation not brought up on comics, may not realize the connection between sex and hanging, with one of the typical perverse fantasies for wishing to hang an undressed girl and watch her struggles. But this is made abundantly clear to children in their daily reading matter. In one story a man "kills for sport." There is a sequence with illustrations of half-nude girls where he makes this comment:

"Ho-Ho! What a hangman I make! The police are blundering fools! But I am an artist!"

"My noose will fit around that pretty's neck!"

In the next picture the blonde girl, clad in a noose, a bra and Bikini trunks is hanging from a tree. And you see her again, hanging "in a death struggle."

There are individuals who suffer from the truly dangerous perversion of wishing to hurt or kill couples making love to each other. The comic-book industry obliges by describing such cases in detail. So, the child who had never had such an idea before will learn it; the one who had any idea at all, however faintly, will have it nourished and given form. One picture shows a couple in an automobile, both the young man and the girl with blood streaming all over their faces from bullet holes in their heads. In the story the murderer was never caught.

Some comic books describe sexual sadism with its most morbid psychological refinements. In a recent comic book a man makes love to a married woman, while her husband, whose leg has been injured by the lover, has to look helplessly on. The lover kisses the girl, taunting the husband all the while. The girl gets sexually so excited by this perverse situation that she exclaims: "STOP! I can't stand it any more!"

Another morbid fantasy is the idea of drawing blood from a girl's veins in order to overpower her completely. Outside of the forbidden pages of Sade himself, you find this fully described and depicted only in children's comic books.

We have traced the effect of this seduction to sadism. Children's spontaneous drawings are one good indicator. In one such drawing, a girl is tied nude to a post. A handkerchief is stuffed into her mouth. On the floor are her discarded panties. In front of her is a boy heating some torture instruments over a fire. On his chest is the S of the superman.

Several young men who gloated over these sadistic comics stories as adolescents have told me that during sexual relations they have to rely on the fantasy that the girl is bound and tied down in one way or another.

Certain kinds of books and magazines of pornographic or semipornographic character for adults are called "high-heel" literature. This has to do with the erotic character that high heels have for certain men. Psychiatrists know that there are men who collect shoes with high heels, as a kind of fetich for erotic pleasure, and that other men have such fantasies as having women with very high-heeled shoes step on them. In the ordinary comic book for children exaggeratedly high heels are introduced and appeal to these latent fetichistic tendencies. In one comic book with a story on "the man who shanghaied more than 1,000 men from the San Francisco docks," there is suddenly -- unrelated to the story -- an illustration showing large in the foreground only the lower part of a girl's legs, in net stockings and very high-heeled red shoes. The young boy who called my attention to this told me he and his friends got a kick out of it. This type of picture, showing only legs and extremely high heels -- and interrupting a story of action to do so -- is a repeated motif in different comic books. Several boys have told me that they collect these comics illustrations and use them for sexual fantasies, with or without masturbation.

A nineteen-year-old boy told me about his high-heel fantasies: "You are the first one I tell it to. I think of girls twisting their heels on my chest and face." His first complete sexual stimulation had come from masochistic scenes in comic books at the age of about ten or eleven. "This woman had a castle and in order to generate the electricity all the men had to push something. The women, who were glamorously dressed, would hit the men, who were in various stages of undress."

The average adult may not know much about the fact that there are men who are masochists and indulge in fantasies of a strong woman to whom they must act as slaves and who whips them if they do not carry out all her whims. Books for adults with detailed descriptions of sexual masochism and without artistic merit are considered pornographic. Masochism derives its name from the novelist Sacher Masoch who wrote such stories. Typical masochist fantasies that could be straight out of Sacher Masoch are offered to little boys and girls by the comic-book industry. In one story a baroness has two male slaves. They "obeyed her every whim while she lorded it over them with a savage tyranny!" The accompanying picture shows the baroness, whip in hand. She talks about forcing a man "to come to me on his knees" and speaks of him as "my willing slave." In one scene which might be from a case history by Krafft-Ebing you see her whipping a man who is crouched on the floor: "So! You dare to kiss me, do you, you dog? Take that! and that!"

Many years ago, as a postgraduate medical student, I listened to lectures on the psychopathology of sex. I did not think then that one day I would have so much difficulty in convincing people that what I learned there about sick adults was not the best reading matter for healthy children!

There are men who have a desire to see undressed girls tied to posts or with their hands bound behind their backs or above their heads, or confined in chains. Such deviations of psychosexual development usually have their origin in some early chance experience either seen, heard or read. American children are given every opportunity to develop these psychopathic tendencies.

A twelve-year-old sex delinquent told me, "In the comic books sometimes the men threaten the girls. They beat them with their hands. They tie them around to a chair and then they beat them. When I read such a book I get sexually excited. They don't get me sexually excited all the time, only when they tie them up." The difference between the surreptitious pornographic literature for adults and children's comic books is this: in one it is a question of attracting perverts, in the other of making them.

There is a lot of loose and irresponsible talk about children's sadistic reading being a help to them in getting rid of their aggression. I have yet to see a single adolescent who had sadistic fantasies and wishes and got rid of them by reading sadistic comic books. Nor have I found a single published case.

A group of Hookey Club boys from twelve to fifteen discussed what they thought was good and bad in comic books and spoke about "torture" as a bad feature. Most of them agreed they liked books showing it, though. I asked the boys whether any of them, if they actually had a little girl in a lonely place, would really like to tie her up, beat her and torture her. I wondered whether any of them would admit to that and asked for a show of hands. Everybody smiled -- and every hand went up. They had learned their comic-book lessons well. It is frequently overlooked that long before the age of puberty children may have very elaborate sexual fantasies which do them no good. The sexualized brutality of crime comic books leads not infrequently to a connection between the thrill of suspense and that of sexual arousal -- a kind of anxiety stimulation. Sometimes this may go far enough to produce orgasm. "I think sex all boils down to anxiety," one boy told me. In some cases, more often in girls but also in boys, this arousal is closely related to masochism.
There is a special kind of cruelty mixing crimes against property and sexual exploits which I have hardly ever encountered in juvenile cases before the comic-book era. Nowadays it is not at all uncommon.

A boy from a well-to-do family was referred to me for psychotherapy after he had become very inattentive in his studies. During treatment he told me once that he and three other boys, fifteen and sixteen years old, used to go to a candy store in the neighborhood where they ate ice-cream cones, bought comic books and talked big. One evening in one of the boy's parents' car they drove from the suburb where they lived to Broadway. There they picked up a young prostitute and took her to the home of one of the boys whose parents were away. Two of them had intercourse with her and various sexual experiments were tried out, the girl being very co-operative. They paid her five dollars each. After that, all four went out with her in the car to drive her back to Broadway as they had promised. On the way they had a bright idea. They stopped the car, pounced upon the girl and while one held her forcibly around the neck the others beat her unmercifully about the face and body. They went through her handbag and took out all her money. One boy, hitting her in the face, said to her, "You are too independent!" The girl did not fight back. She just sat and cried and said it was not fair after she had been so nice to them. Then they left her at a subway station, with just enough money to pay her fare. This is comic-book stuff.

Comic books create sex fears of all kinds. In girls the identification of sex with violence and torture may cause fear of sex, fear of men and actual frigidity. A Western with a picture of Tom Mix on the cover has in one story no less than sixteen consecutive pictures of a girl tied up with ropes, her hands of course tied behind her back! She is shown in all kinds of poses, each more sexually suggestive than the other, and her facial expression shows that she seems to enjoy this treatment. Psychiatrically speaking, this is nothing but the masturbation fantasy of a sadist, and it has a corresponding effect on boys. For girls, and those boys who identify themselves with the girl, it may become the starting-point for masochistic fantasies.

Some of the ordinary comic books have illustrations revealing crude sexual details if you look at them in a certain way. The shoulder of a man with a red scarf around his neck shows a girl's nude body. This is so clear that it can induce the immature reader to look for such things and stir him up sexually.

Love comics do harm in the sphere of taste, esthetics, ethics and human relations. The plots are stereotyped, banal, cheap. Whereas in crime comics the situation is boy meets girl, boy beats girl; in love comics it is boy meets girl, boy cheats girl -- or vice versa.

Adolescent girls are not helped by this bit from a love comic: "How long can a beautiful woman wait for love? Is it a crime to take passion where it is found -- regardless of mocking faithfulness? (For the thrilling answer see page 17.)"

Love comics, like crime comics, play up the angle that what they depict is real life. "These girls are real people with real problems and real dramatic confessions," says a typical issue. What do these "real" girls want? "More than anything in the world I wanted glamor, money, adventure ..." What are their problems? The titles of the stories give the answer:

FALLEN WOMAN

RUNAWAY PASSION!

PRICE OF PRIDE

FORBIDDEN LOVE

MY FOOLISH MISTAKE!

MUST I REVEAL MY PAST?


In crime comics normal sexual life is repressed, whereas violence is shown in detail. In love comics it is just the reverse. Homicide is usually prevented at the last moment, while fornication is completed:

"Violent passions smouldered in my heart! I burned with love for a man who could never be mine. In a moment of weakness I surrendered to a tragic impulse and grasped at a forbidden love!"

Or: "Naive, innocent fool that I was, I thought he was asking me to marry him! But I found out different fifteen minutes after we checked into the hotel!! My folks hushed it up of course ... and I learned to forget...."

Or, again: "One moment of sin ... The ugliest sin in the world ... would it bring her a lifetime of happiness?" (sic!)

There are no good modern studies on childhood prostitution, although the case material for such a study is unfortunately not lacking. The whole subject is hushed up, just as juvenile drug addiction was until recently. Childhood prostitution is always due to neglect by the family (which often cannot help itself) and by social agencies. It is on the increase at present. Comic books do their share in laying the psychological groundwork.

Annie, aged ten, engaged in sex play with men for which she received money. Like most children she was very suggestible. From comic books she absorbed fantasies of violence and sex, but the few constructive things she saw, like the movie about Sister Kenny, stimulated her to the constructive fantasy of becoming a nurse. "I fooled around with men, young men and old men. They gave me a dollar. I don't have my period yet. They just took down my pants. I meet the men on the docks. They did it in a shady house, a house that has all kinds of tools in it -- hammers. I went over there four times a week. I don't like it. Girls don't like it. I did it for the money. Sometimes I would get half a dollar, sometimes a quarter. Some men don't give you anything. Cheap, ain't they!"

This girl read about twenty comic books a day. Some of them she read over three or four times. After she saw the Sister Kenny movie she formed the ideal of becoming a nurse who "cures the people." But one good movie could not prevail over hundreds of comic books.

Other varieties follow the pattern of adult organized prostitution, except that the girls get younger and younger and sometimes the purveyors do, too. A girl of seventeen supplied schoolgirls of twelve to fourteen to middle-aged men. She had about twenty-five girls. The official investigation, which was far from thorough, estimated that at least fifty adult men were involved. The seventeen-year-old girl got $1.50 to $2.00 from each customer. But she gave the girls only a quarter or fifty cents.

There are quite a number of obscure stores where children congregate, often in back rooms, to read and buy secondhand comic books. The proprietors usually permit the children to spend a lot of time in their establishments and to pore over the comic books. In some parts of cities, men hang around these stores which sometimes are foci of childhood prostitution. Evidently comic books prepare the little girls well.

Homosexual childhood prostitution, especially in boys, is often associated with stealing and with violence. For all these activities children are softened up by comic books. Their superego formation with regard to sex is interfered with in a subtle way: everything is permitted to men in comic books and there is constant sex stimulation. Charles was studied at the Quaker Emergency Service Readjustment Center. At the age of twelve he engaged in regular prostitution. He did not play hookey, but followed this occupation after school hours. He said, "I meet the men in office places or places of business. They give me a dollar or fifty cents. I wondered how they'd be so generous. Some men are about thirty-five." The outstanding feature in this boy's examination was his moral confusion. Comic books contributed to this. "I usually read comic books, Gangbusters or True Comics, about ten or fifteen a week, about two a day. I trade them."

More has been printed on the subject of homosexuality than on any other sexual phenomenon. This would indicate not only a preoccupation with the subject, but also that our understanding of it is still incomplete.

Comic books, like other books, can be read at different levels, with different people getting out of them different things. That does not depend only on differences in age; it is affected also by more subtle factors of constitution, experience, inclination and unconscious susceptibilities. To determine them, I have let children draw, write and make up stories; have studied their dreams and asked them directly or in playroom observation what they got out of these stories, what they dislike, how they thought the stories would affect other children -- especially younger ones.

Many pre-adolescent boys pass through a phase of disdain for girls. Some comic books tend to fix that attitude and instill the idea that girls are good only for being banged around or used as decoys. A homoerotic attitude is also suggested by the presentation of masculine, bad, witchlike or violent women. In such comics women are depicted in a definitely anti-erotic light, while the young male heroes have pronounced erotic overtones. The muscular male supertype, whose primary sex characteristics are usually well emphasized, is in the setting of certain stories the object of homoerotic sexual curiosity and stimulation. This, incidentally, is increased by the male "art nudes" featured in advertisements in millions of children's comics, which correspond to the athletic male art nudes appearing in certain magazines for adults so often collected by homosexuals.

In an issue of a popular comic there is on the back cover a full-page colored picture. It shows a stalwart youth, nude except for a well-filled loin cloth. No young man or adolescent in the upper-age groups whom I asked to describe this picture in one word used any expression except "fairy." The boy has long blonde hair falling over his shoulders and bound with a red ribbon over his forehead. On both wrists are green bracelets, and graceful ribands twist around his ankles above his bare feet. He wears a bare dagger coquettishly fixed in front of one hip. He has big blue eyes and a beautiful suntan. His expression, to quote one of the boys who commented on it, is "sissy and sappy."

Many adolescents go through periods of vague fears that they might be homosexual. Such fears may become a source of great mental anguish and these boys usually have no one in whom they feel they can confide. In a number of cases I have found this sequence of events: At an early age these boys become addicted to the homoerotically tinged type of comic book. During and after comic-book reading they indulged in fantasies which became severely repressed. Life experiences, either those drawing their attention to the great taboo on homosexuality or just the opposite -- experiences providing any kind of temptation -- raise feelings of doubt, guilt, shame and sexual malorientation.

The term pederasty does not mean -- as is often erroneously believed -- a crude physical relationship between men. It comes from the Greek word pais meaning a youth or boy, which is also the root of such words as pedagogy. Pederasty means the erotic relationship between a mature man and a young boy.

Several years ago a California psychiatrist pointed out that the Batman stories are psychologically homosexual. Our researches confirm this entirely. Only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and of the psychopathology of sex can fail to realize a subtle atmosphere of homoerotism which pervades the adventures of the mature "Batman" and his young friend "Robin." Male and female homoerotic overtones are present also in some science-fiction, jungle and other comic books.

Just as ordinary crime comic books contribute to the fixation of violent and hostile patterns by suggesting definite forms for their expression, so the Batman type of story helps to fixate homoerotic tendencies by suggesting the form of an adolescent-with-adult or Ganymede-Zeus type of love-relationship.

In the Batman type of Comic book such a relationship is depicted to children before they can even read. Batman and Robin, the "dynamic duo," also known as the "daring duo," go into action in their special uniforms. They constantly rescue each other from violent attacks by an unending number of enemies. The feeling is conveyed that we men must stick together because there are so many villainous creatures who have to be exterminated. They lurk not only under every bed but also behind every star in the sky. Either Batman or his young boy friend or both are captured, threatened with every imaginable weapon, almost blown to bits, almost crushed to death, almost annihilated. Sometimes Batman ends up in bed injured and young Robin is shown sitting next to him. At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and "Dick" Grayson. Bruce Wayne is described as a "socialite" and the official relationship is that Dick is Bruce's ward. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. As they sit by the fireplace the young boy sometimes worries about his partner: "Something's wrong with Bruce. He hasn't been himself these past few days." It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. Sometimes they are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket off, collar open, and his hand on his friend's arm. Like the girls in other stories, Robin is sometimes held captive by the villains and Batman has to give in or "Robin gets killed."

Robin is a handsome ephebic boy, usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. He is buoyant with energy and devoted to nothing on earth or in interplanetary space as much as to Bruce Wayne. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident.

In these stories there are practically no decent, attractive, successful women. A typical female character is the Catwoman, who is vicious and uses a whip. The atmosphere is homosexual and anti-feminine. If the girl is good-looking she is undoubtedly the villainess. If she is after Bruce Wayne, she will have no chance against Dick. For instance, Bruce and Dick go out one evening in dinner clothes, dressed exactly alike. The attractive girl makes up to Bruce while in successive pictures young Dick looks on smiling, sure of Bruce. Violence is not lacking in these stories. You are shown Batman and Robin standing in a room with a whole row of corpses on the floor.

In a study of over a thousand homosexual cases at the Quaker Emergency Service Readjustment Center we found that the arousal of homosexual fantasies, the translation of fantasies into fact and the transition from episodic homosexual experiences to a confirmed fixation of the pattern may be due to all sorts of accidental factors. The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies, of the nature of which they may be unconscious. In adolescents who realize it they may give added stimulation and reinforcement.

In many adolescents the homoerotic, anti-feminist trend unconsciously aroused or fostered by these stories is demonstrable. We have inquired about Batman from overt homosexuals treated at the Readjustment Center, to find out what they thought the influence of these Batman stories was on children and adolescents. A number of them knew these stories very well and spoke of them as their favorite reading. The reply of one intelligent, educated young homosexual was typical: "I don't think that they would do any harm sexually. But they probably would ruin their morals."

One young homosexual during psychotherapy brought us a copy of Detective Comics, with a Batman story. He pointed out a picture of "The Home of Bruce and Dick" a house beautifully landscaped, warmly lighted and showing the devoted pair side by side, looking out a picture window. When he was eight this boy had realized from fantasies about comic-book pictures that he was aroused by men. At the age of ten or eleven, "I found my liking, my sexual desires, in comic books. I think I put myself in the position of Robin. I did want to have relations with Batman: The only suggestion of homosexuality may be that they seem to be so close to each other. I remember the first time I came across the page mentioning the 'secret bat cave.' The thought of Batman and Robin living together and possibly having sex relations came to my mind. You can almost connect yourself with the people. I was put in the position of the rescued rather than the rescuer. I felt I'd like to be loved by someone like Batman or Superman."

A boy of thirteen was treated by me in the Clinic while he was on several years' probation. He and a companion had forced a boy of eight, threatening him with a knife, to undress and carry out sexual practices with them. Like many other homo-erotically inclined children, he was a special devotee of Batman: "Sometimes I read them over and over again. They show off a lot. I don't remember Batman's name, but the boy's name is Robin. They live together. It could be that Batman did something with Robin like I did with the younger boy.... Batman could have saved this boy's life. Robin looks something like a girl. He has only trunks on."

The Lesbian counterpart of Batman may be found in the stories of Wonder Woman and Black Cat. The homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable. The Psychiatric Quarterly deplored in an editorial the "appearance of an eminent child therapist as the implied endorser of a series ... which portrays extremely sadistic hatred of all males in a framework which is plainly Lesbian."

For boys, Wonder Woman is a frightening image. For girls she is a morbid ideal. Where Batman is anti-feminine, the attractive Wonder Woman and her counterparts are definitely anti-masculine. Wonder Woman has her own female following. They are all continuously being threatened, captured, almost put to death. There is a great deal of mutual rescuing, the same type of rescue fantasies as in Batman. Her followers are the "Holliday girls," i.e. the holiday girls, the gay party girls, the gay girls. Wonder Woman refers to them as "my girls." Their attitude about death and murder is a mixture of the callousness of crime comics with the coyness of sweet little girls. When one of the Holliday girls is thought to have drowned through the machinations of male enemies, one of them says: "Honest, I'd give the last piece of candy in the world to bring her back!" In a typical story, Wonder Woman is involved in adventures with another girl, a princess, who talks repeatedly about "those wicked men."

In the Black Cat stories, the superwoman in ordinary life is a young girl like any other. But when she goes into action, she is "Black Cat" and has donned a sort of Superman uniform. In a story called "Mr. Zero and the Juvenile Delinquent" a little boy is mercilessly beaten and is about to be kicked, as he lies helplessly on the floor, when Black Cat intervenes. On an educational page in the same book she gives good advice for violence as instruction for self-defense:

"Swing the upper part of your body forward while slamming the edge of your left hand against his larynx. The impact will knock him down." At least!

Image

A comic-book baseball game. Notice the chest protector and other details in the text and pictures. [So now you know, fiends. Now you know why there is a ball game being played in the moonlight at midnight in the deserted Central City ball park. Look closely. See this strange baseball game! See the long strings of pulpy intestines that mark the base lines. See the two lungs and the liver that indicate the bases ... the heart that is home plate. See Doc White bend and whisk the heart with the mangy scalp, yelling ... "Play ball ... batter up! Let's go Philly, Boy! Pitch it in ...." See the batter come to the plate swinging the legs, the arms, then throwing all but one away and standing in the box waiting for the pitcher to hurl the head in to him. See the catcher with the torso strapped on as a chest-protector, the infielders with their hand-mits, the stomach-rosin-bag, and all the other pieces of equipment that once was Central City's star pitcher, Herbie Satten ...]

Image

Corpses of colored people strung up by their wrists.

Image

Comic-book philosophy.

[Kid Melton, The Killer Without a Friend!
"I don't need nobody! I'd stick a shiv in my best friend's back if it would get me an easy buck! Friendship is for suckers! Loyalty -- that's for jerks!" So spoke Kid Melton, Cincinnati's most hated criminal and he backed his words with bullets until he learned his lesson the hardest way of all!]

Image

[Phantom Lady]
Sexual stimulation by combining "headlights" with the sadist's dream of typing up a woman.

Image

Children call these "headlights" comics.

["This is a shame, but orders is orders!"
"Help! Help!"
"Hold her still, will ya?"]

Image

An invitation to learning.

["Where ya goin' on a night like dis, Tony? Ya ain't gonna shoot anybody with dat rod, are ya?

Image

Giving children an image of American womanhood.

["Lousy!!! Filthy!!! I'll tear ya ...

Image

Children told me what the man was going to do with the red-hot poker.

Image

Outside the forbidden pages of de Sade, you find draining a girl's blood only in children's comics.

Image

Cover of a children's comic book.

Image

Pity was the keynote when Homer described a dead body dragged behind a war chariot. Dragging living people to death is described without pity in children's comics.

["A couple more miles oughta do th' trick!"
"It better! These **** Gravel roads are tough on tires!"
"But ya gotta admit. There's nothing like 'em for erasing faces!"
"Superb! Even big Phil will admire this job if he lives long enough to identify the meat!"
Then Little Mike Turk would come roaring back!]

Image

What comic-book America stands for.

[Jo Vanna ran far -- he ran to America! He recalled the names his father had mentioned! He knew where to go -- to this fence -- to that gun seller! It wasn't long before Joe Vanna acquired a reputation ...]

Image

A sample of the injury-to-the-eye motif.

["Yes Mary Kennedy ... you try to square things with the big boss!"
"P-put th needle down!! NO!

Image

Image

Image

["But John Raddow doesn't pull a license out of his pocket ..." "AIEEE!" "BANG!" "You asked for it!"]

Image

Treating police contemptuously is a comic-book commonplace.

["The next instant, a gas shell bursts amidst the police ..." PING! ZING! SHUSS!

Image

["Stand! Draw not your blood in sight of the killer heads. They will live!"
"Aye, five will live, but one shall remain silent --"]

Image

Image

["Jeepers! A dame -- and she's been croaked!"]
A girl raped and murdered.

Image

How to hurt people.

[VULNERABLE Eyes: Finger jab or thumb gouge
Nose: Heel of hand blow or pressure
Chin: Heel of hand or fist blow
Throat -- Adam's Apple -- Carotid arteries -- wind pipe: edge of hand, finger jab or hand pressure
Temples: Kick or extended knuckles blow
Bridge of Nose: edge of hand blow
Lips: Edge of hand blow or pinch
Heart: Fist blow or Kick
Solar Plexus: extended fingers, fist or kick
Pit of stomach: fist blow or kick
Knees -- Front, Inside and Outside: Kick or counter joint movement.
Shins: kick
Ankle and foot: Counter joint movement
Arch: Heel stamp
FRONT.
One of the secrets of defensive tactics is this: there are certain spots in the body more sensitive than the rest of the body area. By concentrating your attack on those spots you can easily gain the advantage over any attacker regardless of his apparent superiority in weight or size. These charts, made for the use of government agents in training, show just where those spots are and what personal weapons to use against them.]

Image

["He screamed as I drove it in. I felt it tear flesh, crunch against cartilage. I raised it and stabbed again and again ..."]

Image

[I pointed to the spot below Lon's chest ... below the torn flesh and blood ...
"Look. navel. He had a navel."
"Incredible! He ... He was a mammal!"]

Image

["Where he came from, the superior race is the mammal, which bears its young alive ... attached to the mother by an umbilical cord."
"And here ... we lay eggs! We have no navels!"]

A young girl on her wedding night stabs her sleeping husband to death with a hatpin when she realizes that he comes from a distant planet and is a "mammal."

Image

[CRIME DETECTIVE REAL POLICE CASES "But -- I tell ya! I came here becuz I was thinking about my mind!"
"Yeah, horseface -- we know you were thinking -- we smelled rubber burning -- c'mon -- let's see what the judge thinks!!"
PSYCHIATRIST]

Caricature of the author in a position comic-book publishers wish he were in permanently.

Image

Children's drawing found by police on boy-burglars.

Image

["We gotta time it just like a football play. I've rented this vacant store for our ambush spot --"
"It's a perfect spot for me and the chopper."]

MODERN JUVENILE DELINQUENCY INVOLVES KNOWLEDGE OF TECHNIQUE.

Comic-book map for crime.

Image

[John Evans' scheme of murder ...
1. Boards train, 8 p.m.
2. Leaves to kill Mike, 8:14 p.m.
3. Flies to meet train, 12 midnight.
4. Arrives Boston, 1 a.m.]

How to prepare an alibi.

Image

Diagram for housebreakers.

[Diagram of Denzer's device for locking window inside from outside ...
He looped doubled string under bolt handle. Ends of string (A & B) led up over top of open window to outside window surface. He left through window.
Outside, he reached in, grasped window, slammed it towards himself, closing it. Then pulled both strands (A & B) through sprungcrack (C) locking bolt in cradle.
He next released strand B, pulled on strand A, and reclaimed entire string.]

Image

["I'll teach you! I'll teach you to do as you're told!"
"Oh-h-h!"]

The title of this comic book is First Love

Image

["He's dead all right, professor Reid! He was strangled by some brute hands! Look at his face ... fear is written all over it!"
"But look at his mouth! His tongue ... it's been ripped out!"]

Children are first shocked and then desensitized by all this brutality.

Image

["Jeepers! I better call the cops!"]

The wish to hurt or kill couples in Lovers' Lanes is a not uncommon perversion.

Image

Stomping on the face is a form of brutality which modern children learn early.

Image

["This'll maybe help you to grow up faster'n anythin' I know about."
"Rick, you -- ouch! -- put me down! Do you hear? Put me down this instant! Oh, I've -- ouch! -- never been so insulted in my life! I'll have the sheriff on you, Rick Dennison! I'll -- I'll -- (SOB) -- Oh!"]

Erotic spanking in a Western comic book.

Image

[With plenty to offer ... ]

Indeed!

Image

[But as she bites into his neck and he feels a burning poisonous venom seeping through his veins paralizing his every muscle ... he realizes the answer to it all!]

Sex and blood.

Image

[The graphic story of boys and girls running wild in the violence-ridden slums of today!
Reform School Girl!
They succumbed to temptation!
This is the story of youth gone wrong ... and of the penalty hundreds of pretty girls have to pay when they allow themselves to fall victim to unscrupulous men, their own wayward emotions, and the other hidden pitfalls of a sensation-crazed society!]

Comic books are supposed to be like fairy tales.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Wed Dec 04, 2013 1:18 am

8. "Bumps and Bulges"

Advertising in Comic Books

"But they have raised no cry, I wonder why."
-- Countee Cullen


One is apt to forget that besides delinquent and emotionally disturbed children there are many children who are just plain unhappy. That is particularly true of adolescents. If you gain their confidence and give them a chance to talk to you under suitable circumstances you will find that one of their most frequent and serious worries has to do with the growth of their bodies.

Writing about the health problems of adolescents, Dr. J. Roswell Gallagher, one of the country's leading student-health specialists, gives first place to worries about health and development: "To the adolescent boy they are matters of vital concern. ... To be abnormal in growth or development is (to him) a very serious matter." He goes on to point out that parents and teachers often misunderstand that "among perfectly normal adolescents" there are great variations in height, weight, size and maturity from the standard average pattern.

Biologically these variations in physical development in boys and girls usually have little significance. They become worries and plague the children in their social context. Unsuitable reading, chance remarks by adults, kidding by other children, over-concern of parents, incautious remarks by doctors and so on are apt to set off worry and unhappiness over being "different" or "abnormal." Sexual maturation, mental and physical, may add associations, guilt feelings and fantasies. It is usually the same areas of the body that are involved in these worries. In boys it is the face (complexion and hair), the body build in general (muscular strength, height and weight) and the primary sexual characteristics. In girls it is the face, the general body build (fat distribution and weight) and the area of greatest psychological sensitivity, the breasts.

In psychotherapy of children with all kinds of difficulties I have found that one of the main goals has to be to raise their self-confidence. Adolescents with these hypochondriacal growth worries can be helped provided they come to the attention of an experienced adult. But for prevention, efforts directed at the individual child are not enough. Attention must be given to the adults who exploit these anxieties of children commercially.

No better method could be evolved to cause such worries or to aggravate them than the advertising in childrens' comic books. I understand that there are advertising associations or advertising councils interested in keeping products advertised, as well as the manner of their advertising, on an ethical level. If that is true, they must have looked the other way with regard to the stupendous amount of advertising in comic books. In any case, they "raised no cry." Advertising is, or could be -- quite apart from its selling aspect -- a wholesome educational influence. That in comic books is not only anti-educational, but has done untold harm to children from the point of view of public health and mental hygiene, not to speak of common human decency.

There are different types of adolescents, the Stanley Hall type, the Thomas Wolfe type and others. Whatever their social status, their native ability, they are all more or less susceptible to the worries and anxieties exploited by the scare advertisements in comic books. These advertisements are apt either to cause hypochondriasis or cater to it. In some children such hypochondriacal reactions assume serious forms. In the semipornographic, semiobscene magazines for adults sold at the newsstand, some of the same products and some of the same advertisers can be found. Sometimes the names of the firms are different, but the addresses are the same. When these advertisements are in comic books they are slanted to children and adolescents.

Advertisements in comic books have caused decent boys and girls many tears. This advertising brings the comic-book industry an enormous revenue. In the Journal of the American Medical Association Dr. Harry F. Dietrich, writing from the point of view of pediatrics, said that "parents must be shown that pimples and pounds are relatively unimportant problems." He spoke of "puerile worrying about temporary cosmetic blemishes, guilty worrying about juvenile masturbation, and competitive worrying about their children's ounces and inches" as "all this wasted emotional effort." But what chance do parents have when by mass advertising campaigns children are inveigled to worry about these very things and encouraged to keep away from doctors and secretly buy expensive, phony and sometimes harmful remedies?

I have seen a number of cases where pre-adolescents or adolescents have fallen for these advertised products which of course did not help them. The advertisements merely stimulated their hypochondriasis and increased their mental anguish. I have on different occasions openly drawn attention to this public-health violation. It is a matter which the Federal Trade Commission could have taken up. Since the claims in advertisements are often exaggerated, misleading and false, the Post Office could• have prosecuted for fraud. Nothing happened, except that the advertisements got more brazen and shameless. Only one health department, one of the biggest and best in the country. took up the matter at all. Its report stated that it found large quantities of "dangerously misleading advertisements" in comic books, and that "many thousand comic books contain ads promoting the sale of bogus patent medicines." It pointed out how these advertisements were especially directed to adolescents: "The comic books grow worse each year in accepting flagrantly misleading ads. The pity of it all is that teen-agers are very conscious of their appearance. They send for these phony-and-harmful skin cure-alls without telling their parents." Nothing was done, however, even after this outspoken confirmation of my findings by an official public health agency. The charmed existence of the comic-book industry evidently extends to its advertisements.

In order to guard youth against overconcern about skin or figure, and to help when they are plagued by fears of abnormality or ugliness, one must try to make them less self-conscious. Dr. Gallagher points out from his experience that one must assure them that there is no cause for shame. And he warns that one should not even use the word problems in this connection because it "has much too gloomy a sound."

Millions of comic books do exactly the opposite. They especially play up these very words which should be avoided. Advertising people tell me that in the profession this is called the "emotional appeal." And that is precisely what it is -- ruthlessly playing on the emotions of children. They ask children whether they are not "self-conscious" about one minor or fancied ailment or another, thereby, of course, deliberately making them self-conscious or unhappy. They promise to help them if they are "ashamed" about some little, or perhaps even nonexistent, blemish, thereby, of course, causing them to feel unnecessarily ashamed. They frighten the girls by insinuating to them that they have "problem bosoms." This phrase alone thrown at twelve- or thirteen-year-old little girls is enough to precipitate a severe and distressing hypochondriacal reaction. No wonder they are willing to spend money on all kinds of pills, ointments and gadgets!

Even girls without neurotic trends are apt to be sensitive about their breasts during and before adolescence. Some girls mature earlier than their classmates and go through agonies because they fear they are conspicuous. The opposite may of course occur, too. There are all kinds of folklore superstitions that the growth and shape of the breasts has something to do with past or future sexual life. Usually it is difficult for a woman, and much more so for an adolescent girl, to tell even a doctor about such secret preoccupations. A genuine sexual hypochondriasis may center around the breasts in very young girls, with anxiety, fear dreams, preoccupation with sex and guilt feelings.

Here is fertile soil for the comic-book "breast ads." They promise certain help for "problem bosoms," "NO MATTER WHAT SHAPE BOSOM YOU HAVE" ($5.95). A typical full-page advertisement in a comic book addressed to "Junior" has two photographs of girls, one average, the other with markedly protruding comic-book-style breasts, The caption says:

DO MEN CHOOSE MARY OR ALICE?


and goes on:

When Tom H- met Mary W- and Alice B-, folks wondered who the lucky girl would be. Both girls were pretty and charming, and grand fun, and enjoyed the same interests Tom did. But, somehow, it was Alice whose lips Tom bent to in the moonlight . . . it was Alice whose "I do" rose breathlessly at the altar ....

Tom's choice was not surprising. For it is the woman with a beautiful, alluring bust contour who most often wins the admiration, popularity and affection every woman desires. And there can be no COMPLETE feminine beauty without a warmly rounded, lovely bust contour, symbol of woman eternal. Look through history. Look around you today. It is the woman with graceful, appealing figure lines who enjoys social and romantic triumph. Yes, there are many lovely Marys whose wit, charm and friendliness cannot compete with the natural law of man's attraction to beauty fulfilled completely.

The _____ Ritual . . . may be able to improve the handicap of unappealing figure lines . . . which may mean the difference between loneliness and thrilling romantic fulfillment! Formerly $2.00 ... Don't let skepticism or discouragement deny you the opportunity for happiness ... Be fair to yourself, to your future as a woman.


One must always remember that an issue of such a comic book has an edition of hundreds of thousands of copies. In such a large number, a percentage of unfortunate girls are bound to fall for it, worry themselves sick, keep their worries a secret, and send for the advertised merchandise.

Suppose a girl does not fall for these photographs and the accompanying text. Other advertisements suggest a test even more apt to give her inferiority feelings and' make her think she is not as other girls. "BREASTS LOSING FIRMNESS?" screams another ad (on the same page on which a doll is advertised). This one promises to lift your breast "into a vital-beautiful form," It tries to persuade the adolescent girl that there are three kinds of inferiorities: first, "those with normally firm bosoms who want that added lift and separation that make the difference between an ordinary appearance and real figure beauty"; second, those whose breasts lack "firmness"; third, girls with "PROBLEM BOSOMS" ($1.98).

But maybe even these pictures, their text and the "firmness test" do not make enough girls worried. Then there are full• course lessons in hypochondriasis. In a comic book with stories of love's frustrations there is a full-page advertisement (found in many other comic books, too) with sets of photographs: "Before" and "After." The "Before" look like average girls; the "After" have noticeably protruding breasts. Accompanying these pictures are three sets of diagrams, each purporting to show profiles of women's bust lines. Any girl, of course, especially after she has been alarmed by the text, can identify herself with at least one of these diagrams and brood about the corresponding information: "SELF-CONSCIOUS ABOUT YOUR FLAT-LOOKING BUST LINE?" ($2.49). Some advertisements are especially directed to growing girls whose busts are just starting to develop and lead off with screamers: "SMALL BUST." They promise a "secret patent-pending feature" for "UNSHAPELY SMALL BUSTS." Such advertisements have caused inferiority feelings in countless children, some of whom will carry this emotional burden with them through life.

The ultrabosomy girls depicted as ideal in comic-book stories and the countless breast and figure advertisements make young girls genuinely worried long before the time of puberty. These very young girls become entrapped by the sex appeal of comic-book pictures and the "emotional appeal" of their advertisements. Laura's case is a good example. One day her mother came home unexpectedly. Laura was nine years old at that time. As her mother told it to me, "she put tissue paper inside of her dress so that she would have a bosom. She must want to grow up too fast. She wants to grow up and be fixed up beautifully." I asked Laura's mother to tell me more about the girl. "There is nothing wrong with her," she said. "She reads comic books all the time. She reads Jumbo, Archie, Jeanie, Millie the Model, also Nellie the Nurse. One day my husband picked up a comic book. He said, 'Who the h___ reads this?' I said, 'Laura does.' He said, What, all those naked women?' I said, 'Well, that is all they sell for the children, what can you do?'" The psychiatric social worker to whom I turned Laura over for guidance reported to me later that the girl had absorbed all the breast lore from comic-book pictures and advertisements.

Some adolescents, depending on their type of constitution, pass through phases of growth when they are apt to be chubby. Is that something unimportant, which most of them will outgrow? No, comic-book ads say. There are "valuable secrets on how to get the most out of your life! DISCOVER HOW TO BE HAPPY ... LOVED ... Do something positive about your unsightly superfluous fat" (tablets, $1.98).

There are other "secrets," too, to help the adolescent girl once she has become sufficiently self-conscious about her figure: belts, girdles, creams, pills, tablets, books, reducing contraptions, massage, etc. In the unending stream of advertisements it goes like this:

I lost 70 lbs. in 5 months

Lose fat fast. 10 lbs. in 10 days ($2.98)

Reduce safely ... Take off 7 lbs. the first week! Lose ugly fat now ($2.50) -- (This one is in a comic book endorsed by a psychiatrist.)

How an unhappy fat girl became a happy slim girl ... 5 lbs., 10 lbs., 20 lbs. -- even more, as many as you want! (Full month's supply, $2.00, three months', $5.00) Not sold in drugstores.


No matter what part of her body a girl may be sensitive about, skillful advertisements take care of every eventuality and scare her with the supposed ugliness and serious import of "BUMPS AND BULGES" ($2.98). Special attention is drawn to "buttocks":

You have nothing to lose but weight ($2.00)

It helps restore the right curves in the right places ($2.00)

Don't suffer humiliation and ridicule by being fat! ($2.00)

The only known food product listed in medical dictionaries as an aid in reducing! ($4.00)


Modern medicine has definite scientific knowledge about weight reduction. Expert medical authorities have clearly expostulated this knowledge to other physicians in medical journals. And in popular writings addressed to the non-medical public, it has been made available to adults. But to children we teach exactly the opposite of the well-established scientific truth.

Dr. Frank H. Krusen, chairman of the Council on Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, at the request of the Council on Foods and Nutrition, wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association, "No form of external manipulation is capable of removing adipose tissue from a particular region of the body. Massage will not reduce local deposits of fat.... " Speaking of "spot reducing," he states that the value of "these devices is absolutely nil." His article makes it perfectly clear that "there is no 'easy way' to reduce fat. Proper reduction of the intake of food is the only logical method of reducing weight."

The excellent pamphlet, "Overweight and Underweight," put out by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, contains genuinely scientific information: "Massage will not take off pounds.... There is no way to reduce safely without eating less.... No easy way is safe." Unfortunately the number of adults who read this pamphlet is infinitesimally small in comparison with the millions of children and adolescents who learn the opposite in comics advertisements:

GREATEST BENEFIT IN REDUCING BY MASSAGE

The method is so simple and so easy: NO EXERCISE OR STRICT DIETS. Scientifically designed reducer. Your own private masseur at home.

Apply over most any part of the body-stomach, hips, chest, thighs, buttocks, etc. USED BY EXPERTS. Thousands have lost weight this way. Can be used in the privacy of your own home ($8.95 plus postage)


Of course adolescents who pass through a slender growth phase are not forgotten:

Skinny Girls are NOT Glamour Girls!

Ashamed of your skinny, scrawny figure?

-- can help you to add pounds and pounds of firm attractive flesh to your figure

Checked by our medical director, a well-known New York practicing physician . . . ($2.00)

If ... you are ashamed of your skinny scrawny figure ... a doctor-approved formula ... So don't let them snicker at your skinny, scrawny figure. A skinny scarecrow figure is neither fashionable nor glamourous. Remember, the girls with the luscious seductive curves get the dates. ($2.00)

SKINNY GIRLS DON'T HAVE OOMPH!

You will want those extra pounds that "bring out" your natural eye-catching curves. Take _____ faithfully for a week. See if you can't actually feel the difference. ($2.00 plus C.O.D. charges)


Some perfume advertisements try to make girls anxious and discouraged. "Do people talk about you? Are you alone? Unhappy? Discouraged? Are you a girl who just can't seem to find the right man?" (Gossip perfume, $2.00 plus postage). Others stimulate girls to erotic fantasies and arouse sadistic-masochistic wishes: "Do you want to make men obey you? ... Do you want to make him obey your every command? (Chez-Elle perfume, $2.00 plus postage).

Or:

Dear Friend: ... the same double power she used when she took a husband away from his wife or a sweetheart away from the arms of his loved one ... (Diablo's secret perfume, $3.00 plus postage)

Men killed each other just for her favors and when she beckoned men leaped to obey ... (Fury perfume, $3.00 plus postage)

Can you make strong men weak? Do you dream of THRILLING moments of LOVE and ECSTASY? ... Let Blue Passion help bring him into your arms ... (Blue Passion perfume, $2.00 plus postage)

All my life I dreamed that some day I would find a perfume that would raise a man's ardor ... (Man-Trap perfume, $2.00 plus postage)


Skin conditions are another field for comic-book scare advertisements. Acne. pimples, blackheads and complexion troubles of all kinds are a cause for worry, inferiority feelings, anxiety and, on account of superstitious beliefs, guilt feelings about sex. This effect they are apt to have not only on insecure children, but on the rank and file of children in general. "Acne affects adolescents at the time of life when their appearance is of most importance to them," writes Dr. Marion Sulzberger. "It often produces feelings of inferiority and psychologic and emotional damage which may be permanent and which often color later life." The main trouble with these mild skin conditions is that they upset people, especially children, so seriously. Comic-book advertisements do all that they can to make boys and girls extremely self-conscious about their skin, and to feel miserable when there is the slightest blemish. They promise instant, miraculous cures.

A full page advertisement begins with this dialogue:

"Ask your friend Tom."

Tom, why don't Sis and I get invited to proms and parties?"

"Frankly, Jim, it's those ugly blackheads."


Then follows the indoctrination with fears and shame:

What a "black mark" is the blackhead ... according to men and girls popular enough to be choosy about dates!

"Nobody's dreamboat!" "Nobody's date bait!" And that's not all that's said of those who are careless about blackheads. But blackheads ARE ugly! Blackheads ARE grimy! And they DON'T look good in close-ups!

So can you blame the fellow who says, "Sure, I meet lots of girls who look cute at first glance. But if, on that second glance, I see dingy black -- it's good night!"

Or can you blame the girl who confesses, "I hate to go out with a fellow who has blackheads, if he's careless about that you're sure he'll embarrass you in other ways, too!"

But you -- are YOUR ears burning? Well, you've company, and, sad to say, good company. There are lots of otherwise attractive fellows and girls who could date anyone they like if they'd only realize how offensive blackheads are and how easily and quickly they could get rid of them, If they want to! ... The "he-man" who's also clean-cut, will get the breaks wherever he is! . . . Even cute girls get careless.... So don't take chances, cute though you may be!


Another statement in the advertising is, "Those ugly blackheads give others such a wrong impression of you!" Some boys take this as a reference to masturbation and react with worry, guilt feelings and withdrawal. The advertised cure is to use a gadget to extract blackheads mechanically ($1.00).

Children read these skin ads very closely. A fourteen-year-old girl said in the Clinic, "I had one pimple once. I read all about it in the pimple ads. I wondered how it would come out if I put something on it." Many boys and girls have more pimples and buy the "remedies" on the strength of such advertisements as these:

Your good qualities -- intelligence, character, dignity -- all go to nought, are completely cancelled out by a skin that nobody loves to touch ... To remove the distressing embarrassment of these skin blemishes ... ($1.98)


Many of the advertisements give the children the impression that buying such a product is like going to a doctor, thereby keeping them away from real medical advice which might either reassure them quickly or really help them. For example, a big ad directed to girls concerned about pimples says:

STOP Losing Your Chances for Dates ...

It's so easy that a few weeks from today you won't believe your mirror! ... PLANNED BY DOCTOR. ($2.00)


A full-page advertisement with four pictures of schoolboys and girls starts with a blazing headline:

I WAS ASHAMED OF MY FACE

"I just want to be alone!" ... The skin doctor's formula ... works wonders ... ($2.00 plus postage)

Now while the memory of prying eyes deepens your misery ... save your present and your future ... Special Note to Girls ... Embarrassed by periodic pimples? ($2.00)


Some children get so worried about acne and the repeated failure of the costly comic-book cures that they withdraw socially to such an extent that they look like -- and have been diagnosed as -- incipient schizophrenia. The unwary physician who does not remember that one has to gain a youngster's confidence first and make the diagnosis afterwards may fall into this error. I have seen a number of such cases of skin-sex hypochondriasis. All examinations and tests ruled out schizophrenia. A high school student was presented to me at the Clinic by one of my assistants with a history of liking to be by himself and brooding. He had been previously diagnosed as incipient schizophrenia. I elicited that what he had were not irrational worries, but very understandable and comic-book-ad inspired ones: "Ever since I was getting out of public school I worried about it [acne]. I read the full-page ads in the comic books and I did what they said, but it didn't help. There are times when I withdraw completely. I can see myself standing there in front of the mirror. I scratched this -- I can't remember ... [weeps]."

A thirteen-year-old girl showed me an advertisement which made her deeply concerned about some minor cosmetic blemish. It has a big photograph of a girl, her head lowered on her arms, her face contorted, evidently from crying, a handkerchief clutched in one hand. Above it in enormous capitals:

STOP crying about PIMPLES

($3.00 plus postage charges)


Concern about hair is not overlooked in comic-book ads:

Here is thrilling new hope. Do you want longer hair? ... Your hair to become softer, silkier, more lustrous than it has been before -- in just one short week! ... ($1.00)


Advertisements for boys cover different areas, but appeal to the same kind of susceptibility to juvenile hypochondriasis as those for girls. The concern of boys with growth and body build is exploited in advertisements illustrated with photographs of supermuscular he-men (often with big genitals like some of the comic-book heroes). I have seen a number of cases of boys who were developing more slowly than some of their friends, who were only mildly concerned about it until comics ads made them feel downright ashamed. These advertisements go like this:

How to Make YOUR Body Bring You FAME instead of SHAME! Are You Skinny? Weak? Flabby? ... I know what it means to have the kind of body that people pity! ... I don't care how old or young you are or how ashamed of your present physical condition ... I can shoot new strength into your old backbone ... help you cram your body so full of pep, vigor and vitality that you won't feel there's even standing room left for weakness and that lazy feeling! ...


A full-page advertisement illustrated with photos of muscular he-men says:

From a SKINNY WEAKLING to a MIGHTY MAN ...

I gained 53 lbs. of MIGHTY MUSCLE. 6-1/2 inches on my CHEST; 3 inches on each ARM. You can do it in 10 minutes a day!


Presently the same advertisement appeared (December, 1953) in a super-endorsed comic book with a public service page of the National Social Welfare Assembly. Now "Skinny" gains "70 lbs." of mighty muscle, his chest grows "7 inches" and his arms "3-1/2 inches each"!

The large art photos of male nudes wearing only scanty trunks are a special comic-book feature. Of course there are boys who look at them admiringly because they are interested in body development. But he must be an inexperienced psychologist indeed who does not know that these photos of supermales serve also other purposes. Boys with latent (and sometimes not so latent) homosexual tendencies collect these pictures, cut them out and use them for sexual stimulation. One of my patients started to cut out these photos at the age of eleven. One ordinary children's comic has no less than fifteen such photographs!

Many children get hurt in two ways by these he-man ads: They get disappointed when they do not get results, and they get homoerotic fantasies from the photographs. One ten-year-old boy was treated at the Clinic because he had prostituted himself to men. He looked a little too small for his age. He told us how he studied comic-book ads to correct this: "I have one of those books at home. It is no good. I got several. I started doing it for thirty-five days and nothing happened. I tried it for my arm -- you know, 'mighty arms.' I thought I could be strong, but it didn't work. All I did was keep the pictures of the wrestlers and boxers and photographs of strong men and muscle men."

Comic-book advertisements give children the idea of scrutinizing themselves in a mirror, to look for anything they should worry about. One ad has a big balloon:

Hey SKINNY! Yer ribs are showing!


and continues farther down the page:

When you look in the mirror ... practice in the privacy of your own room ... just watch your scrawny chest and shoulder muscles begin to swell ... those spindly arms and legs of yours bulge ...!


Some of these advertisements hint at worries and guilt feelings based on the superstitiously supposed effects of masturbation.

BUNK! Nobody is just naturally skinny! Girls snickered at me behind my back. Are you always tired? Nervous? Lacking in confidence? Constipated? Suffering from bad breath? Do you want to gain weight?


Another ad advising you how to become "an all-around HE-MAN" says "Prove it to yourself in one night!"

Emphasis on the region of the "crotch" in some ads directs attention to a similar line of thought, as do "supporter" ads ($2.98) and remedies for "itching" which "may go ... to the crotch of the legs." ($1.00). It is not only a fraudulent claim, but an invitation to sexual hypochondriasis when an ad says:

Do the best science knows for you to do to GROW MORE VIRILE HAIR IN 30 DAYS.


For all these artificially created or aggravated inferiority feelings, the comic-book ads offer one emotional outlet: overcompensation in brutality. Under the thin disguise of self-defense, full-page ads are permitted to tell millions of children:

I BROKE HIS HAND LIKE A MATCH!

It was easy! He was helpless. He howled with pain! ... Method of Offensive Defense, based on natural, instinctive impulse-action ... Smashing, crashing, bone-shattering, nerve-paralyzing method ... 70 BONE-BREAKING SECRETS . . . ($1.00 -- formerly sold at $5.00)


Besides all these "health," body building, complexion, "bumps-and-bulges," he-man and brutality advertisements there is a stupendous amount of advertising which deserves to be called a childhood armament program. Comic-book advertisements use any device known to advertising writers to fascinate children with weapons. Children have been supplied with arms through these comic-book ads or have learned from them how to make their own weapons, some of them deadly. In one radio discussion about comic books the time-worn argument was raised that Grimm's fairy tales are violent, too. John K. M. McCaffery, newscaster and literary critic, interposed that he had seen lots of weapons advertised in comic books, but had yet to see an edition of Grimm's fairy tales with advertisements of crossbows.

In millions of comic books, ads make all kinds of weapons attractive to children. There are premiums for boys and girls "consisting of genuine .22 cal. rifles" (of course, with an illustration of the rifle). This is a deadly weapon and only the other day a fourteen-year-old boy killed an eighteen-year-old with one of them.

All kinds of "toy" guns and pistols are advertised in comic books. A typical advertisement has a big picture of a gun:

Amazing new gun. Shoots like a real gun.


An accompanying sequence teaches how the gun might be used to threaten people:

You fooled us, kid, I thought that gun was a real one!


Other guns can be transformed into dangerous weapons. An eleven-year-old boy who knew his way around told me about one of them: "They can make it snap faster with an elastic. They shoot little round pebbles. You get the pebbles from puzzles they sell in stores. They fall in little holes when the puzzles are jiggled around."

A great role in the advertising is played by B.B. and air guns. Some shoot B.B.'s, some, steel darts. They are considered harmless by some people -- but not by children who have been injured or by those who have lost an eye when shot by them.

Medical journals and public agencies have drawn attention to the many serious eye accidents from B.B. and air guns. I inquired of one public agency, which knew of a number of cases blinded by these weapons, what they were going to do about it. They answered that they were "planning a campaign to reach all children in school about the horrors of B.B. guns." Dr. James B. Bain, of Washington, D.C., reports twenty-nine eye injuries, in five of which an eye had to be removed -- all caused by B.B. guns in one single year in Washington alone. As reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Society for the Prevention of Blindness of the District of Columbia reports nine B.B. eye injuries in three months and asks for laws prohibiting the sale of B.B. guns to children under eighteen: "The only effective way of preventing these injuries is to ban the sale, use and possession of air guns."

According to statistics from 421 hospitals all over the country, reported by Pathfinder, there were from Christmas, 1949, through January, 1950, 275 air gun injuries; 164 of them were eye injuries, with permanent impairment of vision in sixty-four and eye removal in twenty-five. Philadelphia pioneered with a humane ordinance banning air guns. The results were spectacular, a lesson to those who do not realize that progress in preventive medicine is helped by laws. Where there had been seventeen air rifle eye injuries treated at Wills Hospital in Philadelphia in the short survey period, in the twenty-five months following enactment of the ordinance there was only one. A similar observation was made in Pittsburgh, where in 1951 an eye injury from B.B. guns occurred once every twelve days; when the use of these guns was restricted there was only one such injury in 1952. No wonder that the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness suggested in 1953 an ordinance, which among other things would prevent the sale of air guns to minors.

All this is a good illustration of the social problems of comic books: On the one hand adults and children are warned against these guns; at the same time glamorous advertisements in comics seduce more and more children into wanting, buying and using them. Children's real interests seem to count for little. While the experts in ophthalmology know the danger of these guns and have advocated the only real method of prevention, there are experts in child psychiatry and education who do not draw the line at endorsing comic books which have ads with big pictures of these guns:

Strap this sweet-shootin' -- on your bike ... Only $6.95

Shoot regular steel BBs ... ($6.95)


Dr. William C. Menninger has called the pre-adolescent period "the golden age for mental hygiene." It seems also to be the "golden age" for comic-book publishers, advertisers and experts. Text, pictures and medical endorsements blend to lead both child and parent astray. Take a 1953 endorsed comic book which contains the story of "Superman when he was Superboy." It has a full-page colored advertisement for an air rifle in which a newspaper editor says about an air rifle program: "The police like the idea -- so does the school superintendent -- so do the ministers." The ophthalmologists do not!

After one of the instances when a boy was killed in an adolescent gang fight, John E. Cone, chief of the Kings County District Attorney's homicide bureau, made a full investigation which verified my findings on comic-book advertising. He reported:

"We collected a veritable arsenal of home-made weapons, switch-blade knives, milk can handles converted into brass knuckles, and so forth. We found out pretty much of their ideas were obtained from comic books. For instance, in one book a lad showed us how to change a converted cap gun into a lethal weapon. And these lads also purchased a number of guns as a result of the advertisements contained in these crime comic books. Many times they will say that comic books are for adult consumption, whereas actually the advertisements would never appeal to an adult."

Knives of different kinds are advertised in comic books, too. How far has the armament program for children progressed in the knife category? A search of a single school yielded 141 knives! The attitude of the authorities towards knives in the hands of children seems to be this: Let's permit adults to advertise and sell to juveniles as many knives as possible; then, when they buy and use them let's punish the juveniles as severely as possible. In some neighborhoods detectives and policemen have been instructed to bring to the station house any youth who carries weapons. Weekly checks for dangerous weapons in places where children are apt to meet have been announced. A national magazine had an article about the dangers of switchblade knives sold to and used by children, with the rather cynical comment that the toll up to now was "relatively small -- a few dozen children killed, somewhat more wounded." This article concluded: "Don't let your son be smart-alecky about a knife. De-glamorize knife-carrying to him." What possible good can such suggestions do when at the same time enticing comic-book advertisements offer these very switchblade knives for sale to even the youngest child? And while the ads supply the knives, the stories describe their use for skilled violence. You see the young boy, with his hand in his pocket where the switchblade knife is carried, talking to a grown-up. Suddenly he whips out the knife (and you see the exact way to hold it, with your thumb on the button): "Make a move and I'll whittle you down to half my size!"

Despite the facts that according to police authorities switchblade knives are "one of the worst weapons out," that their sale to children under sixteen is forbidden, that in New York alone teen-agers and switchblade knives were involved in some one thousand stabbings, that switchblade-wielding teen-agers have been held in bail of $100,000 each, millions of comic books carry illustrated advertisements:

"FLINGS OPEN FAST." "Big size! Only $1.65."


Juvenile gangs sometimes spring up quickly. Gang leaders have told me about the problem of arming them. Here comic-book advertising has proved a great help. A full-page advertisement offers a:

10-PIECE KNIFE SET

8-inch blade roast slicer
8-inch blade ham slicer
7-inch blade butcher knife
5-inch blade sandwich knife
4-inch blade vegetable knife
4-inch blade utility knife
3-inch blade paring knife
4-inch blade grapefruit knife
8-inch sharpeningknife


The question of the kitchen-set knife ads came up several times in Hookey Club sessions. Once a thirteen-year-old boy said, "This knife set in the comic books is disguised as a kitchen set, but of course the kids immediately know what to use them for. They buy them and split them up. In the schools where I was, the boys use them. They have straps and strap them on their legs. See the point there? They specify the point so that you know how you can use it. But they make out it is for meat! Naturally the boys are not going to buy them for cutting meat and so forth!"

One type of advertisement I call the "arsenal ad." It consists of a whole page of illustrations and text offering guns, pistols, rifles, throwing-knives, leather whips, slingshots, fencing-sets and other useful toys for children of the comic-book era. Police have found whole arsenals of weapons in children's hiding-places and traced some of the arms back to these ads.

Comic books have other dubious advertisements of miscellaneous character. I have examined and treated a number of youths after they had been arrested for prowling about trying to look in windows to see women undressing. Most of them were rather harmless and responded readily to common-sense forms of psychotherapy and guidance. One of them told me about "peeping Tom ads" in comics and other boys confirmed their suggestive significance. There are telescope ads, for example, offering: "Real power and up-close clear view! A 1,000 thrills are yours with this powerful imported telescope. Enjoy life! ... Bring some scenes so close you feel you can touch them!" Another advertisement, for binoculars:

You'll get the thrill of a lifetime when you take your first look through these powerful binoculars. It's positively amazing how well you can see ... You'll be able to see people and wild life from a distance and watch what they're doing when they can't see you. Enjoy front row seats from way back!


Boys in New York, Boston or Chicago who buy these binoculars are well aware that there is no "wild life" on city streets. They also know what else these optical instruments can be used for. Some ads point this out:

... Bring in distant people with amazing clarity and sharp detail ... See without being seen ... ($3.94)


In some ads it is especially pointed out that you can look into "neighbors' homes" and the illustrated telescope points to a half-nude girl.

Many "human relations ads" are not exactly helpful to juveniles. One is for a course for boys on getting along with girls:

It's Easy to Win Her! Women are funny -- Put psychology to work. No more clumsy mistakes for you ... Don't be a Faux pas!


This last phrase would indicate that the retooling for illiteracy has made headway even among advertising copywriters!

There are courses for girls on how to handle boys, too:

Learn once and for all how to get along with men in this amazing handbook


Comic-book stories teach violence, the advertisements provide the weapons. The stories instill a wish to be a superman, the advertisements promise to supply the means for becoming one. Comic-book heroines have super-figures; the comic-book advertisements promise to develop them. The stories display the wounds; the advertisements supply the knives. The stories feature scantily clad girls; the advertisements outfit peeping Toms.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:39 pm

PART 1 OF 2

9. The Experts for the Defense

The Scientific Promotion of Comic Books

"But when you notice the intent, You are dismayed at what is meant."
-- Schiller


The direct effect of comic books on children through their pictures, text and advertisements is reinforced by an indirect influence: endorsements and writings of experts. They affect the child through parents, teachers, doctors, clergymen, adults in general and public opinion.

The comics industry took hold of the minds of children unobserved. Those whose function it would have been to watch what happens to children took no notice of comic books, or if they did, regarded them as trivial; at any rate, did not read them. When through sporadic cases it came out that comic books had harmed children, the conquest of American childhood by the industry was already an accomplished fact. The children, many of them despite guilt feelings, accepted the comic books, and the adults, many of them against their better judgment, accepted the opinions of the experts.

The experts for the defense function primarily on two fronts: first, to counteract the healthy reaction of parents against crime comics in all their disguises; secondly, to combat the criticism voiced by professional people once they begin to look at samplings of comic books children have been reading for years. The activity of these experts for the defense came in two waves. One, in the early forties, followed the disclosure of what comic books really are by the literary critic, Sterling North. The second, in 1948, came after I first presented the results of my studies of comic books in Washington and demonstrated their actual sadistic marrow. These two peaks are well documented by the two special comic-book issues of the Journal of Educational Sociology, both edited by Professor Harvey Zorbaugh of New York University's School of Education. Their special pleading in the guise of "dispassionate scrutiny" represented an all-time low in American science. But as publicity for comic books these issues were well-timed and immensely successful.

From magazines, newspapers and the radio, and from the endorsements on so many comic books, one may get the wrong impression that there are many scientific experts defending comic books. Actually the brunt of the defense is borne by a mere handful of experts. Their names occur over and over again. They are connected with well-known institutions, such as universities, hospitals, child-study .associations or clinics. That carries enormous weight with professional people and, of course, even more so with casual lay readers and parents all over the country.

In their actual effect the experts for the defense represent a team. This, of course, docs not mean that they work as a team. They work individually. But their way of reasoning, their apologetic attitude for the industry and its products, their conclusions -- and even their way of stating them -- are much alike. So it is possible to do full justice to them by discussing them as a team rather than individually. There is little danger of quoting them out of context, for what they have to say is so cut and dried that one quotation from the writing of one expert fits just as well into that of another.

Of course they contradict one another occasionally, or contradict themselves between one paper and another. That is not really their fault, but part of the impossible thesis they defend. One expert who has endorsed an enormous number of crime comics, for example, will point out the great vital appeal they have for children, while another proclaims that "crime comics are read mostly by adults." One writes: "Comic-book readers like their comics in large doses," while another is proclaiming that "an excess of this reading suggests a need for deeper study not of the reading, but of the child." Or one will say that comic-book stories are only fantasy and the children know it, while another is saying of comic-book characters, "To their readers they are real flesh and blood people." Or, to take an example of self-contradiction from a rather sketchy article by another of the experts: He writes that only 36 per cent of adults unqualifiedly approve of comic books as reading for children and that the objections refer to the most serious areas a parent can be concerned about, the "danger to character and mental health." Despite this, he draws the contradictory conclusion that "on the whole American adults approve the comics as a medium of entertainment for children."

One expert writes about the fact that children, while they may neglect their other possessions, "hardly ever deface or lose a comic book. These books are treasured, they are objects of barter, they become collector's items," Another expert writes that the fact that comic books are "cheap publications which may be destroyed or bartered without compunction makes the comics comparable to stories told by storytellers of old," In other words facts do not make much difference to these experts; comic books are good anyhow.

The question of why children become excessive crime-comics readers is also answered both ways by the experts. On the one hand they say that this excessive reading is, in each individual child, the sign of a separate disease, On the other hand, they state with equal confidence that it is part of the normal stages of childhood. Actually, of course, the stages of childhood do not unfold automatically, independent of social influences. Excessive comic-book reading is an adult-induced condition, to which, for a number of reasons, some children are more susceptible than others, although none is immune.

Comic books, one expert writes, "may be used as an introduction to reading of the originals -- particularly of the Bible." Another team-expert will inadvertently admit the opposite, that "one of the most unfortunate things about comic books is that ... children are not so apt to read better books which might of course influence them to higher ideals."

The names of experts for the defense and of the institutions with which they are connected have been printed in millions of comic books and/or full-page comic-book advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post and the Saturday Review of Literature and/or in statements by the publishers or their spokesmen. The chairman of the Section of Criminal Law of the American Bar Association, commenting on the writers in the two special comic-book issues of the Journal of Educational Sociology, found it "disappointing" that in a "purportedly objective study" experts do "not make a complete disclosure of their interests." He further mentions that when he wrote to one of the experts to enquire about this, "she did not respond." [1]

In quoting experts for the defense in this chapter I am referring to those specifically mentioned in the Kefauver Report as having or having had connections with the industry. There are, of course, sporadic experts who have defended comic books without any such connection. I do not consider them as members of the defense-team.

Speaking in a very different connection of "impartial" studies made by experts economically connected with an industry, the Commissioner of Investigation of the City of New York has taken the view that such studies should be discounted: "You do not bite the hand that feeds you." The New York State Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comics, in seeking the opinions on crime comics from a wide variety of experts, including psychiatrists, judges and educators, discounted testimony by any of these team-experts. This may well be a proper attitude to take in order to ascertain the true facts for judicial or legislative purposes. But since I was carrying out a scientific investigation I took a different course, and studied all the team-experts carefully as if their opinions had been expressed gratis. I cannot agree with some of the experts that the fact that comic books are so widely read proves them to be all right. To my mind it only shows that they are deserving of study. In the same way, I do not believe that because the opinions of the experts for the defense are so well circulated, they must be all right. To me that indicates that they, also, are a proper object of study.

As my inquiry proceeded, I wanted continuously to criticize my own conclusions in the light of the opposing views. So I took all the experts very seriously, at least until I had analyzed their arguments. The devil can quote scripture for his purpose. What would these experts quote? I found them mentioning Aristotle, Freud and the brothers Grimm. According to Newsweek's "Platform," "at least half of all comic books" in 1949 "were devoted entirely to crime or supermen, in their assorted guises." (In actual copies read, the number is much larger, and by 1954 the proportion was very much higher.) Can there be any scientific theories to justify that? Paid partisanship is not the complete answer. The influence of the experts for the defense is to be explained not only by the fact that the public is being misinformed about comic books, but that it is exposed to wrong ideas about children. On that soil both comic books and their experts flourish. So the little comic book, with its pictures, text and advertisements and expert endorsers is an indicator of a generalized reaction of society.

The writings and speeches of the experts for the defense have many features in common. They always shy away from telling what is actually in comic books, what the plots are, what the characters really say and do. They do not want to call attention to the books, they prefer to put all the blame on the child, or his mother. As one of them writes in one of those "neutral" articles in a national magazine: "We must look not at the comics but at the child." Why should I as a doctor look only at the child and "not at the comics"? Why not look at both? This same expert notes, not without sarcasm, that comic books "grew to considerable dimensions before the 'guardians of our culture' were aroused by them." But should not the guardians of our children have been aroused first?

Here is an example to show how impossible it is to get any idea of what comic books really are from these writings by defense experts. In an article on comic books widely circulated by the Child Study Association of America, purporting to be a "survey" of the whole comic-book field, only the following titles of comic books are even mentioned:

1) Superman (whose publisher employs the writer of the pamphlet)

2) Mickey Mouse

3) Donald Duck

4) Mutt and Jeff

5) Moby Dick

6) Three Musketeers

7) True Comics

8) Blondie

9) Li'l Abner

10) Jungle Comics (described with the classical understatement that "sometimes women are featured in these stories, as captives or intended victims")

This is supposed to be a survey! One need only glance at any newsstand to discover that the most important part has been left out. This misrepresentation goes so far that the same expert writes, "There is a considerable amount of humor in the comics" (she means comic books) and she tries to make parents believe that the sexy wenches in the jungle books are just "fair maidens"!

The experts for the defense do not tell you what children get out of these stories, either, what they actually say, what is reflected from comic books in their minds. Instead they write about the good things that comic books are supposed to have done, be doing or will do in the future, about how educational they are or could be, and to what good uses they could be put. One states, for example, "History is often a dull subject. ... Through comics it could be made a fascinating study. ... American history would become a popular study in school.... " Unquestionably it is fascinating to learn that George Washington needed the help of Superboy to cross the Delaware. But do you want to direct the child's attention to the personality of the father of American democracy or to the exploits of a uniformed superman-youth? Similarly, it must be admitted that a lesson about anthropoid apes is less "dull" when accompanied by a picture of the animal about to rape a girl.

Pooh-poohing their bad effects, one expert points out that he knows a hospital where "comic books are used specifically to calm down troublesome" juveniles. He does not mention that this is the only psychiatric hospital in the country where troublesome juveniles sent there for observation and treatment got so out of hand that the police had to be called to "calm them down."

The team-experts like the word deep. It occurs over and over again in their writings, e.g. "the appeal of comic books is deeply rooted in our emotional nature." They use this word as an answer to any objection that is raised. The reply that things are "deep" or "deeper" or "far deeper" is supposed to answer everything. In one short paper the word occurs four times: "The motivation toward unsocial acts lies much deeper than any casual contact with ideas on a printed page"; the language habits of children "derive from deeply rooted home and school standards and not from any casual contact with any entertainment medium"; these "comic book characters are deeply human"; only if a child is "in deep emotional conflict he may be further burdened or disturbed by his comics reading."

One hopes to find in these writings at least one case where a comic-book addict seemed to be adversely influenced by comics in which it was proved that not comic books but something "deep" was the real cause. But in all the writings of the experts I found not a single case like this. Instead there are again and again flat statements like this: "the roots of delinquency and crime are far deeper," or "... the roots of [the] difficulties lie in ... his life ... rather than in the storybooks that he reads." Who then has gone to the root of the problem? One expert tells us: "Superman strikes at the root of juvenile delinquency" and apparently this is "deep" enough.

Those who have studied comic books seriously know that comic books have to be differentiated from newspaper comic strips. Dr. Richmond Barbour, director of guidance of the city schools of San Diego, writes: "The easiest way to study abnormal psychology these days is to read the unfunny crime comic books. Don't mistake them for the comic strips your paper prints. Papers wouldn't dream of printing the stuff.... " Yet the experts in their writings speak unspecifically of "comics" and seem to be trying to mix comic books with newspaper comic strips, much to public confusion.

Without exception all these experts have in common one trait that is not in agreement with the best established usage of scientific writing. If a scientist wishes to prove that a special virus is not the cause of a virus disease, it is obligatory that he at least refer to the literature which says the opposite. But these comic-book experts continuously quote each other and try to bury in complete silence some of the studies that have been made demonstrating the harmfulness of comic books. So it is necessary to get acquainted with samples of this literature which are never mentioned.

Dr. George E. Reed, director of a large psychiatric hospital affiliated with McGill University, in a paper read before the American Psychiatric Association, reported on a study of the effect of comic books on normal children from seven to fourteen. He proceeded in a strictly scientific manner, using among other procedures a "game technique." He determined the latent as well as manifest meaning of the pictures to the child. It is noteworthy that his observations were made before crime comics came to full bloom in the blood-and-bra formula. In contrast to the experts for the defense, Dr. Reed said what the comic books are about: "Violence is the continuous theme, not only violence to others but in the impossible accomplishments of the heroes, heroines and animals." He found undue stress on superdevelopment of hero and heroine: "... any variation from this 'norm' is the subject of suspicion, ridicule or pity." He noted that "distorted educational data are common"; that "direct action" by the hero is "superior to the dumb and incompetent police"; that race hatred is taught: "... foreigners are all criminals"; that "scantily clad females [are] man-handled or held in a position of opisthotonos [exaggerated intercourse-like position]." It was his opinion that juvenile delinquency is in part dependent on environment and that "comic books are of increasing importance as a part of children's environment." With regard to sexual development he drew this important conclusion: "The repeated visualization of women being treated violently by men can do nothing but instill an ambivalent emotional attitude in the child toward heterosexual contacts." In other words, he pointed to a profound disturbance of normal psychosexual development of children through the medium of comic books. As a result of his studies he regarded it as "fallacious" to consider comic books as a substitute for mythology or folklore, or to regard them as a normal emotional outlet for normal children. In vain will you look for any mention of this carefully weighed psychiatric report in any of the writings of the team-experts professing to express both sides and enlighten the public.

Sister Mary Clare, a trained and experienced teacher, published a study of the effect of comic books on children under eleven. She found that the innocuous comic books of the humorous and animal type that parents know about form "an insignificant minority." She found that comic books have "their greatest appeal during the years when the children's ideals are being formed, that is, from 3 or 4 to 12." She sums up the relation of comic books to delinquency: "Children want to put into action what they have learned in their comics: thinking they can have the thrill that is theirs only vicariously as they read. Sometimes they set out to imitate the hero or heroine, sometimes it is the criminal type that appeals, and of course they are sure that they will not fail as the criminals did in the magazine story, for 'getting caught' is the only disgrace they recognize." She deplores particularly the harm comic books do to children's eyes. Another effect of comics on young children is excessive daydreaming along unhealthy lines. One of her observations is that "scenes of crime, fighting and other acts of violence are "among the items most noted and best remembered by even the youngest children." She relates this to her finding that in adventure comic books there is a "disproportionate emphasis on crime, sadism and violence."

One of her cases highlights what comic books do to the minds of many children. She asked a nine-year-old boy which comic book he liked best and he answered without hesitation: "Human Torture."

"You mean 'Human Torch,' don't you?"

"No," he said positively, "Human Torture."

Dr. B. Liber, experienced psychiatrist and author of a textbook of psychiatry, states that "abnormal thinking and behavior may be due to other causes as well, but the comic books contribute their share." He cites the case of a nine-year-old boy: "His gestures with arms and legs and his motions with his entire body illustrated the crimes which he feared and enjoyed at the same time -- 'strangling is like this and like this...'" This boy described his fears and thrills: "Then there is the natives. They tear a guy apart. In two halves ... I like the Superman. . . . I like stabbing a tiger ... I like Nero fiddling Rome with some fire." Dr. Liber sums up his opinion like this: "The problem of the comic books has not been solved and will not be as long as somebody can make much money through their existence and popularity. Their source is fiendishness, viciousness, greed and stupidity. And their effect is foolishness, mental disturbance and cruelty."

A sociologist, Harold D. Eastman, carried out an analysis of some five hundred comic books and with the aid of his sociology students studied several hundred high school pupils from three high schools, thirty-five children at the fourth-grade level, pupils from a rural school and inmates of two institutions for the treatment of juvenile delinquents. In experiments with the fourth-grade children he found that over half of them wanted to play the part of the villain. As far as the relationship of comic-book reading to delinquency is concerned, he found that crime comics and generally not acceptable comics were "the most desired reading for the juvenile delinquents." Crime comic books were listed as first choice by more than 90 per cent of the inmates of both institutions for delinquents. With regard to the question of imitation he cited the case of a fourteen-year-old high school girl who stated that "she didn't like comic books because her boy friend read them all the time and tried to make love to her as he imagined Superman would do it and she didn't like that at all."

He analyzed ten comic-book heroes of the Superman type according to criteria worked out by the psychologist Gordon W. Allport and found that all of them "may well be designated as psychopathic deviates."

In another study, by Mary Louisa McKinney, who has studied comic books and lectured to PTA groups in Tennessee, the reactions to comic books of seventy-five children aged ten, eleven and twelve were studied. There were some who spent up to fifty hours a week on them. Her outstanding finding was that although children realized that comic books made their "pleasant dreams turn bad," they kept on reading them.

What do the experts for the defense have to say? We can disregard their remarks that there are comic books which are read only by adults. One expert herself admits that "wherever there are comic books you will most certainly find children."

The experts say children do not imitate what they see in comic books. As Governor Smith used to say, let us look at the record:

1) A boy of six wrapped himself in an old sheet and jumped from a rafter. He said he saw that in a comic book.

2) A twelve-year-old boy was found hanged by a clothesline tossed over a rafter. His mother told the jury that she thought he re-enacted a scene from comic books which he read incessantly. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death and scored comic books.

3) A boy was found dead in the bathroom, wearing a Superman costume. He had accidentally strangled himself while trying to walk on the walls of the room like his hero.

4) A boy of ten accidentally hanged himself while playing ''hanging."

5) A fourteen-year-old boy was found hanging from a clothesline fastened over a hot-water heating pipe on the ceiling. Beside him was a comic book open to a page showing the hanging of a man. The chief of police said, "I think the comic-book problem can't be solved by just a local police ban. It will require something bigger."

6) A ten-year-old boy was found hanging from a door hook, suspended by his bathrobe cord. On the floor under his open hand lay a comic book with this cover: a girl on a horse with a noose around her neck, the rope tied to a tree. A man was leading the horse away, tightening the noose as he did so. The grief-stricken father said, "The boy was happy when I saw him last. So help me God, I'll be d___ if I ever allow another comic book in the house for the kids to read!"

7) A boy of eleven was found hanged from a rope in the bathroom. He had the habit of acting out stories he had read in comic books.

8) A boy of thirteen was found hanged in the garage. On the floor was a comic book showing a hanging.

9) A boy of twelve was found hanging from a clothesline in a woodshed. On the floor was a stack of comic books.

10) A ten-year-old boy was found unconscious, hanging from a second story balcony. He got the idea from a comic book he had been reading.

11) A boy died after swinging in a noose from a tree. He had tried to show another boy "how people hang themselves." The City Council denounced the "mind-warping" influence of comic books.

12) An eight-year-old boy jumped from a second-floor fire escape "like Superman" and broke both his wrists.

One conclusion of the experts that has been widely accepted is that, as one of them puts it, comic books "are really the folklore of today," or that what is in them "is the folklore of the times, spontaneously given to and received by children ..." This seems to be a disarming argument. But is it true?

What is folklore? The term was introduced over a hundred years ago by the British scientist W. G. Thoms. It is now used in many other languages. Authorities seem to agree on the definition of folklore as "the oral poetic creations of broad masses of people." Folklore has intimate connections with other arts, from dances to folk plays and songs. In the history of mankind folklore has played an important role. It is one of the fountains of wisdom and of literature. Many writers -- among them the greatest, such as Shakespeare and Goethe -- have drawn on it. It does not require much thought to realize that comic books are just the opposite. They are not poetic, not literary, have no relationship to any art, have as little to do with the American people as alcohol, heroin or marihuana, although many people take them, too. They are not authentic creations of the people, but are planned and concocted. They do not express the genuine conflicts and aspirations of the people, but are made according to a cheap formula. Can you imagine a future great writer looking for a figure like Prometheus, Helena or Dr. Faustus among the stock comic-book figures like Superman, Wonder Woman or Jo-Jo, the Congo King?

When children act out comics stories, the results are destructive. But children's real nature comes to the fore when they are given the chance to act out stories from genuine folklore and children's folk tales. Frances C. Bowen has shown this in her wonderful Children's Educational Theater at Johns Hopkins University. "Overly exuberant children," she found, "learn to be co-operative and find a wholesome outlet for their energies."

Another statement by a comic-book expert that has gained wide currency is that comic books contain "a strikingly advanced concept of femininity and masculinity." In further explanation of this statement it is said: "Women in the stories are placed on an equal footing with men and indulge in the same type of activities. They are generally aggressive and have positions which carry responsibility. Male heroes predominate but to a large extent even these are essentially unsexed creatures. The men and women have secondary sexual mannerisms, but in their relationship to each other they are de-sexed."

If a normal person looks at comic books in the light of this statement he soon realizes that the "advanced concept of femininity and masculinity" is really a regressive formula of perversity. Let's compare this statement with the facts. One of the many comics endorsed by this child psychiatrist has the typical Batman story, the muscular superman who lives blissfully with an adolescent. Is it so advanced to suggest, stimulate or reinforce such fantasies? The normal concept for a boy is to wish to become a man, not a superman, and to live with a girl rather than with a superheroic he-man. One team-expert has himself admitted that among the three comic-book characters "most widely disapproved" by adults are Superman and Batman -- the prototypes of this "advanced concept of masculinity." Evidently the healthy normal adult rejects them.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.

Postby admin » Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:39 pm

PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 9 CONT'D.)

As to the "advanced femininity," what are the activities in comic books which women "indulge in on an equal footing with men"? They do not work. They are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family. Mother-love is entirely absent. Even when Wonder Woman adopts a girl there are Lesbian overtones. They are either superwomen flying through the air, scantily dressed or uniformed, outsmarting hostile natives, animals or wicked men, functioning like Wonder Woman in a fascistic-futurist setting, or they are molls or prizes to be pushed around and sadistically abused. In no other literature for children has the image of womanhood been so degraded. Where in any other childhood literature except children's comics do you find a woman called (and treated as) a "fat slut"? The activities which women share with men are mostly related to force and violence. I admit they often use language -- "advanced," I suppose -- which is not usually associated with women. Dr. Richmond Barbour mentions an example: "'Try this in ya belly, ya louse' the young lady says as she shoots the uniformed policeman in his midsection. Scantily dressed, thighs and breasts exposed, she is leading three similar gun-girls. One has been shot, and she is falling. Another girl shoots at the police with a revolver and mutters, 'Here's one fer luck!'"

The prototype of the super-she with "advanced femininity" is Wonder Woman, also endorsed by this same expert. Wonder Woman is not the natural daughter of a natural mother, nor was she born like Athena from the head of Zeus. She was concocted on a sales formula. Her originator, a psychologist retained by the industry, has described it: "Who wants to be a girl? And that's the point. Not even girls want to be girls.... The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman.... Give (men) an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves." Neither folklore nor normal sexuality, nor books for children, come about this way. If it were possible to translate a cardboard figure like Wonder Woman into life, every normal-minded young man would know there is something wrong with her.

The experts claim that the theme of comic books is good conquering evil, law triumphing over crime. There are many more crimes in comic-book stories than crimes that are punished. Moreover, punishment in comic books is not punishment; it usually takes the form of a violent end. Melodrama instead of morality. Comic books direct children's interest not toward the right, but toward the wrong. In many stories the criminal wins to the very end, and you see the man who has murdered his wife triumphantly pouring the rest of the poison into the sink in the last picture. There are whole comic books in which every story ends with evil triumphant.

If the forces of law do win in comic books, they do so not because they represent law or morality, but because at a special moment they are as strong and brutal as the evildoer. The real message of the comic books to children is the equation: physical force equals good. As the author and critic, Marya Mannes wrote: "In twenty million comic books sold it would be hard to find a single instance where a character conquered only because he was kind, honest, generous or intelligent." Can there be a more serious indictment?

"Comic books," said Frances Clark Sayres of the children's department of the New York Public Library, "reduce everything to the lowest common denominator of violence, vulgarity and commonplace expression." That seems true also in the sphere of moral judgments. A comic-book publisher's advertisement embellished with names of some of the experts says: "It is on record that Cain killed his brother. And Peter Rabbit stole a carrot, if we remember rightly!" Murder as no more significant than taking a carrot! That is the ethics of the comic books, ethics with which the experts evidently have no quarrel.

The experts further claim that comic books are an aid for children in their general adaptation to life and, as one of them puts it, can serve as "mechanisms for personal experimentation with reality." It is not clear how children are supposed to do this. Are they supposed to play the hunters or the hunted? The torturers or the tortured? The rapers or the raped? Are they to fantasy that they stab wild animals or girls in the eye or that wild animals will come to their aid when they need help? Where does the reality of life come in? Adaptation to the reality of life consists in learning to use one's faculties for something constructive, to make an effort to apply oneself, to seek guidance from those who know better, to respect the rights and wishes of others, to learn self-discipline. The reality of life may consist in a struggle, but that does not mean a continual violent physical fight between those who are not allowed to kill and those who are permitted to kill.

In vain does one look in comic books for seeds of constructive work or of ordinary home life. I have never seen in any of the crime, superman, adventure, space, horror, etc., comic books a normal family sitting down at a meal. I have seen an elaborate, charming breakfast scene, but it was between Batman and his boy, complete with checkered tablecloth, milk, cereal, fruit juice, dressing-gown and newspaper. And I have seen a parallel scene with the same implications when Wonder Woman had breakfast with an admiring young girl, with checkered tablecloth, cereal, milk, toast and the kitchen sink filled with dishes draining in the background.

Mastery of reality is based on a normal and not an abnormal set of human values. What the comic books give children to "experiment with" is either the reality of the sordid or what Stephen Spender calls "glamorized unreality." What the experts are telling us is that children have to learn to accept violence as a part of life, not only violence in the name of a cause, but violence for violence's sake. Adaptation requires sustained effort. The only effort that comic books teach is to avoid errors if you don't want to be caught. That pervades even their slippery slogans: "Forget one detail and there is no perfect crime!"

There are children who suffer from frustration. One team-expert's advice is: "Superman symbolizes the modern attempt in dealing with these problems (of frustration).... If not Superman himself, some one of the many other characters such as the Batman, The Flash, Captain Marvel, and the Green Lantern." Is that the best we can do for children, that we teach them the Green Lantern will help?

Another apologia brought forth by the experts is that "anything in which children show such absorbing interest must meet some emotional need in the child." But, if a child shows any trouble, he presents "special problems which call for careful consideration not in relation to his reading alone but to more fundamental emotional needs." In other words, comic books supply the needs of children only if nothing goes wrong. If anything goes wrong, we are told that they do not supply the needs of children and that we must leave out comic books entirely and search for ever deeper needs beneath needs. This talk of deeper and deeper needs is science fiction rather than science.

This passage by one expert is often quoted by the others: "Much of what children find in the comics deals with their own unconscious fantasies. It is possible ... that they need this material as a pattern for their dreams to give them content with which to dream out their problems." This is the most derogatory statement about normal children that I have ever read. It confuses what a child needs with what he can be seduced to desire. Some comic books depict necrophilia. Does that supply a need in the child? Many comic books describe every conceivable method of disposing of corpses. Do children need that for their daydreaming? It is a fallacy to regard the aberrations of adults as the needs of children.

Children need action and comic books supply that, the experts say. But no instrumentality has ever been invented to keep children more inactive than comic books. Moreover action is not merely action. It has content, meaning and emotional interest. The kind of action depicted in comic books is not what children need, but what adults think will excite them and sell.

Do we really know so little about children's needs as these experts imply? Children need friendliness, they need a feeling of identification with a group, they need cheer and beauty. And they want and need honest and disinterested guidance, because it gives them a feeling of security. It is precisely here that the comic-book industry and its experts stab them in the back.

Closely related to the argument that comic books supply children's needs is the further one that the child has his own choice about comic books. He can select what he wants and the responsibility is therefore his. This claim goes so far that the children are held responsible even for the unsavory development of the comic-book industry: "It is their [the children's] selectivity and their standards which must in turn influence the comics, whose content and standards of quality and taste are shaped to meet the customer's demand."

How much choice does a child with ten or twenty cents in his pocket have? There are many stores in town and country which have only comic books and no other printed matter except perhaps newspapers and magazines of no interest to the child. With only comic books to choose from, children really have no choice. But even if they did have a choice, the principle of leaving it entirely to them which is so vociferously promulgated by the Child Study Association of America is wrong. It is our duty to teach the child to make choices. The librarian Mrs. Sayres points out that through comic-book reading the child "loses his ability to discriminate." Of course we should try to see things from a child's point of view, but as educators and doctors we must adopt a larger view, use our own judgment and not deliver children into the hands of those who exploit their inexperience.

A pretty piece often played by the symphonette of comic-book experts is on the theme that it was always so. Children always have had these psychological needs to escape from reality and to give vent to feelings of hostility and resentment, and they used to be satisfied by fairy tales, by dime novels -- even by Shakespeare. All these, the experts tell us, are just as cruel and just as violent as comic books, so why pick on comics?

They formulate this in various ways. "Children have always sought this kind of vicarious adventure.... Through our own dime novels, big little books and comics," says one. "Comic books [are] in a way parallel to some of the fairy tales such as Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel, and The Pied Piper of Hamelin, all of which could be pretty scary to children," says another. Or: "... psychologically the comics are the modern fairy tales." Only those who do not know what is in the comic books have fallen for this, for there never has been a literature for children so enormously widespread, appealing mostly through pictures and expressing, as Dr. Richmond Barbour put it, "savagery, murder, lust and death."

After his excellent and incontrovertible description in 1940, when he found that 70 per cent of comic books contained material which no newspaper would accept, Sterling North followed up the subject eight years later. He found that the average comic book had even lower ethical, artistic and literary standards than it had in 1940. Speaking of fantasy and crime comics, he commented that they were "almost without exception" guilty of what I, in the meantime, had called "obscene glorification of violence and sadism." As a literary critic he took up this question of whether it was always so and found:

To those who insist that we older Americans also read trash in our youth, I say go back and read Horatio Alger and even the dime novels, if you wish. Edward Stratemeyer's Rover Boys may have seemed a trifle too pure to be credible. But the effect that had on impressionable readers was to heap scorn on the cheat and honor on the boy who played to win but played fairly and modestly. Frank Merriwell, hero of countless tales of pluck and luck, may have been both too virtuous and too successful to be considered a probable characterization, but his influence on millions of young Americans was never such that it burdened the juvenile courts.

The trash of today is of an entirely different sort. It is even less well-written than the interminable tales of derring-do and virtuous adventure that filled my boyhood. And, unlike that earlier form of literature, it has added rivers of rape, arson, torture and hooded justice to youth's increasingly dim lexicon.


Marya Mannes has described how her eight-year-old son became addicted to comic books despite an abundance of good books and other entertainment in their home. "Each story," she said, "is a catalogue of force, a metronomic repetition of violence that has in it the seeds of aberration." And she added: "The reasonable may talk all they please about the lurid literature our fathers used to read in their youth; let them find examples -- books widely read by the young of other generations -- which can touch the comic books...."

As for fairy tales, have the most cruel of them, including some of those by Grimm, been so good for children? Dr. Wilhelm Stekel wrote: "I really consider fairy-tales unsuitable for children, at least in the form which Grimm, for instance, has given them. New editions for the various age levels should be printed, in which will be eliminated, or at least modified, all that is cruel. It is not absolutely necessary for the ogre to devour his own seven children, for torture and murder to occur wholesale."

So some fairy tales are not a very good alibi. But even if they were, comic books have nothing in common with them. Fairy tales have a magic of their own which is completely absent from comic books. In comics the solution is simple, direct, mechanical and violent. Fairy tales contain emotional conflicts; they cannot be reduced to who catches whom, who knocks out whom, who kills whom and how and who is going to torture whom. Dr. J. G. Auerbach, psychoanalyst at the Lafargue Clinic, who made comparative studies of the effect of fairy-tale and comic-book reading on children, concluded:

Why does the picture of Hansel and Gretel pushing the witch into the oven create no desire in the child for vindictive action against those who boss him? How does the bloody cutting open of the wolf's belly to let out Red Riding Hood's grandma differ from the knife attacks depicted in the comic books? ... I believe the answer lies in the fantastic element of the fairy tale, which depicts a world far removed from reality. The child may identify himself with the persons or animals in this fantasy world, which he makes his own. There he may allow his fantasy to soar as he wishes: it is his private empire in which he reigns. He knows the difference between the real and the imaginary; there is no attempt to bridge the gap. Another helpful characteristic of fairy tales is their poetic form, even in prose, which also tends to remove tragedy or mischief from everyday life. The less fairy tales obey these two laws, the more they are apt to instil in the child anxiety, or a desire to translate fantasy into reality.


Children who play fairy tales would have a hard time having someone actually eat Red Riding Hood. But they can and do try to bind, gag, and stick each other with sharp instruments as they see it so realistically depicted in comic books. Comic books are not dreamlike and not symbolic. If symbolism occurs it is coarsely sexual. In comic books no one lives happily ever after, as they do in fairy tales; in comic books some characters get eliminated by force, others go on killing. "The comics may be said to offer the same type of mental catharsis to its readers that Aristotle claimed was an attribute of the drama," says one of the experts. But comic books have nothing to do with drama, with art or literature. To invoke Aristotle in their defense is like invoking Beethoven in defense of street noises.

The experts claim that comic books are no worse than dime novels were. True, dime novels were subliterary; but they were earthy and indigenous and had overtones of literature. They had echoes of James Fenimore Cooper. They taught conventional values. Their vocabulary did not even contain swear words. The hero would say "something which sounded very much like an oath." No "lousy, stinking coppers," "dirty squealers," "fat sluts," "filthy bilge-rats" or "dirty rotten scum!" They did not have psychiatrists endorsing them. It was not necessary.

Richard B. Gehman, novelist and magazine writer, had this to say in his essay "From Deadwood Dick to Superman": "[Dime novels] never glamorize the robber nor the desperado . ... The hero's morals were impeccable .... The hero pulled himself up from poverty by hard work.... He honored and respected his parents."

A favorite argument of the comics experts goes like this: Children's troubles or delinquencies are complicated phenomena. How can you pick out only one single factor and even mention comic books? Aren't you guilty of oversimplification?

Nobody versed in clinical research would reason like that. You cannot put "factors" into a discussion of a child as you put eggs into a basket. The different factors that influence a child's life may accentuate, activate, counteract or negate one another. Or they may run side by side. You cannot at the outset reject any factor because on the surface it seems trivial. Sometimes the causes are near at hand and are overlooked for just that reason.

Of course there are other factors beside comic books. There always are other factors. That is true of tuberculosis, of syphilis, of automobile accidents. When a child reacts to something, whether it be comic books or a dog that bites him, a good doctor takes up the whole situation and does not leave out any factor, including the possibility that either the comic books or the dog may be virulent.

When it comes to prevention, the let's-not-blame-it-on-any-one-factor argument is totally inadequate. Take a tree. Its health and growth depend on many factors: its age, the soil, the water, the weather, the pruning, the nearness of other trees and vegetation, absence of injury from animals such as deer and mice and pests. All these factors combined make up the health of a tree. But when you study the health and life of trees concretely you find that one single factor, Endothia parasitica, regardless of all the other factors, beginning in 1904 wiped out all the native chestnut trees in the United States. The agricultural experts know that. But the comics experts would call it an "oversimplification."

Study of one factor does not obliterate the importance of other factors. On the contrary, it may highlight them. What people really mean when they use the let's-not-blame-any-one-factor argument is that they do not like this particular factor. It is new to them and for years they have been overlooking it. If they were psychoanalysts, they were caught with their couches up. They do not object to specific factors if they are intrinsic and noncommittal and can be dated far enough back in a child's life. They do not object to social factors provided they are vaguely lumped together as "environment," "our entire social fabric," "culture" or "socio-economic conditions." Comic books have been -- and still are -- considered beneath the dignity of scientific scrutiny and not a respectable causal factor. But science does not mean a closed system of respectable causes, it means a mind open to all potentialities.

One of the industry's experts writes: "The comic book situation acted merely as a precipitating factor in the production of symptoms by fitting the details of the child's psychic difficulties." Merely is the tip-off. Is it not important for us physicians if a condition which otherwise would not have broken out is "precipitated" by a psychological influence such as comic books?

In trying to deny the harm done by comic books the experts make it appear that comic books have no influence at all and represent merely "casual contact with ideas on a printed page." But when they pronounce on the effects of "good" comic books they suddenly forget that and write that comic books "exert tremendous influence."

The experts say: "Making a scapegoat out of comic books will not solve our basic social problems." Naturally. Another says: "The comics are an outgrowth of the social unconscious." I do not believe that comic books -- any more than slums -- come from the "unconscious." Both are kept alive by the same social forces.

If a child has any trouble that can be traced to comic books, the experts maintain that this child was "predisposed" or "unstable" beforehand. Of course this is a diagnosis made only after the child got into trouble. It amounts to no more than saying that the comic books are good and the children bad. I believe it is the other way around -- that the children are good and the comics bad.

To blame everything on "predisposition" or a supposedly preexisting "emotional disorder" means of course to deny the role of temptation and seduction. According to the experts, the trouble is always in the child, and not in the comic books. The fault is always in the child's mind, and not in the invasion of that child's mind from outside.

The experts say that only abnormal children are affected by comic books while normal children are supposed to be immune. If abnormality is defined with any degree of psychiatric accuracy, the opposite is true. Many severely abnormal children are not affected by comic books. They are wrapped up in their own morbid fantasies and imaginations.

The experts like to invoke early infantile experiences and say that what is pontifically called the "character structure" of the child is laid down finally in the first few years of life and therefore cannot be deflected later by such trivial things as comic books. Yet in their writings I have not found a single case of comic-book inspired nightmares, behavior disorders or delinquency where, by analysis, the comic books as etiological factor were disproved and causation by infantile experience was proved.

A child is not a stereotype of his own past. To blame everything on very early infantile experiences is not scientific but exorcistic thinking: Nothing could harm a child unless the devil was already in him. Comic books do their harm early enough. Children of three or four have been seen poring over the worst. Freud would not have considered that too late for harm to be done.

The idea that all children's difficulties begin and end with their very early family relationships has placed an enormous emotional burden on mothers. When children read comic books excessively, seduced by their ubiquity, their covers and their sex appeal, the experts tell us that it is also up to the parents. They are supposed to regard excessive comic-book reading as a danger signal, a "symptom of disturbance," "not to control or limit his reading" but to look for causes in the child and even seek "psychiatric help." If only half of the excessive comic-book readers were sent to mental hygiene clinics, some of which already have a waiting list for a year or more, these clinics would be occupied with only this for a century.

A star argument is that whatever a child does, he would have done anyhow, even if there were no comic books. With such an argument -- if it is an argument -- you can condone anything. It is true that many children read comic books and few become delinquent. But that proves nothing. Innumerable poor people never commit a crime and yet poverty is one of the causes of crime. Many children are exposed to the polio virus; few come down with the disease. Is that supposed to prove that the polio virus is innocuous and the children at fault?

Take the fourteen-year-old Chicago boy who strangled an eight-year-old girl. He left fifty crime comic books in the room with his dead victim. They depicted all kinds of ways of abusing girls and killing people, including strangling. The experts want us to assume that this is a mere coincidence, that the similarity between the details in the comics and the details of the deed committed have to be ignored, and that what we must look for instead are "far deeper" causes!

The causes of children's delinquencies are not like stones that fall into water. There is a delicate balance between impulse, rationalization and inhibition; temptation, seduction and opportunity; imitation, morality and guilt feelings; fantasy, self-control and a final precipitating factor.

The most insidious thesis of the experts is that comic books "serve as a release for children's feelings of aggression." Children, so the stereotyped argument runs, need vicarious violence to overcome frustration through aggression. If comic books make people get rid of their aggressions, why are millions of them given to young soldiers at the front whom we want to be aggressive? Comic books help people to get rid not of their aggressions, but of their inhibitions.

The experts not only justify sadism but advise it. One of them, a child psychiatrist, writes: "In general we have offered to the strip writer the following advice: 'Actual mutilation ... should not occur ... unless the situation can be morally justified. ... If such an act is committed by some fanciful primitive or by some enemy character it can be more readily accepted and used by the child.'" In its long and tortuous history, psychiatry has never reached a lower point of morality than this "advice" by a psychiatric defender of comic books.

The getting-rid-of-aggression-by-comic-books argument has no clinical basis. The children with the most aggressive or violent fantasies or behavior are usually the most habitual readers of violent comic books. Running away from home is one of the most typically aggressive acts of children. I have seen many children between the ages of eight and twelve who ran away and who were found "with a stack of comic books."

The crudity of the experts' reasoning corresponds to the crudity of the comic books. The concept of the release of aggression is applied far too mechanically. It would have to be shown in the individual case that aggressive tendencies are pent up or dammed up, thwarted or repressed. In young children one can sometimes determine that by the Duess Test. The next step is to find out whether blood, horror and violence are of any use in such a situation. We have found that they are not. Children do not need just an outlet, anyway; what they need is guidance to understanding, substitution and sublimation. Far from giving release, comic books make violence and brutality seem natural to children. Comic books give release to only one aggression -- that of the comic-book industry.

A number of years ago I had to examine a young man in jail in order to give an expert opinion about his sanity. He was in serious trouble, being accused of attempted rape. He had enticed a girl to walk with him past a vacant lot, had suddenly pounced on her and struggled with her. The girl had stated that there was no actual rape and that she got away from him bruised and with her clothes torn. I told him that I wanted to know more about his life and he told me the story.

Since childhood he had had fantasies of taking a girl and tying her up, especially tying her hands behind her. It started when he was about eleven and saw pictures of that in comic books. Then he looked for comic books where that was especially depicted, for example, those with girls tied in chairs with their hands fastened behind their backs. He cut out pictures and also drew them. They gave him sexual fulfillment. He had no intention of raping the girl, an act of which he would have been less ashamed. What he wanted was just to tie her up. The struggle to do it had given him full sexual satisfaction. This was one of the cases that made me resolve to study the comic-book question systematically.

We seem to have made a fetich of violence. A pamphlet distributed by the Child Study Association of America contains this outlandish statement: "Actually, hitting is one of the ways in which children learn to get along together." At a meeting of the National Conference of Social Work, the statement was made: "Brutality has always been a part of children's literature and life.... If your child destroys your furniture while imitating Superman or Captain Marvel, he's being motivated by impulses we shall need more of, if the world is to survive -- the impulse to annihilate an evil." The speaker did not explain what was so evil about the furniture.

Almost a decade after his first study, Sterling North wrote: "I have yet to see a clear, convincing, logical proof of the harmlessness of comics from any psychiatrist or psychoanalyst -- even those to be found on the payrolls of the comic magazines, where their true function is usually hidden under some such euphemism as 'consulting editor.''' One can sum up the scientific writings of the defense experts by saying that their relationship to real science is like the relationship of comic books to real literature. Since they think so highly of comic books, this comparison should be no offense to them.

We could learn from the specialists in agriculture. They teach you to let all plants and trees grow to their optimal development. They do not compromise with anything that might conceivably harm crops and they try to prevent harm by spraying trees early. They do not try to find something good in anything that interferes with growth; they do not say there must have been something wrong beforehand; they teach you how to cultivate the soil scientifically. They would know how to deal with the comic-book pest.

Psychiatry, I think, should be a science of the positive health of the mind. Its aim should be to help the individual to develop his true personality. It is not enough for a psychiatrist to say that he has not found that comic books cause nightmares, anxieties, morbid fantasies or violent acts, and that therefore they must be wholesome for children. Mental health has positive signs. A child needs positive factors: He needs ethical principles to live by, he needs the concept and experience of loyalty and solidarity, of beauty, constructiveness and productiveness, creative expression, the spirit of the family and love. If that is interfered with, his positive mental health has been harmed, whether he has symptoms or not. All these positive factors are absent from crime comics. If a rosebush should produce twelve buds and only one blossoms, the bush is not healthy and it is up to us to find out what is interfering with its growth. The chief content of a child's life is growth and learning. No positive science of mental health is possible if it permits such interference as the mass onslaught of comic books.

_______________

Notes:

1. According to the Kefauver Senate Crime Committee (Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce) the following persons, among others, who are thought of as independent critics by the public, have been or are employed by the comic-book industry: Dr. Jean A. Thompson, Acting Director, Bureau of Child Guidance, Board of Education, N.Y.C.; Sidonie Gruenberg, director of the Child Study Association of America; Prof. Harvey Zorbaugh, Professor of Education, New York University; Dr. Lauretta Bender, child psychiatrist in charge of the children's ward of Bellevue Hospital, N.Y.C.; Josette Frank, consultant on children's reading, Child Study Association of America. The amounts paid range to $300 a month over a period of many years. One expert, Professor Zorbaugh, served as "research consultant to Puck, the Comic Weekly." One comic-book publisher alone spends $750 a month on four children's experts who endorse his products.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Next

Return to Media Violence Studies

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest