Was Seduction of the Innocent the most damaging thing to happen to comic books? It neutered the industry for decades.
Seduction of the Innocent and The Comics Code
Was Seduction of the Innocent the most damaging thing to happen to comic books? It neutered the industry for decades.
>Was Seduction of the Innocent the most damaging thing to happen to comic books?
No, deconstruction stories did that.
Never understood why people think that comics are for kids.
prove it.
Whatever the industry did to kill almost anyone but Marvel and DC was enormously damaging.
Watchmen was a godsend.
yep, monopolies are always a bad thing
means nothing really
That book was a scapegoat. It sold next to nothing and was unknown to the public (and probably even the industry) before the senate hearings. Blame the government and its connections to comics publishers. THAT'S what caused the censorship, no matter what revisionists try to tell you.
That's not a deconstruction. Understanding Comics is a deconstruction. Actual deconstructions are RARE in comics.
>Blame the government and its connections to comics publishers
Noelle Stevens please.
No, the industry itself is at fault.
Apparently Wertham just wanted to institute age ratings.
This
Watchmen employs revisionism, not deconstruction.
Maybe he means the gravitation toward quirky Whedonesque writing in comics.
>quirky Whedonesque writing
Better than Frank Miller's edgy cringe or George Lucas' bad Shakespeare.
Not really, they're all pretty terrible.
No. Frank Miller's was good until about halfway through Sin City, and he wasn't emulated the way Bendis is. Bendis was never good.
Fredric Wertham was right.
He wasn't but the industry has spent the last decade trying to make him right.
Censorship is and always will be about controlling the masses. Its pointless, useless, and only there because some people get offended by things they do not like.
>Was Seduction of the Innocent the most damaging thing to happen to comic books?
Until Bendis.
>This one guy made a character I dislike, therefore he is responsible for ruining all of comics
Really?
For what it's worth, Wertham was coming from a decent place. He was a legit criminal psychologist who prior to SOTI, saw a LOT of fricked up shit in his line of work. Most notably, Wertham was the shrink who had to do extensive interviews with Albert Fish, one of the most fricked up serial killers of the 20th Century and was the one Fish confessed all of the fricked up shit he did to kids to.
Road to hell, anon. Road to hell.
Jesus, chatting with that bastard Albert Fish would screw anyone up. That man was sickness incarnate. I seriously suspect he was behind two additional child murders known as the New York Ripper killings
>After Wertham's manuscript collection at the Library of Congress was unsealed in 2010, Carol Tilley, a University of Illinois librarian and information science professor, investigated his research and found his conclusions to be largely baseless. In a 2012 study, Tilley wrote "Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence—especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people—for rhetorical gain."
>Among the criticisms leveled at Seduction of the Innocent are that Wertham used a non-representative sample of young people who were already mentally troubled, that he misrepresented stories from colleagues as being his own, and that Wertham manipulated statements from adolescents by deliberately neglecting some passages while rephrasing others such that they better suited his thesis.
I think people also need to think about the context of when the book came out. Youth culture and the concept of teenagers as we view them is an incredibly recent development that came about as part of the post-war period.
More teenagers—a word that literally didn't exist until the mid-1940s—started attending high school and as more of them were spending more time together in a shared setting this led to the creation of a shared culture that was exclusive to teenagers. The hard times were mostly gone so Johnny didn't have to start working in the factory when he turned 14 and Anne didn't need to immediately go into clerical work or whatever. Now all the Johns and Annes were hanging out together in school and after school they'd hang out some more with all their abundant free time, maybe have a part-time after school job so they could buy things. So youth culture began taking shape and a lot of times it came in the form of rebellion against parents and expected social norms. This was incredibly shocking to a lot of people and there was a whole moral panic about juvenile delinquency. Something had to be behind it, corrupting the youth away from morality and comic books, with their tawdry and violent stories, were seen as one of the factors.
This is also why rock 'n roll was so shocking and seen as especially obscene and vulgar. It was more sexually charged (especially the black artists) to the point where the name itself was an obvious reference to sex and teenagers would get so into it that they'd seem to go into frenzies like the riots and vandalism that would happen during Blackboard Jungle screenings. America pre and post-World War II might as well be completely different worlds. The cultural change brought about by the economic prosperity after a generation of depression and misery was sudden, immense, and very shocking and upsetting to adults who had no real idea what to make of any of it.