This essay from the Meanjin archives was first published in Volume 3 Issue 1 1954.
‘The comic book industry,’ reported a New York State Legislature study in 1952, ‘has, since the termination of World War II, achieved the greatest volume of circulation of any type of book or magazine that this country has ever known.’
During 1952, more than 100,000,000 copies of comic books were sold each month in the United States—a total of well over a billion copies for the year. Surveys indicate that 98 percent of all American children are regular comic-book readers and that the average child reads between twenty and twenty-five comics a month.
In the words of Dr. Fredric Wertham, chief of the Mental Hygiene Clinic at Queens General Hospital: ‘Comic books are the greatest book publishing success in history and the greatest mass influence on children.’
And the influence of comic books has fitted the needs of the Cold War, since they have been accustoming millions upon millions of young Americans to concepts of violence, savagery and sudden death.
The name ‘comic book’ is misleading. Scarcely of a humorous nature, the overwhelming majority of comic books are macabre compendiums of mayhem and murder, perverted sex and sadism, weird and ghastly adventures, crime, brutality and blood-curdling horror. Crudely drawn in garish colours, cheaply printed in magazine form on pulp paper and sold for ten cents a piece, these publications pour an unending torrent of filth and bestiality into the minds of American children. They depict human beings as fiendish degenerates, glamourize the lynch-justice heroics of muscle-bound ‘supermen,’ exalt the use of force and violence, and make of agonised death a casual, every-day affair.
The dispensers of justice in the comic-book jungle of crime and violence are usually supersleuths, supercops, supercowboys or supermen of some other variety, who—while defying the laws of both nature and man—take the law into their own hands and mete out ‘hooded justice,’ as Sterling North of the Chicago Daily News has termed it. Bearing such names as Black Knight, Captain America, Captain Midnight, Captain Marvel, Kid Eternity, Man-hunter, Marvel Man, Superman, Professor Supermind, Rocket Man and Wonderman, these magically powerful heroes personify the central theme of the comic books that might makes right and that the most-muscled individual is the noblest. Appropriately enough, the various supermen are generally garbed in stormtrooper-like uniforms, complete with special mystic insignia.
A logical concomitant of this emphasis on The Leader principle and glorification of force is the derisive contempt manifested in the comic books for any aspect of culture and learning. Stock comic book characters are intellectuals portrayed as long-haired crackpots and scientists as white-gowned madmen plotting to destroy the world.
‘If there is only one violent picture per page and there are usually more,’ stated Gershon Legman in 1949 in an incisive essay on comic books, entitled Not for Children, ‘this represents a minimum supply, to every child old enough to look at pictures, of three hundred scenes of beating, shooting, strangling, torture and blood per month, or ten a day if he reads each comic book only once.’
A 1951 analysis of ninety-two comic books reported the following content: 216 major crimes; 86 sadistic acts; 309 minor crimes; 287 incidents of anti-social behaviour, 186 instances of vulgar behaviour; 522 physical assaults; and the techniques of 14 murders in details.
A typical tale, appearing in the June-July 1952 issue of Crime Suspense Stories, portrayed a professor at a medical school murdering his wife, mutilating her body to prevent identification and then hanging the body among the corpses kept at the school laboratory for purposes of dissection by his anatomy students. The drawing, which vividly depicted the professor strangling his wife, bore this caption:
How long we struggled I don’t know—but an ominous silence seemed to clear my senses! Her body was completely limp and her eyes bulged from their sockets from the pressure of my fingers that were knotted around her neck!… A few quick slashes with a kitchen knife entirely obliterated her features! Then after pulling her teeth and removing her jewellery and clothing, my wife was completely unrecognizable.
A steadily growing number of comic books deal exclusively with the subject of war. Featuring stories of frenzied sanguinary battles, devastating air raids, murderous hand-to-hand combat and barbarous atrocities, with most of the action laid in Korea, the war comics overflow with pictures of grim-faced or grinning American soldiers smashing in the heads of bestial-looking Chinese and North Korean soldiers with rifle butts, blowing them to pieces with hand grenades, and slaughtering them with machine guns, trench knives and flame throwers.
A typical cover drawing appearing on the August 1952 issue of War Front, depicted an American GI plunging his bayonet into the stomach of a North Korean soldier with the comment: ‘It was either him or me! I lunged forward and felt his belly collapse before the cold steel!’ The same issue of War Front contained a prefatory note which read as follows:
Know The Truth! See the facts of war come alive at a mile-a-minute clip!… Thrills explode on every page as the fury of war comes forth… History of Battle! The story of glory and gore with all its moments of terror and tension… Fox-Hole Guts! Death shrieks in every shell!… Truth! Action! History! Guts! Thrills! Suspense! The drama unfolds in War Front.
‘Never before in the history of the world,’ notes Gershon Legman, ‘has a literature like this, specifically for children, ever existed.’ Not all of the comic books deal with crime, sex, corruption, war. A handful feature stories taken from the Bible and other literary classics; and the narratives of some comics are built around animals. Almost invariably, however, the animal comics are replete with instances of sadism and violence. Similarly, many of the classic comics stress grim and brutal episodes.
There are also some comic books of a progressive nature, which stress the importance of combating discrimination and feature other such democratic concepts. The number of these comic hooks, however, is infinitesimal in comparison with the quantity of the regular ones.
Growing numbers of Americans are voicing grave concern over the pernicious influence of the comic books on children. In some communities, citizens have organised boycotts against newsdealers handling comics that feature crime, war and horror stories. In several towns, the newsdealers themselves have imposed voluntary bans on ‘comic books glorifying crime.’ Due to public pressure, bills calling for the censorship of comics have been introduced in a score of State legislatures.
At Congressional hearings held in Washington in the winter of 1952 by a Special House Committee, churchmen, educators, child specialists and public health officials forcefully condemned comic books for ‘poisoning the minds of children,’ serving as ‘manuals for the guidance of potential dope addicts,’ and ‘providing blueprints to youths in starting criminal activity.’ Among the witnesses was the mother of a seventeen-year-old youth who was then on trial in Michigan on the charge of having stabbed to death a gasoline station attendant during a hold-up. Urging that crime comics be outlawed, this mother testified regarding her son:
He was always a good boy. He never got into trouble. But he started reading these things… He bought all he could find… He would just lie on the bed and read his comic books or just stare at the ceiling… They had such a hold on him that he had nightmares… He started talking like the hoodlums in the stories… They led him to drinking and then to taking dope… He was a wonderful boy until he got hold of those books…
Certain individuals, however, not only emphatically deny that comics are harmful to children but even find highly positive values in them. Various child psychologists and psychiatrists, the judgment of some of whom is possibly influenced by their being employed as paid advisers to comic-book publishers, contend that comics provide children with an excellent medium for ‘working out their natural aggressions’ and ‘finding release for innate hostilities’ in a ‘fantasy world.’
Reflecting this viewpoint, Josette Frank, the educational associate in charge of children’s books and radio on the staff of the Child Study Association of America, writes in the pamphlet, Comics, Radio, Movies—and Children:
The fact that a large number of comic books deal in crime, or at least in violence of one kind or another, reflects the desire of a large number of people, including children, to read about crime and violence. This is nothing new. The greatest literature of all time abounds in violent deeds. These, in their own time, reflected the deep inner needs of the people. They still do.
The comic-book publishers themselves—whose business is now grossing in the tens of millions of dollars a year—are, naturally enough, among the most eloquent exponents of the virtues of their product.
According to them, comics not only play a major patriotic role in helping maintain Cold War morale on the home front but also have a vital service to perform in acquainting foreign countries with ‘the American way of life.’ One such publisher, Leverett Gleason by name, urged in the fall of 1951 that the U.S. State Department ‘shower Russian children with comics books to indoctrinate them through special adventure stories.’
‘Are not these precisely the themes by which Hitler brought up a whole generation of German youth, with results that are well known to all of us?’ asked a brief regarding comic books which was presented to the Board of Education in Toronto, Canada. In many parts of Canada, the sale of comic books dealing with crime, violence and sex is forbidden by law.
In this connection, it is interesting to note what the Australian born novelist, James Aldridge, had to say following a recent visit to the Soviet Union about current literature for youth in that land. ‘I was especially interested in children’s books and looked through hundreds,’ reported Aldridge. ‘Not one had a hint of violence in it; not one had any other emphasis but human dignity, patriotism, education, and kindliness toward others.’
In a speech in the Canadian House of Commons in 1949, E.D. Fulton quoted James V. Bennett, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the United States, as saying: ‘We have in one of our institutions a boy who carried out a kidnapping plot following the precise pattern he had read about in a crime comic called Crime Does Not Pay. Not only did the boy confess that he got the idea from the crime comic but the facts surrounding the execution of the crime bore out his statement.’
Fulton went on to cite ‘the trial of two boys, aged eleven and thirteen, for murdering James Watson of Dawson Creek, in Canada, in the fall of 1948. During the trial positive evidence was produced to show the boys’ minds were saturated with what they read in crime comics… One boy admitted to the judge that he read as many as fifty crime comics a week, while the other admitted having read thirty.‘ Fulton added:
In Montreal a boy aged twelve beat his mother to death with a bat while she was sleeping and at the trial said he had seen that sort of thing in the comics… In Los Angeles a fourteen-year-old boy poisoned a fifty year-old woman. He said he got the idea from a comic book, as well as the recipe for the poison. In the same city a thirteen-year-old boy was found hanged in a garage with a crime comic illustrating that sort of thing at his feet.
It would of course be a gross oversimplification to ascribe the growth of juvenile delinquency and violent crimes by young Americans solely to the influence of comic books. Rather, their impact on American children has to be evaluated as part of the entire pattern of similar influences in TV, radio and motion pictures, and has to be considered within the over-all Cold War atmosphere of crime, corruption, cynicism, brutality and resort to force.
Dr. Werthem adds: ‘If you want a generation half storm troopers and half cannon fodder, with a dash of illiteracy, comic books are good, in fact they are perfect.’
Enormous as is the current circulation of comic books in the United States, the extent of their influence upon the minds of young Americans is rivaled by that of another and even more newly developed mass medium: television. By the end of 1952, there were television sets in the homes of more than 21,000,000 American families.
Some concept of TV’s effect on the rearing of American children may be derived from this sardonic comment of Dr. Dallas Smythe, director of studies for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters: ‘While the typical theme of Hollywood pictures has been “Boy Meets Girl,” the typical theme of TV is “Boy Meets Body”—a violently dead body usually.’
Both in January 1951 and January 1952, Dr. Smythe conducted a study of one week’s television programmes in New York City, with monitors watching and carefully classifying all of the programmes on every one of the city’s television stations. Of the total time allotted to programmes specifically for children, it was found that about 8 per cent came within the category of ‘Information and Instruction,’ while 60 per cent came within the category of ‘Drama.’ Regarding the latter, Dr. Smythe reported: ‘The largest single type of drama program in New York was crime drama.’
Throughout the country, such grisly fare is the rule rather than the exception on TV programmes for children. Hour after hour, day in and day out, in millions of American homes, countless children are sitting with their eyes hypnotically glued to TV screens across which moves an unending procession of vividly enacted scenes of savage violence, bloodshed, brutality and crime. Through the ingenious artistry of television, mayhem and murder have be come commonplace components of American family life.
How grave is the harm being done to the more than 20,000,000 children who now regularly watch television shows in the United States was suggested by an article in the July 11, 1951 issue of Variety magazine. The article, which dealt with TV crime programmes, quoted from prominent educators who compared these programmes with the type of culture which evolved in Germany during the Nazi regime. Recalling that the German people had been ‘gradually conditioned to the acceptance of brutality by its constant introduction into literature, movies and theatre,’ the educators pointed out that ‘as each and every suspense story on TV becomes more bloodthirsty, as murders increase in number and border on the maniacal, the viewer gradually accepts these aberrations,’ and that ‘an adolescent … whose daily television fare is eye-gouging, depraved murders… will not be so easily shocked by or likely to protest against the brutalities of war.’
To some persons, on the other hand, this circumstance seems quite advantageous. In the words of Owen Callin, radio and television editor of the Los Angeles Herald-Express:
It must be remembered that almost every programme with crime and violence has ‘good’ winning out. Life in itself isn’t a bed of roses. It might be well to acquaint our youngsters at an early age with things they might have to face when they grow up. Why keep them sheltered until the age when the knowledge of some crime or violence may shock their emotions to a far greater degree if they hadn’t been indoctrinated solely through their very young years? And after all… if they’re going to be sent to Korea eventually, isn’t it only fair to them that they at least have some knowledge of what they’ll face?
When it comes to familiarizing youth with deeds of crime and violence so they may ‘have some knowledge of what they’ll face’ on possible future battlefronts, television has radio at an admitted disadvantage. The visual enactment of robberies, torturing, assaults and murders is far more vivid and precise, naturally, than the reproduction of such phenomena merely through the spoken word and sound effects.
Sharply conscious of this handicap, the directors of radio dramas have diligently striven to overcome it through the wholesale use of blood-curdling screams, sudden shots, mad laughter, thunderous explosions, and tortured gasps and groans. Some radio shows have adopted such sound effects as fiendish chuckles and bursts of machine-gun fire as their opening and closing trademarks. An ever-growing number of radio dramas resemble sound recordings of an armed riot in a lunatic asylum.
In the considered judgment of radio and television companies they are fulfilling an important social duty in presenting programmes dealing with crime and violence. As the recently published code of the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters states in a section entitled ‘Responsibility Toward Children’:
The education of children involves giving them a sense of the world at large. Crime, violence and sex are a part of the world they will be called upon to meet, and a certain amount of proper presentation of such is helpful in orienting the child to his social surrounding.
It is an ugly commentary upon the atmosphere of the Cold War that violence and crime should have come to be thus regarded as an integral part of the social surroundings of American children.
The full Meanjin archive can be accessed at www.informit.com.au/meanjinbackfiles
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