MIKE GOLD: Who’s taking the bullet?
Funny thing about Fred Wertham.
Dr. Fred, in case you don’t know, was the guy who, back in the late 40s and early 50s, was concerned about all the sexual imagery and violence he saw in comics and its harmful impact on our nation’s youth. He, and those many folks of similar mind, waxed poetic about this crawling evil in the pages of such then-popular general interest magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest. He later wrote it all up in a best-seller called Seduction of the Innocent, which helped lead to the establishment of the Comics Code censorship board.
It also lead to the establishment of a noisy all-star rock’n’roll band that starred Bill Mumy, Miguel Ferrer, Steve Leialoha, and Max Allan Collins. They released an album called, appropriately, The Golden Age. It was loud, and it featured Weird Al Yankovic on one track. But this has absolutely nothing to do with my point.
My point is, if sexual imagery and violence in comics were to be considered bad, then Dr. Fred wasn’t incorrect in his analysis of the medium. He was merely premature.
What he thought he found in the children’s comics (a redundancy) of the 50s can be easily discovered on the walls of any comic book shop today. Now, the industry’s defense might very well be “but these books are not for children,” and they’d be right. At today’s cover prices, with all the intertwined continuity and story arcs that command a commitment to multiple purchased, children can’t afford them. Heck, damn few adults can afford them, but adults should have the option of buying any sort of reading material they want.
But you would think that in these times of rising religious fundamentalism and “family values,” at least somebody would be bitching about all the blood and guts and astonishingly huge-breasted crime fighters, both female and male. I know my friends at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund might disagree, but they fight for the comics retailers and creators who get nailed. I’m glad to see they don’t have to extend their meager resources any further than they have to.