Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books… (2024)

I've heard about this book and its impact on the comics industry for more than twenty years, but this is the first time I've gotten my hands on a copy instead of relying on someone else's summary and quotes--the book has been out of print for sixty years, and not even libraries seem to have wanted to hold on to their copies.

It's very strange to finally read it at a moment when we are so attuned to fake news. Wertham claims in the beginning to have spent seven years on detailed studies of comics and their impact on children, but throughout, he mainly gives anecdotal and incomplete information. We get our first survey of a dozen adolescents and their reading levels on page 129, and the entire book has one footnote, on page 223. Instead, we get quotes and details with no context -- children act out seemingly without reason or motive. In part, this is because Wertham maintains that all children can be saved, and the only way to make that feasible is to set aside anything he isn't empowered to fix: in Wertham's world, no one has schizophrenia, dyslexia, or a learning disability; such are mentioned only as bad diagnoses by other doctors. Along the same lines, no parent abuses their child in any way. If pre-teens engage in gang activity or sex trafficking, it's purely because they read about it in comics, no other influences from their homes or neighborhoods, and no indication of why these kids are troubled while other kids who read comics are well adjusted. Reading this book, I was constantly aware of how much was being left out of every story, every quote, so that Wertham could pin children's problems on something he could fix.

The sad thing is, Wertham is doing this with the best of motives. He's worried that power fantasies make kids idolize fascism. He's angry that comics reinforce stereotypes about people of color and make them targets of violence and rape. He's upset that the advertisem*nts in comics take advantage of teenage insecurities, shaming both boys and girls into buying snake-oil cures to reshape their bodies. These are all topics dear to my heart. But in the service of these ideals, he not only cherry-picks anecdotal evidence from kids (claiming that because kids lie, no study or survey would be accurate anyway), he fudges details about the comics themselves. He says that comics get cancelled or switch titles so often that mentioning a title or issue number wouldn't tell the reader anything, and therefore describes both national trends and individual instances with no citations. He says nine panels of a particular comic were devoted to violent acts, but doesn't say what percentage that is of the whole comic (or what counts as violent). And over and over, he assumes correlation means causation, that reading lurid material causes violence, instead of considering that violent people may choose reading material that reflects their interests.

If nothing else, the book reminded me of just how much damage we can do when we care deeply about making the world better but just can't get the data to fit our ideals and expectations.

When I was younger—say in the late 1980s, early 1990s—the concept of free artistic expression was primarily associated with the social and political left. The totalitarian states of international communism were discredited; second-wave feminism had clearly overreached in its anti-p*rn crusades; and tirades against the objectionable character of both elite and popular culture were associated largely with the religious and racial right’s crusades against alleged Satanism and against queer and black arts. I am thinking of the controversies over heavy metal, NEA funding, and “Cop Killer,” for example. But when I was a kid, I didn’t listen to rap or heavy metal and I didn’t attend elite art exhibitions; instead I avidly read comic books. In those pre-Internet days, the folk memory of comic-book readers tended to elide the 1950s public outcry against comics—which led to their being tried in the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency Hearings and to the self-imposition by the industry of the absurdly censorious comics code—with the ‘80s/‘90s posturing of the religious right (and of certain New Democrat or blue dog allies, such as Tipper Gore). I had certainly heard of Fredric Wertham by the time I was 11 or 12, but, lacking good information, I pictured him as a Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan or Bill Bennett type.

As comics have over the last generation come under increased academic jurisdiction, though, readers have noticed that Wertham was in fact far more like the type of person who would today profess comics studies, a leftist less enamored than were prior generations of free speech. (See, for instance, Chris Bishop’s very engaging and informative lecture.) In the introduction to the most recent edition of Wertham’s 1954 anti-comics polemic, Seduction of the Innocent, James E. Reibman sets the record straight: “Of course, the irony in all this is that Fredric Wertham, a traditional left-wing European intellectual and product of the Enlightenment tradition, continues to be both castigated and characterized as a reactionary.” Seduction of the Innocent, then, is in a very different genre from the Chick-tract-type screed; it is, rather, a lament over the demise of high bourgeois culture sung by an impeccably cultured exile of that culture’s European calamity. (Wertham was brought up within the kultur-loving humanistic milieu of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie.) It is more like Theodor Adorno than Jesse Helms.

When read with the above understanding, Seduction of the Innocent is an almost sympathetic book. The psychiatrist Wetham was a crusader for racial equality who opened a clinic in Harlem (named after Paul Lafargue) for indigent black youth; he collaborated with or earned the praise of Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison and Thurgood Marshall. That comics promote racial hatred was, not at all unreasonably, one of his chief complaints:

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.

Besides racism, misogyny, and sadism, Wetham also charged comics with poor aesthetic standards in everything from printing materials to spelling; with the promotion of crime and violence; with inspiring children to undertake all sorts of dangerous acts (jumping off the roof to try to fly like Superman, etc.); with numbing children’s sensibilities so that they cannot appreciate great literature and art; and with being produced by an industry that mistreated its creators, strong-armed its distributors, and bought off off “experts” and politicians (he never states outright, but carefully implies, what we now know to be true of the early comics’ mafia connections, as elaborated by Chris Bishop in the lecture linked above).

Despite Wertham’s left-wing credentials, he shared the mid-century left’s dim view of hom*osexuality, seeing it as a lamentable form of maladjustment brought about by a corrupt society. For this reason, he is perhaps best remembered for his actually rather perceptive, if undeniably hom*ophobic, attack on Batman as hom*oerotic text (this is another reason, I believe, that he was misremembered as right-wing by the time of my adolescence):

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 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 hom*osexuals living together.

And Wertham, to be fair, was not much of a totalitarian censor. His proposal was to ban the sale of “crime comics” (though this was a pretty all-encompassing term to him; he thought Donald Duck was, for all practical purposes, a crime comic) to children under 15. He was not for any kind of outright ban—and certainly, he was at pains to emphasize, not for any restriction on what adults could purchase and read. In his defense, one might note that the comics of the time really were pretty wild and that today we accept without objection things like rating systems, which inform consumers without much interfering with free expression. On a more personal note, I might add that I essentially agree with his defense of the subtler pleasures and greater intellectual demands of high culture against sensationalist mass-produced pop culture—but this, for me, is on grounds of aesthetics, not ethics or politics.

Anyway, while it is well and good to re-assess Wertham’s book with a greater understanding of his not totally unsympathetic intellectual position, the book is still the product of a faulty worldview, in my judgment. For one thing, Wertham was in a sense not socialist enough; even if we accept that cultural objects can do mental harm to vulnerable children (and this remains an “if,” as far as I know), why blame cultural objects themselves and not the structural forces that create vulnerability in the first place? Furthermore, I do accept that his Rouseauist/Dickensian picture of the unsullied innocent coming into the world to be snatched from the virtuous hands of his mother by greedy capitalists peddling smut was no doubt a welcome (over)correction to some elitist and racist opinions of the innate inferiority of the poor; but even so, I don’t believe it does anyone any good in the long run to deny some of the harder truths of existence. Throughout the book, Wertham complains of Superman’s Nietzschean lineage (if he grasped the ironies attending the creation of super-heroes not by Aryan fascists but by assimilationist Jewish working-class immigrants’ sons, he does not mention it):

As our work went on we established the basic ingredients of the most numerous and widely read comic books: violence; sadism and cruelty; the superman philosophy, an offshoot of Nietzsche’s superman who said, “When you go to women, don’t forget the whip.” We also found that what seemed at first like a problem in child psychology had much wider implications. Why does our civilization give to the child not its best but its worst, in paper, in language, in art, in ideas? What is the social meaning of these supermen, superwomen, super-lovers, superboys, supergirls, super-ducks, super-mice, super-magicians, super-safecrackers? How did Nietzsche get into the nursery?

As for Nietzsche, while he certainly wrote some disturbing sentences and was obviously taken up by some far-worse-than-dubious admirers, one fails to learns the lessons of The Genealogy of Morals at one’s peril. Just as Wertham’s polemic against sensationalism is amazingly sensationalist (seduction! of the innocent!), so too is his moral crusade no less an exercise in power-seeking than the actions of his opponents. While Nietzsche may slight some of our nobler drives, I accept his argument that no human pursuit, not the most artistic or the most holy or the most egalitarian, is totally free from the quest to dominate or from impulses of aggression. To deny this is to leave oneself open to dangerous delusions of righteousness. Such delusions, it seems to me, have done more damage than violent comic books or p*rnography. The books that have proved most corrupting have been books like the Bible, the Koran, and The Communist Manifesto; surely, more people have been slaughtered for the ideals of Rousseau than for the anti-ideals of Sade.

A final word against censorship—and censoriousness, which I also dislike. The imposition of the restrictive comics code was the end result of Wertham’s activism. And the end result of the comics code was to put EC Comics out of business. EC’s company of superb writers and artists—Harvey Kurtzman, Al Feldstein, Wally Wood, Bernard Krigstein, among others—were making thoughtful, humane, literary, beautiful comics that went some way toward correcting the flaws of comics that Wertham was most reasonable in pointing out—their simplistic worldview, their illiteracy, their racism, their intellectual poverty, their low artistic standards. It would take almost thirty years for the promise of EC to begin to be realized again, as the code eased off, and American comics could again pursue the creation of serious artistic work. In short, Wertham did more damage to the artists who might have been his allies than he did to the crass and mobbed-up money-men of the industry itself, who simply adjusted, as they always do. Feel free to take this as a parable directed at the Werthamites of today.

Never before have I read such an important book—that was also this bad. Yes, "Dr." Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent is vital to understand the history of comics (and why for so long they really were "just for kids"), but good lord, rarely has such shoddy science made such an impact on popular culture, to its eternal detriment.

For those unfamiliar, Seduction of the Innocent was Fredric Wertham's study—more of a polemic, really—of the alleged effects of comic books on juvenile delinquency. To readers in Joe McCarthy's 1950s, Wertham's study was more than compelling; it was disturbing and a rally cry. In the wake of the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, parents nationwide destroyed and burned comic books of all sorts, censorship was seriously discussed—and the U.S. Senate held hearings to determine their ultimate fate; the outcome was the Comics Code Authority, which transformed comic books from an almost universally-read medium into the juvenilia for which comics were reviled for generations, both by parents (again) and critics. Not until Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino revived The Flash a few years later did comics even begin to recover from the damage that Wertham perpetrated.

It is true that the picture that Wertham paints in Seduction of the Innocent is dire indeed. The problem, which is what makes the book such a dire travesty, is that Wertham largely distorted, manipulated, or outright fabricated data wholesale to reach the conclusion he wanted—i.e., Bad Science™, in spades. More recent writers, David Hajdu especially, have brought clearly to light exactly what a serious breach of scientific ethics and method Wertham committed, and while Wertham's end of protecting children is admirable, his means were . . . perhaps all too appropriate for the McCarthy era. Yes, the 1950s were a simpler time, but many commentators have shown that beneath that façade of a "simpler time" was a grave conformity and nasty antipathy to civil liberties, and Seduction of the Innocent fits that ugly mold perfectly.

If Wertham's thesis were accurate, it would be an excellent call to arms for the betterment of society. But given the scientific fraud Wertham committed, Seduction of the Innocent is—while no less vital a read—an awful call to arms never to let our irrational fear of youth culture overtake us again. That comics have re-entered a renaissance in recent years is of no matter; Wertham's legacy is one of almost total destruction of a valuable medium of communication.

For those so interested, the copy I'm reading is here.

To know thine enemy ... one must read their writings. But, in doing so with Dr. Frederic Wertham, I noticed that there was more similarities in the way he and I thought, than differences. The premise of this book, by the way, was not to ban comics forever (though, shortsighted that he was, he did not see the artistry they would become in the future) but rather institute a restriction on who can buy which comics at what age. You know, what we have in place for movies, video games, some music and even books now. He wanted to take the "Crime Comic Books" (which included the Suspenstories as well as Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman) and restrict those to the 15 and older crowd.

For those who refuse to read it (or try and can't get past the fact that this is an editorial essay on the evils of comic books), here's the main arguments: a) the linking of violence and sexual imagery has created sado-masoch*sts, b) the prevalence of gorier scenes in comic books have forced other media to follow suit (namely television and movies), c) the crowd being targeted by the ads are too young to understand the "motives" (when any are given) behind the scenes of violence if they even see more than just the pictures, d) all of this combined creates an atmosphere where delinquency is viewed as normal and powerful and morality is viewed as passe and weak.

In the end, I do believe that there does need to be a balance between those comics meant for little kids and those that are meant for more adult readers. I also believe that finding a way to let the little kids who still need to learn balanced emotional health have access to only those comics which do not glorify what is destructive to societies is wise.

However, I do disagree with a few of his main reasons for the arguments (besides the general well-being of the children). First, if his only interaction has been with children who "became maladjusted" after reading these books, than it doesn't matter if they really are a minority, his whole point of view is skewed. And in a democracy - a true democracy - there is rule by majority. What we have done in the US (supposedly) is try to take into account the minority opinions also and balance out the majority versus the minority, but he claims that rule by majority is not democracy at all. He claims, in fact, that by letting the majority rule, we are preventing democracy from occurring. Also, he claims that comic books have no redeeming value and this is a horrible falsehood. The fact that he didn't recognize a burgeoning art when it was being birthed is a big problem. That he could not see they would have literary value (and, in fact, did at times back then also), is unfortunate.

That these same arguments have been used for movies, television, video games, music and will be continued to be used forever is a tragedy of our world. Those who make the arguments do have the society's best interest at heart, I do not doubt that. But that we can't find other ways of helping educate all people in finding and praising the "good" as well as the "horror" is the root of the problem.

As far as his writing goes, it was fun to read someone so sarcastic.

I like comic books. I like the idea of comic books even more than comic books themselves. I actually never was much of a collector or anything; I doubt I ever had even a hundred at one time. Of those, I have less than 30, I think, today.

But because I love the idea, I occasionally go out on the web looking for them, usually ending up thoroughly frustrated by confusing websites and high prices. I was doing that when I came across this book, available on the web. I started reading it and was immediately riveted.

Basically, Dr. Wertham is advocating taking comic books away from children under 15. He's writing in 1954 and since I don't really read comic books today I have no way of knowing whether anything has changed in their content. The early days of movies were very risqué, then they changed (whether they liked it or not), and now they've gone back again, exponentially more graphic. Maybe the same thing happened with comic books.

Dr. Wertham's particular focus is crime comic books, but in these he includes superhero comics. He mentions Superman and Batman specifically. Batman, I think, gets a little more attention, thanks to its hom*oerotic overtones. (Figures. Batman was always my favorite. Well, at least I've never asked my wife to dress up as Robin.) Mostly, though, it's the violence that interests Wertham, and the way it is marketed to young children and defended by some in the psychological community.

Sometimes the publisher's name on the comic book and the name and contents of the book show a ludicrous discrepancy. For instance, one of the 1952 crop has on its first page a horrible picture of a man shot in the stomach, with a face of agonized pain, and such dialogue as: "You know as well as I do that any water he'd drink'd pour right out of his gut! It'd be MURDER!" The name of the publisher is: Tiny Tots Comics, Inc.

He makes a good case. When I was (much) younger, I used to be in that group that says it is uninfluenced by media. The most common example given is advertisem*nts. "Advertisem*nts don't affect me." Yeah, well, I've learned since then. I've learned that (a) companies don't spend billions on "useless" advertisem*nts and (b) I can be swayed in various ways by advertising. I know that even if an advertisem*nt turns me off to a product that it has swayed me. And if it can have an affect at my age, what can the media do to young children? Maybe the better question is, What can't it do?

I believe in psychology (psychiatry, with its drugs, makes me a little nervous sometimes), and I always have. Again, though, my eyes have opened a little as time has passed. And this, appropriately enough, because of true crime. I'm referring to those creatures that crop up in courtrooms all over the country and who are called "expert witnesses." If there's one thing true crime teaches us, it is that one can find an "expert" to espouse any opinion. The comic book industry, as Wertham tells us, made effective use of such "witnesses," who became defenders of the status quo.

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.

One of the comic book industry's most cherished defenses was that it produced comic book versions of the classics. (At least one of the comic books I still retain is one of these, White Fang.) Here again, Wertham makes a good point (more than one, actually).

I have never seen any good effects from comic books that condense classics. Classic books are a child's companion, often for life. Comic-book versions deprive the child of these companions. They do active harm by blocking one of the child's avenues to the finer things of life. There is a comic book which has on its cover two struggling men, one manacled with chains locked around hands and feet, the other with upraised fist and a reddened, bloody bandage around his head; onlookers: a man with a heavy iron mallet on one side and a man with a rifle and a bayonet on the other. The first eight pictures of this comic book show an evil-looking man with a big knife held like a dagger threatening a child who says: "Oh, don't cut my throat, sir!" Am I correct in classifying this as a crime comic? Or should I accept it as what it pretends to be - Dickens' Great Expectations?

One of things I liked very much about this book is Wertham's reasonableness. He doesn't blame the kids and he doesn't blame the parents. I get so sick of the "parents are to blame" argument, an argument that I feel exists in a theoretical fairyland totally divorced from reality. The people to blame are the ones making money -- millions, billions of dollars -- who are not only clearly self-interested, but who also have the financial means to foist whatever they want on the rest of us. That's how Wertham sees it, too (at least, so far as the well-being of children is affected).

But this, of course, brings up questions of civil liberties and censorship. Wetham says:

There seems to be a widely held belief that democracy demands leaving the regulation of children's reading to the individual. Leaving everything to the individual is actually not democracy; it is anarchy. And it is a pity that children should suffer from the anarchistic trends in our society.

I can't tell you how much this statement speaks to me. I personally believe that America is on the road to anarchy, that its national identity is becoming noticeable by its absence, and that its best chance of survival in the next 200 years is the complete cultural conquest of the rest of the world. (Well, that, and its nuclear weaponry.) And what we do to our children, as well as what we don't do for them, is a prime example. If it isn't comic books these days, then it's video games and an internet where anything goes. Oh, but it's the parents' fault if their children get into any of the bad stuff. As if individual parents alone can fight society itself. It's almost as if we need a totalitarian family structure to combat an anarchistic society. It's crazy.

And yet...I like comic books. I read some of Wertham's descriptions of the horrible things in the comic books of his time (I grew up in the 60s and 70s) and what do I think? I think, Man, I'd like to see some of those comic books! They sound like fun.

But just because it's fun doesn't mean it's good or good for you. This book reminded me of that much at least.

Best read as a manifest of its times, because as such it has its entertaining moments.

Wertham does come off as well intended at first, and some of his observations are not too far out there. Quite actually some of it is still relevant and heavily discussed today.
Topics like the objectification of women, racial prejudice and unnecessary use of overt violence... but just when he has you got so far to believe him having half a brain comes some nonsense like this:
Superwoman (Wonder Woman) is always a horror type. She is physically very powerful, tortures men, has her own female following, is the cruel, "phallic" woman. While she is a frightening figure for boys, she is an undesirable ideal for girls, being the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be.

Add to this that the whole text is terribly overwritten, Wertham makes the same point over and over at the start of each new chapter, as if it could gain any credibility if only said often enough. His point being a variation on: "This kid read a comic book and got incited by it to torture/murder/rape another person" - the scary thing about this being that one gets the sense that Wertham really believed so, leading towards the end to him making the statement that kids and minors commiting terrible crimes are not to blame for their actions, the comic book industry is at fault.
(Seriously, anybody seeking to excuse rapists, in fact demanding they should not be punished for their actions, should be shot on sight.)

Half of the text could have been cut out, never missing anything.
Speaking of missing, Wertham never cites any (reliable) sources for anything he writes. For all we can tell each and everything is just Urban Myth because a lot of his anecdotes have this "A friend / a cousin / a guy I once knew" vibe to them. It's all kept just plausible enough to maybe believable, yet too intangible to prove.

Another "charming" quality of the author is, he poses himself as open minded at first, only to then constantly go on about how comics wake (dangerous) hom*oerotic thoughts in children, how they normalize the idea of hom*osexuality, how they prepare kids for (hom*o-)sexual abuse ...

While his entry about how Batman and Robin really are a gay pair is involuntary comedy of the finest, his blatant hom*ophobia is anything but funny.

This said, I liked the literary quotes, like his bending The Bard's words to his use:
"Thus comic books make cowards of us all"

or this not very subtle, but highly enjoyable play on the title of Steinbeck's famous novel (or Robert Burns' poetry, as such):
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."

The most infamous book in comic book fandom and yet most have only seen small excepts from the book.
Written by a psychiatrist who genuinely cared about the well-being of children, it caused a congressional investigation into the comics industry and led to the creation of the Comics Code censor board. Then it is revealed years later that Wertham may have manipulated his collected data and fabricated patient testimonies, which was against the APA Ethics Code.

This book is a very fascinating historical document that is outdated in many ways, like how clinical research in the 1950s are done vs. now. Unlike modern psych books, this book does not have any citations in the text, so I cannot look up the comics he is talking about, and Wertham relies heavily on anecdotes from troubled youth, which is not a good way to draw conclusions beyond a small sample group.
To be perfectly honest, Dr. Wertham does have a point about children being exposed to content far too violent and sexualized for them, and I agree that many of the horror and crime comics of the era were not at all child friendly. However, he takes his assumptions a step too far, claiming that there is no artistic merit at all in comics, and that they damage “real” literature, movies and TV, making them as violent as comics themselves.
Dr. Wertham stated multiple times that “crime comic books” increases juvenile delinquency, citing several court cases, while acknowledging that comics are not the sole factor in negatively affecting children. Then he notes that the term “crime comic books” includes a wide range of genres, including Westerns, superhero, and sci-fi so his viewpoint is flawed to a degree.
As now commonly known, Dr. Wertham took serious issue with superheroes, like Superman symbolizing fascism, Wonder Woman’s “unladylike” strength going against 50s era housewife sensibilities, and the hom*oeroticism found in the Batman comics. He also argued against romance comics and their flawed manipulative portrayal of relationships.

For a long discredited psychology book, it is worth reading though just to understand its impact on pop culture, but it can no longer be taken seriously after almost 70 years later.