Saturday, March 02, 2013

11 Most Controversial Comic Books of All-Time


The list, care of the Huffington Post.

From the piece...

Like a lot of people who work in comics - or who just grew up in the second half of the twentieth century loving "funny books" - I was not surprised to learn that Dr. Frederic Wertham had, in his famous 1954 anti-comic book screed Seduction of the Innocent, "manipulated, overstated, compromised and fabricated evidence." On February 19, the New York Times reported this conclusion, reached by University of Illinois Assistant Professor Carol L. Tilley, who examined Wertham's papers at the Library of Congress.

Wielding his psychiatric credentials as a cudgel, Wertham used the media, including that nascent sector called television, to insist that comic books were inherently for children, and that adult content could, in fact did, warp young minds. Comic books like Crime Does Not Pay were intended to teach youngsters the methods of criminals and the glorification of murder. Horror comic books twisted young minds with scenes of violence and gore, while Batman and Wonder Woman encouraged homosexuality - after all, Bruce Wayne lived with a young boy, and Wonder Woman frolicked with her sisters on an island. And Superman, well, he was obviously the personification of the Nazi super-fascist - never mind that a couple of Jewish kids from Cleveland created him. 

For the comic book industry, the 2013 exposure of Wertham comes a little late.

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