We’re on part three of this chapter’s analysis and we aren’t even to the halfway point of the chapter. It’s a good thing we usually take a break before the Prize Fight of a Friday Night Fights tournament because it looks like I might need it. But maybe I’ll get lucky. In this section Dr. Wertham is going to tell us that even the supposed good comics are just bad comics that trick our kids better. This is also the section I jumped ahead to because I really wanted to showcase what Dr. Wertham considers a good comic, which is an illustrated book and not an actual comic. Remember, Wertham is comic illiterate and proud of it, and anything that is a new way to tell a story he’s against. I bet he doesn’t even like the newspaper strips he keeps remind the readers aren’t the same as comic books. This section shows his snobbery even more and makes me sad to be a lover of books because he’s the kind of fanatic that keeps me out of fandoms in this regard. And I do love books. I still have an old summer reading promotional poster on the wall of the studio, although it is currently blocked by a video rack due to the current layout. This article series is usually about examining a prose novel one chapter at a time. Books are awesome!
But I don’t think you have to hate books to love comics or hate comics to love books. Comics tell stories their own way, just like books, movies, serials, TV shows, radio dramas, and whatever else they had in the 1950s. To toss a whole medium away because you hate seeing a kid not reading a book…by the way, what if Dr. Wertham could magically wish all comic books out of existence and saw this new wave of kids still weren’t reading the classics or reading at all? What would he do then? Let’s just get on with it.
Here’s the chapter we’re looking at if you’re new.
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Chapter By Chapter Special: Seduction Of The Innocent ch. 12 part 5
I have to keep reminding myself there’s only two chapters left.
Thus far we have seen that Dr. Wertham is a literary snob and that it has affected his view on comics and the rights of the publisher. And I would agree to keep the more violent and vulgar comics out of the hands of kids but when he’s lumping so many comics under his “crime comics” banner it’s hard to take him seriously. The only comic he likes is not a comic but an illustrated book. He still thinks Superman is a Nazi icon created by two Jewish men over a decade before Hitler’s rise to power. And he keep beating the same messages into the readers head to make sure you see his perspective and only his perspective.
We’re still on the subject of “dealing” with comics legally. Wertham actually suggested putting the more violent and “naughty” comics where kids won’t see them but adults will. And yet he would include Wonder Woman among those ranks because the only one he’s seen sitting with her at the breakfast table is another woman so of course they’re lesbians because….reasons. And yet kids are still getting their hands on the comics even Wertham’s supposed defenders of comics would agree is pornography. So I don’t know what Wertham wants besides “get rid of comics and read a book”, which means I probably answered my own question. Let’s try to finish this chapter today, shall we?
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on September 22, 2017 in Comic Spotlight, Seduction Of The Innocent and tagged book review, Chapter By Chapter, commentary, Dr. Fredric Wertham, Seduction Of The Innocent.
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