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Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency (1955) (thecomicbooks.com)
55 points by uniqueid on July 13, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 51 comments



Really interesting stuff from other places on what's a pretty darn interesting topic...

There's a nicer site from The U.S. Capitol Visitor Center:

https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/exhibitions/congress-investi...

A wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Subcommit...

And a longer read from The New Yorker with some interesting details:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/31/the-horror

And entire series from Comic Book Legal Defense Fund an comics censorship:

http://cbldf.org/resources/history-of-comics-censorship/hist...


There's also an interesting essay about the Canadian 'Fulton Bill' here (via the last site you linked): 'Crime Comics Still Illegal in Canada' http://cbldf.org/2016/05/crime-comics-still-illegal-in-canad...


Transcripts of the hearings are at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/juveniledelinque54unit/page/n5/m...


Maybe comic books didn't lead to delinquency but they sure led to something far worse. A non-stop stream of terrible Marvel movies and TV shows that seem to be mandatory viewing for everyone if you wanna be able to have a conversation with people nowadays


That's because events such as these (and subsequently the comics code authority) made it legally and financially nonviable to do anything but spandex comics for kids. Before that, the contents of comics was as varied as the films and pulp fiction of the time. Imagine if during the time of the Hays Code people were burning celluloid in the streets (look up public comic book burnings) and as a reaction studios made nothing but Laurel and Hardy and Ma and Pa Kettle films and it wasn't until the 80s that any kind of adult film-making re-emerged in the mainstream in any substantial way.


The comic Planetary (DC) is a pretty good send up of this phenomenon. It indirectly pays homage to the old varied styles of comics while showing how the popularity of super hero comics, namely The Fantastic Four, destroyed those other genres.


I just bought the Planetary omnibus because I love Warren Ellis and it doesn't disappoint. Lots of comic book concepts taken to new places.


>>A non-stop stream of terrible Marvel movies and TV shows

I'm always surprised when people have such a visceral reaction to anything. There's what, 20? 30? Proper big marvel movies now - are they all terrible? I literally can't believe that - yes, they are not high cinema, but there is enough variety there that surely you can't describe all of them as terrible. Unless I don't know, you just hate marvel and all their characters?


>are they all terrible? I literally can't believe that - yes, they are not high cinema, but there is enough variety there that surely you can't describe all of them as terrible.

There is no real objective measure of a movie's quality. However by the standards we do have such as Rotten Tomatoes scores from critics, the Marvel movies all range from fine to great with the lowest RT score coming in at 66%. That means even in its worst installment two thirds of people that professionally assess the quality of movies had positive things to say about it. I don't think people appreciate how difficult that is from a quality control standpoint. For comparison almost half of all James Bond films failed to reach that 66% mark.

Someone who thinks all Marvel movies are terrible either isn't giving them a fair chance or is simply out of step with popular culture.

Now if you want to open it up to the general genre of superhero films, there are plenty of terrible movies in that group.


Granted, not all the Marvel movies are terrible. Yet They have gone from a freshly squeezed orange drink to a canned energy drink.


WandaVision was brilliant and innovative and unique.

So I don't think they are at the point yet of just cranking out derivative shows and movies based on the same template.


Willing to say the same about Daredevil TV show from a few years ago.

That show didn't even feel Marvel-themed, it felt like it was just set in the same universe. The show is super gritty, dark, and realistic. Feels more like a high class thriller than a superhero show. Which it imo isn't, because the only "superpowers" I've seen in S1 are being good at fighting and a blind person having sonar-like vision thanks to enhanced sense hearing.


I loved the Daredevil show, especially as a big fan of Punisher


WandaVision was a pale imitation of Legion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_(TV_series)

Both very much the same template.


By that logic everything on TV is a pale imitation of something else.


Disney has ESG obligations to meet. Classic hero stories will reflect badly on their commitment to diversity.


I look at the Marvel movies and TV shows and think about a Westerns in the 50's. They were hugely popular, there were a ton of them and some actually were quite good. in the fifties the three networks produced 90 different Western series. But now theres not a single one, and you could count the number of of Hollywood westerns on one hand, and people wonder about the awful taste which must have supported this environment.


Naw, the "mandatory viewing" is pretty much all prestige television and blockbuster movies. Marvel is just the brand you are particularly irritated with. It makes sense because most other forms of entertainment have become too fragmented to have a meaningfully shared experience with anyone. Music, games, sports, arts are so niche and idiosyncratic now that a water cooler conversation is hard. New blockbuster TV and movies are still mainstream and accessible enough to break the ice with someone.


You have the wrong friends ;)


  Maybe comic books didn't lead to delinquency
I find it more interesting to entertain the possibility that they did. It's probably wrong (even if there were/is a correlation, the cause would likely be deeper — maybe the World Wars?) but it's fun to be contrarian and seriously entertain the theory.


If any medium can be accused of destroying the "West", it would be the novel[1].

Terror of media has been an almost constant train of thought since at least the era of Plato. But most particularly it seems that Protestant Christianity is haunted by an existential terror of the imaginary.[2] At the very core of Christian teaching is the unease around Jesus' use of parables (constructs of fiction designed to reveal truth, a contradiction which has resulted in the use of much ink dedicated to the explication of how the former is not really involved at all). It could be argued to hearken back (conceptually) even to the "Tree of Knowledge", where original sin is no longer sex but knowledge itself (which would include knowledge of sex).

[1] The Novel-Reading Panic in 18th Century in England: An Outline of an Early Moral Media Panic --- https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Novel-Reading-Pani...

[2] ON DANGEROUS READING: A Warning Against The Reading of Novels, Fiction, and Other Poisonous Literature (1849) --- http://www.truecovenanter.com/against_the_world/dabney_on_da...


There's no shortage of moral panics about all sorts of things, from rock and roll to dancing to drugs to games to political movements to demographic changes and social mobility, etc, etc, etc.

Anything that is seen to potentially threaten the status quo is liable to upset the people who benefit from it (who also tend to hold the most power in society). Combine such concerns with overactive imaginations and a media which thrives on sensationalism and you get the perfect storm of a moral panic.


I don't doubt the commonplace nature of moral panic. I do, however, wonder to what degree it is culturally hidebound. It might, perhaps, be a general human characteristic, but the cultural leeway any desire or compulsion is granted is a determiner in to what it effects are (and the way in which it manifests).

For instance, Japan experienced a similar type of moral panic (through a combination of government and media) around anime and manga at roughly the same time (or a little after) the crusades against comic books (and broader efforts against such works as Lady Chatterley's Lover) were ongoing in the U.S. and the U.K. However, in regards to Japan, the results broke in the opposite direction. Unlike in the U.S., a translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover was found to be obscene, but manga escaped, seemingly, relatively unscathed, and so it continued to develop as a medium in general and thus, now, in various incarnations, caters to a multiplicity of audiences, men and women, children to elderly, students to business professionals to housewives.


Tolkien and CS Lewis would like a word with you… Edit: Tolkien was Catholic and CS Lewis was Anglican, but their works seem popular enough with Protestants.


I doubt hauntings are distributed uniformly or that their manifestations are identical, which for me recalls the quote from A River Runs Through It: "They were Methodists, a denomination my father referred to as Baptists who could read." And of course I have been in many Baptist churches that avow from their pulpits that Catholics are cultists and non-Christian.

Catholicism has always been far more comfortable with the story and the image than its offshoots. So we can get persons like Chesterton who could posit Christianity as distinct in that it is the only religion in which God himself becomes at atheist. And Tolkien could place fiction and fact into oroborosian configurations: "Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story. But since the author of it is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality, this one was also made to Be, to be true."

Comparatively, between him and Lewis, it might be notable that in their major works only Lewis (the non-Catholic) needed to explicitly bring Christianity to the fore.

Popularity I don't know about. As someone who grew up in a household where Tolkien and Lewis were okay but Dungeons and Dragons was Satanic, I think for many it's more about what they assume the contents to be, rather than their actual properties. It's a spectrum. As one reviewer of a Christian horror series modeled after Goosebumps put it: "I am not sure how I feel about Christian horror books".

Such things tends to occupy that interstitial world of alternative Christian culture that recreates rock music and movies and book series, as if to have no active acknowledgement of God (or perhaps such Christian culture in general) for even the briefest moment is indistinguishable from disbelief. It is the same mindset that compels the production of textbooks that are required to invoke a Bible verse to go along with every math problem and to warn children that doing yoga will allow you to be possessed by demons (my 5th grade health book).

But, as I say, I doubt everything is haunted the same way. There are plenty of Protestants who have no problem playing D&D on a Saturday night. But, too, people aren't often consistent. There are many who would defend violent video games, but would then turn around and deploy exactly those arguments against other types of media, as if they too could somehow 'infect'.


It's escapism. When people's lives turn to shit they want to escape in to fantasy and wish-fulfillment.


Some people's lives don't turn to shit - some people are born with lives that are shit from day one. Once they figure that out, they will soon realize that not everyone's life is shit. And that escaping might just something more than a fantasy. One result: science fiction. Another is delinquency.


They aren't all terrible. Black Widow is. Loki isn't.


Haven't seen Black Widow yet (I'm getting "wait 'till it's free" vibes), but opinions of Loki are... not universally good. I, for one, was skeptical about the other two shows and ended up loving both except for the last episodes (which was still OK for Wandavision, but outright bad in F&WS), while Loki was the one I was most interested in, but I've spent almost the whole time furrow-browed thinking "how is this so bad? How? Why did they make that choice? Why is this scene still going on?"

What's best and what's worst in Marvel tends to draw opinions that are all over the place, excepting that rarely does anyone rank the two Guardians movies near the bottom. Like Star Wars, I guess. You can get rankings that are wildly different, except for a few things (almost no-one is going to rank Empire very low, and almost no-one is going to rank AOTC higher than the middle, for instance).


It's funny how people never learn. There are 2000+ year old texts complaining about how youth's "inability" to obey their parents, and wearing Toga's "halfway" (whatever that means), will destroy the future of everyone.


Yes... and pants were banned in Rome for a while, because it was mostly Germanic people wearing them at the time, and it was a mark of the fall of the civilization.

It is like banning sneakers because there is a certain group that is wearing them.... and then retroactively find the excuse to why sneakers are not classy, etc... yet some of them cost a lot, and proper tennis shows look great.


Could you please list your sources? Because the Plato one is apocryphal ( and actually from last century ) :

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/


Ah, the 300 BC equivalent of rebuckling your knickerbockers BELOW the knee. Scandalous!


Is he starting to memorize jokes from Centurion Vilhelmus's Whiz Bang?


Are certain words creeping into his conversation? Words...like... edema


"Standards for such products, whether in the form of a code of[sic] by the policies of individual producers, should not be aimed to eliminate only that which can be proved beyond doubt to demoralize youth. Rather the aim should be to eliminate all materials that potentially exert detrimental effects."

Sounds like a job for the records department at the Ministry of Truth.


Remarkable creativity. As a kid, I found Wertham’s book in a used bookstore. A plate in the book showed a grizzly baseball game. The catcher used a dismembered, decapitated torso as a chest protector.


If anyone is interested in this era of comic books and the society they bred, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon is a smart, excellently written novel.

It covers the comic book culture in NYC in WW2 and the years after, and covers a scenario very similar to this report.


'misuse of mailing lists' section feels surprisingly modern


Heh, serendipity. Three days ago I began to read EC Comics compilation on Science Fiction.


Serious people doing serious stuff.

There's a lot of them these days as well.


Didn't read the report, but it's always the same cycle:

New tech creates a new medium for expression. Young people get obsessed about it, as they do. Older people get offended and think it's threatening the foundations of society, as we do.

2-3 decades later, what was new and dangerous is the now the established sophisticated art, and the former youth is aghast at what current youth is doing.


Maybe you should read the report.

> 2-3 decades later, what was new and dangerous is the now the established sophisticated art,

The report is almost exclusively devoted to violent representations in horror and crime comics, which, rather than becoming high art, have largely disappeared.


I know there was heavy censorship of comics for a long time I remember when I was a kid in the 90's a lot of the comics put in anti censorship ads for awareness of it, I wonder if that censorship contributed to this genre mostly disappearing.


It depends. Superhero comics are not on a path to becoming high culture, and I agree with that. Electronic music clubs are on a path to becoming high culture (recent law change in Germany), and I also agree with that.


Actual comic books peaked in the 90s maybe.

They never fully broke into mainstream culture, but in their niche they were big and certainly accepted.

Now those characters and stories live on in "comic book movies". Less employed people than me can debate to what extent that is the same thing :)


I suppose it depends on how you define "high culture," but when Disney is making Marvel Cinematic Universe movies grossing past $2.7 billion, I think it's fair to say superhero comics have become something.


I'd wager a very small percentage of the moviegoers have ever even seen a comic featuring their favorite movie superheroes, much less picked one up and read it.


And I would wager that only a very small percentage of Broadway audiences have ever picked up a play in paper form either.


What was the recent law change in Germany?


In city planning, clubs will be classified in the same group as theaters and operas. They were previously in the same group as brothels and gambling joints.

https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/gesellschaft/club...




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