The paragraph on Wertham is backwards. Wertham's big focus was on horror comics, war comics, and the like - the Comics Code following his attacks prevented anything but the crazy-go-nuts superhero stories, basically. E.C. stopped publishing its horror titles, the best in the genre, because it could not, and even then moved MAD into a magazine format so they could still publish vaguely-mature articles. Superheroes were on the decline relative to the other genres, until Wertham showed up, after which you had things like the resurrection of the Flash concept, etc.
The war comics, horror comics, and so on were the big offenses, due to their violent nature which would warp any child whose parents allowed him to read a comic with a severed head on the cover. Most of Wertham's big articles of evidence throughout the trials were E.C. horror titles.
On that note I'd like to say Harvey Gaines's testimony defending his comics and those of his contemporaries is both a crowning moment of awesome, as he was the only comics guy willing to do it, and a crowning moment of suck, because he did it absolutely soused. Actually I guess that also kind of makes it a C Mo A.
The paragraph on Wertham is backwards. Wertham's big focus was on horror comics, war comics, and the like - the Comics Code following his attacks prevented anything but the crazy-go-nuts superhero stories, basically. E.C. stopped publishing its horror titles, the best in the genre, because it could not, and even then moved MAD into a magazine format so they could still publish vaguely-mature articles. Superheroes were on the decline relative to the other genres, until Wertham showed up, after which you had things like the resurrection of the Flash concept, etc.
The war comics, horror comics, and so on were the big offenses, due to their violent nature which would warp any child whose parents allowed him to read a comic with a severed head on the cover. Most of Wertham's big articles of evidence throughout the trials were E.C. horror titles.
On that note I'd like to say Harvey Gaines's testimony defending his comics and those of his contemporaries is both a crowning moment of awesome, as he was the only comics guy willing to do it, and a crowning moment of suck, because he did it absolutely soused. Actually I guess that also kind of makes it a C Mo A.
Edited by librofuerte