PSA Monday: Are You A Red Dupe?

March 6th, 2006

Filed under: Comics

From Haunt of Fear #26 (August 1954):


Are You A Red Dupe?
Click for the full image

The Grand Comics Database lists the artist as Jack Davis and Albert B. Feldstein as the scripter. It refers to this as a “tongue in cheek attempt to link efforts to destroy comics to Communists.”

Personally, I don’t think it is tongue in cheek. By the time this comic was on the shelves, Dr. Wertham’s infamous book Seduction of the Innocent had already been released (and excerpts published in the Ladies Home Journal) and the House Subcommittee on Juvenile Deliquency had already turned its eyes toward comics. Within just a few months, the Comics Code Authority would begin, and within a year EC was no longer publsihing comics.

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3 Responses to “ PSA Monday: Are You A Red Dupe? ”

  1. Anonymous
    March 7th, 2006 at 5:28 pm

    It certainly shows a sophisticated understanding of its audience. It looks to me like it’s targetting adults who are ashamed to be reading comics, but would want to be able to defend them against charges of their being bad for kids. I’m curious to see if anything like this could happen again now that the pendulum has swung so far away from the CCA and comics readership is mainly post-adolescent and adult, as I suspect a lot of it was in the ’50’s.

  2. Philip
    March 8th, 2006 at 5:39 am

    Of course, there was a tiny grain of truth in this hyperbole. Wertham and Legman, often remembered as lowest-common-denominator conservative moralists, were much closer to the Frankfurt School argument that capitalist pop culture degraded and sedated the masses. (Legman actually argued that a healthy pop culture would produce material with much less violence but lots more happy and explicit sex.) Martin Barker’s book “A Haunt of Fears” has documented the significant covert role of the UK Communist Party in the simultaneous British moral panic over US crime and horror comics.

  3. ArekExcelsior2
    November 12th, 2008 at 4:22 am

    Wertham actually had a fascinating variety of progressive opinions and has been unfairly derided in recent years as a Puritanical crusader.

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