Comments on: PSA Monday: Are You A Red Dupe?

By: ArekExcelsior2

ArekExcelsior2 — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:22:25 +0000

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

By: Philip

Philip — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 11:39:16 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 23:28:45 +0000

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.