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EC closed all its titles except Mad magazine, and American comics became a little blander, until, in his own telling, Stan Lee came along and shook things up.
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Publishers responded with a Hays Code-style programme of self-censorship. Humour, romance, western, crime, science fiction and horror titles sold as well or better, and Wertham and the Senate were chiefly exercised by EC Comics’ crime and horror output. Superman (launched in 1938), Batman (1939) and Wonder Woman (1941) still had their own publications in the mid 1950s, but they were coming to be seen as a wartime fad. (Never mind that such views, without the disapproval of gay role models, have since become received wisdom among fans.) Superheroes, however, weren’t high on Wertham’s hit list, because they didn’t dominate the market, which was huge: in 1948, American publishers sold between eighty and a hundred million comics a month. Wertham is remembered, if at all, as a paranoid scold who thought that Superman was potentially fascist, that Batman and Robin could be construed as positive gay role models, and that Wonder Woman’s early adventures had a bondage subtext. Generations of fans have had their revenge. Do you think that’s in good taste?’ Fifteen comics companies went out of business in the summer of 1954 alone. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. A Senate subcommittee put publishers on the stand: ‘Here is your May issue. Youth groups organised bonfires of objectionable material. Wertham became the public face of a moral panic. He wasn’t the first to take aim at ‘the marijuana of the nursery’, as a columnist for the Saturday Review called them, but he was the first to offer a socio-psychiatric argument that they led to juvenile delinquency: first at a symposium on ‘The Psychopathology of Comic Books’ in 1948, and then in a book, Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954. His younger patients, he observed, liked reading comics, and as far as he could see the medium was a poisonous jumble of will- to-power fantasies, sexualised violence, misogyny, racism and deviant sexuality. Unfortunately for Wertham’s reputation, his work with children also left him with a bee in his bonnet about comic books. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that school segregation was a danger to public health. Six years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. The result was the Lafargue Clinic, a low-cost psychiatric centre which Wertham opened in a church basement in Harlem in 1946 with help from Ellison and Richard Wright.
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Wertham, a German Jewish emigrant, sympathised, and though a deferment wasn’t needed in the end – a draft notice never showed up – their talks uncovered a shared indignation about the colour line in access to medical care. A friend had suggested that Wertham might find a way to get him a psychiatric deferment. Ellison, who was eligible for the draft, didn’t want to join a segregated army. I n 1942, Ralph Ellison had a meeting with Fredric Wertham, the director of psychiatric services at Queens General Hospital in New York.