On the off chance the world that Big Tech has made reminds anyone of the phrase “Seduction of the Innocent,” what’s really innocent is what used to be thought of as a threat to kids.
That was famously the title of a 1954 book by Fredric Wertham about the supposed warping effects of comic books on America’s youth. Famous enough that you could look up dollar values of collectible titles in The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and see how they’d spike if they’d merited a Wertham mention (denoted with “SOTI”).
The book is notorious because it’s seen as taking down EC, the publisher of an unparalleled and lavishly graphic line of horror and crime comics in the 1950s — The Haunt of Fear, Shock SuspenStories — illustrated by the most talented artists in the field, by far — Wally Wood, Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, Graham (Ghastly) Ingels.
Wertham has since then been ridiculed, and reviled, for philistinism, for his appearances before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, with its McCarthyite air, for the anecdotal nature of his studies.
And yet Wertham, a German-born professor at Johns Hopkins, wasn’t some publicity-hound mouthpiece. He had set up a psychiatric clinic to treat the underserved in Harlem, staffed by volunteers. He tried to help felons.
With comic books, he overdid it, clearly, but at the very least, he was a complicated soul.
Probably worse was John Goldwater, an orphaned and self-made former knockabout who became the publisher of Archie Comics, with its quasi-reactionary and homogeneous vision of midcentury America. He came to be in charge of what followed from Wertham’s work — the Comics Code Authority, institutionalized self-censorship remarkably similar to the Hays Code in the movies. (Which meant goodbye to the likes of the 1932 “Three on a Match,” with its women of loose morals and its cocaine.)
It’s said that Goldwater wanted to use the comics code to stick it to EC for a withering 1954 satire that ran in the company’s Mad magazine, “Starchie,” by Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder, in which Starchie Standrews and Bottleneck (Jughead’s stand-in) are portrayed as slouching, cigarettes and brass knuckles delinquents, and instead of Betty and Veronica we have Biddy and Salonica, chased through the high school’s halls by the drooling principal, Mr. Weathernot.
Starchie ends up incarcerated, where he has plenty of time to think of how he rejected Biddy only to pine for Salonica, when Biddy was every bit the bombshell, in identical tight sweaters, in fact indistinguishable, only blond, not raven-haired. He repeatedly slams his head against the cinderblock wall, shouting, “She threw herself! Jerk! Fool! Idiot!”
It still holds up.