(or, How Gay Superheroes Are Not as Bad as Violent Monsters)
While there are several explanations of how the designations of the Golden and Silver Ages were developed for superhero comic books,1these designations have stuck as a means
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to separate the first decades of superhero comic books from the next few. The desire to do so is a result of a perceived separation between eras implied by one or both of the following conceptual shifts: (1) DC’s classic superheroes and DC’s reinvented superheroes and (2) DC’s classic superheroes and Marvel’s new superheroes. Both are significant as the first eventually leads to DC’s Earth-1 and Earth-2 split and the second creates the other major universe in which superheroes relate to one another. Since the ramifications of the Earth-1 and Earth-2 split do not completely play out and become clear until the Modern Age, I will be focusing on this in chapter 6. Therefore, the events leading up to and including the Silver Age creation of the Marvel universe will be the express purview of this chapter. In order to fully appreciate the Silver Age and the Marvel universe, I must highlight the most interesting event that continues the above- mentioned “convergence of various intentional and unintentional acts,” an event that not only prolongs the primary orality of superhero comic books but also allows it to flourish. Instigated by the general fear of new media and the paranoia of Cold War culture, the single event most important to enabling the maturation of this fledgling traditionality would be the congressional hearings initiated by Fredric Wertham (and the Comics Code they subsequently encouraged). On the surface, this seems like a very unlikely source of “help” for superhero comic books (even if that help can be characterized as inadvertent), as Wertham’s unsupported attacks were not limited to crime and horror comics (his favorite targets). Instead, Wertham charged that comic books, a medium inherently juvenile, caused delinquency in many forms, extending beyond the vio-lence clearly encouraged by crime and horror comic books. In Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, he would charge that Superman also encouraged violence (and fascism) and that Batman and Robin encouraged homosexuality. The resultant public scare and self- regulation of the comic book industry via the Comics Code identified superhero stories as suitable only for juveniles, and it created an artificial authority that regulated the content of superhero stories; this works contrary to the dynamics that allow free flow of information and ideas within traditional culture. Many proponents of comic books have identified Fredric Wertham as the single most important figure in stagnating its artistic growth in America. However, at the same time, Wertham and the congressional hearings eliminated the comic book com-petition that seemed to be bringing the popularity of superhero comic books to an end in the 1950s, and, moreover, this also created a safe haven for the traditionality of superhero comic books to continue to develop (set apart from the literate principle of the adults’ culture world). This chapter will examine how Wertham paved the way for the Silver Age of Marvel superheroes, an extension and refinement of the primary orality developed in Golden Age superhero comic books. While often dubbed the Marvel “revolution” by its creators, the Marvel superhero universe was much more of a realization, with creators like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko working together to refine the raw material of the Golden Age. Thanks to the inept social consciousness of Wertham and the immense creative efforts of Lee, Kirby, and Ditko, the traditional approach of superhero comics would continue to be refined, making only gradual overtures toward literacy.
While I earlier identified the history of superhero comic books and their characteristics, it is important to clarify and perhaps reemphasize some aspects of the early history. To begin with the superheroes themselves, despite their uniform “heaviness,” the prominent heroes were really quite diverse ranging from the justice- over- the- law vigilantes, such as Superman and Batman, to love- the- establishment heroes Green Lantern and the Flash.
Concomitantly, Captain Marvel with his adolescent alter ego, Wonder Woman with her Amazonian background, and Captain America with his patriotic sentiment all hailed from
different sensibilities and appealed to different demographics. In addition, despite the vast popularity of superhero comic books and their league of imitators, the diversity of genre initially seen in the comic strip also continued to a lesser degree within the late 1930s and early 1940s (the years of the superhero boom within the industry). Other genres that enjoyed decent sales included the genres of funny animal stories, such as Disney Comics, teen humor best exemplified by Archie Comics (and appealing strongly to teenage female readers),2and science fiction and fantasy that similarly adhered to many of the tenets of oral epics.3 How-ever, more important as an indicator of the shift in demographic targeting would be the growing success of “jungle comics,” including many Fiction House titles such as Sheena, Jungle Queen. Like many other titles in many other genre categories seeking to bolster its consumer base of young male readers, the jungle tales featured scantily clad women in exotic settings. In a way that perhaps related to this content, these jungle tales were generally imperialist stories with overt racist caricatures that extended far beyond the imperialist fables of writers in the literary world, like Rudyard Kipling. In addition to proving the superiority of the white Western world, these stories often featured violence and sexuality in prurient ways, with implied scenes of torture and sadomasochism. One reason to make special mention of jungle tales is that their basic narrative shared some common links to the traditionality of superhero stories but for the most part borrowed ideas from the age of exploration (and the Enlightenment), rejecting the tribal in favor of the grand ideal of literate society. Even though the industry practices toward workers and ownership of intel-lectual property changed very little, it is inconceivable that comic books could forever remain an island of traditionality and creators would continue to resist the pressure of ideas set forth by the literate world. Another reason to mention the jungle tales is that the pop-ularity of superheroes, while not challenged by jungle tales per se, would be challenged by another genre that utilized similar taboo themes and explicit content in an “adult” context, also working somewhat outside the epic tradition: crime stories. Working under the guise of the cautionary tale, titles like Crime Does Not Pay featured depictions of extreme violence, existing during the war years in the space between the pulps and popular comic books.
However, after the end of World War II, crime comic books soared in popularity with an audience apparently willing to return to the post–Depression sensibility that created film noir and questioned the American dream.4In obvious ways, these subversive stories would undermine cultural ideals and work in ways generally contrary to the affirmations of com-munity in the traditional superhero story.
Whatever might be said about their moral virtues, these crime comic books marked an important stage in the evolution of the industry and youth culture. By demonstrating that successful comic books need not be confined to juvenile adventure stories, fatuous teen humor, and talking animals, they expanded the creative possibilities of the medium con-siderably. More significantly, they broke from the unwritten code that said comic books had to offer fulfillment, affirmation, and conflict resolution to their young audience on terms established by a supposedly virtuous and progressive society [Wright 84].
The negative connotations in Wright’s descriptions of other genres is clear, but, nevertheless, he is very accurate in his representation of the change of target audience among publishers and in his understanding of the content of crime comic books. Ultimately, this new trend would pave the way for more explicit content to come and a controversy that would question the medium as a whole.
While crime comic books began to cause controversy and invite protest in many forms, the general popularity of their more gruesome images encouraged the publication of horror
comic books, seen most clearly in the rise of Bill Gaines’s EC line of horror titles, such as Tales from the Crypt.5Remembered well for featuring bloody dismemberments and titillating presentations of partially clad women, the EC horror titles characteristically turned on a surprise ending that reshaped the meaning of the story as a whole. Often cleverly following in the tradition of crime stories that exposed the dark underbelly of American ideals, these horror comic books were far from mindless entertainment but still were undeniably gratu-itous (with highly detailed, realistic artwork). Wright characterizes the EC approach in the following way:
EC offered young people a liberating alternative to ... culture. With a calculated editorial strategy that sought to demolish the myths, triumphalism, and half- truths that informed Cold War America, EC challenged prevailing assumptions about race, democracy, anti-communism, authority, warfare, the atom bomb, history, marriage, family, children, and ultimately, taste [Wright 152–153].
With this in mind, it is hardly a surprise that EC horror titles brought to a head the concerns incited by crime and horror comic books in general. Because of the fears of U.S. culture in the 1950s, a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham would navigate cultural currents in a way that made him respectable at the time but quite infamous in years to come. “At this time America faced two primary fears: communism and juvenile delinquency. The axis on which these two met found Wertham, whose studies probed the social dynamic permitting the development of these fears and the underlying violence inflaming their intensity” (Reibman xxvi). Well- respected in his field for his research and general practice, Wertham was already the author of works on the psychology of murder and the role of psychiatrists in court cases by the time he entered this contentious discussion of comic books. Since the intricacies of the debates have been explored well by authors, such as Amy Nyberg in Seal of Approval, it is unnecessary to go into exhaustive detail, but a few specifics are important to include. As anxieties led to comic book burnings and eventually a hearing convened by the Senate Sub-committee on Juvenile Delinquency, support from prominent figures marshaled on both sides of the debate (with the Child Study Association and Dr. Benjamin Spock writing in support of comic book reading) (Wright 89). However, in the McCarthy era, hints of anti–
Americanism were often tied to the specter of juvenile delinquency, leading to great support regardless of the case being made. While Wertham was not the only cultural critic who made this case, he was undoubtedly the most important in regard to comic books and fairly representative of the general sentiments against them.
After publishing several articles based on the dubious connections between comic book reading and juvenile delinquency, Wertham would write Seduction of the Innocent, his widely read condemnation of comic books in general; therein, he lumped together all comic books that featured crime (whether crime, horror, romance, science fiction, jungle, or superhero stories) as “crime comics” (Wertham 20). Based largely upon the self- reporting of the juvenile delinquents with whom he worked, Wertham cobbled together a case that suggested comic book reading led to the fundamental problems facing and caused by youth today. Appealing to the conspiratorial fears of 1950s Cold War culture, Wertham would regularly portray the comic book publishing industry as an indifferent and perhaps insidious elite, shaping Amer-ican culture in unhealthy ways (Wright 162).6Although he would repeatedly reiterate that comic books were not the sole cause of juvenile delinquency, Wertham’s book is filled with alarmist rhetoric that works against the establishment of a nuanced position. “Murder, crime and drug traffic are offered to children in literature which the defenders of comic books call the modern version of the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Han Christian Andersen
or Mother Goose. But are there heroin addicts in Grimm, marihuana smokers in Anderson or dope peddlers in Mother Goose?” (Wertham 84). With dubious ability as a critic of lit-erature and visual art, Wertham made vast generalizations, took examples out of context, and ignored the resolution and larger meaning of works. Although his primary target was crime and horror comic books, he did also aim invectives at superhero comic books as well, identifying the partnership of Batman and Robin as homosexual pederasty7and superheroes in general as fascists who glorified violence:
The Superman type of comic books tends to force and superforce.... Actually, Superman (with the big S on his uniform — we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs and endless stream of submen.... It is this feature that engenders in children either one or the other of two attitudes: either they fantasy themselves as supermen, with atten-dant prejudices against the submen, or it makes them submissive and receptive to the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them — by force.... The superman conceit gives boys and girls the feeling that ruthless go- getting based on physical strength or the power of weapons or machines is the desirable way to behave.... In these children there is an exact parallel to the blunting of sensibilities in the direction of cruelty that has characterized a whole generation of central European youth fed in the Nietzsche- Nazi myth of the exceptional man who is beyond good and evil8 [Wertham 34, 97].
Although it might be tempting to berate Wertham for all his missteps in literary interpre-tation (from the S.S. comment to making all of central European youth into sub- men), such a move is unnecessary with generations now soundly rejecting much of his work.
Instead, I will simply point out the first part of this series of quotations where Wertham indulges in the sort of cause and effect argument that he repeatedly claimed his work avoided.
This brief example is not intended to indict Wertham’s faulty case any more than it has already been but to identify basic problems with his ideas that even some recent, more sym-pathetic readings cannot help but identify as a low point of his intellectual career.9
Wertham’s ideas are useful to study as an example of a certain type of intellectual ori-entation toward comic books, and he is undeniably important as an activist who radically changed the direction of the industry (and unintentionally preserved the traditional culture of the superhero comic books). Wertham is the best representative of the cultural critics (some already quoted in this book) whose misgivings toward comic books have as much to do with misunderstanding the new medium as objecting to the content.
The comic book was a new medium altogether, a medium that relied on the interaction of words and pictures to tell stories in a unique way.... Reading comic books was teaching young readers a whole new vocabulary, one that was largely foreign to adults, because adult readers did not immerse themselves deeply enough in this new cultural form to learn its language. The conflict over comic books became generational ... [Nyberg 5].
Recognizing Wertham’s animosity toward superhero comic books and his inability to separate them from crime and horror comic books indicates not only his poor readership but also his anxiety toward the medium in general. As Matthew Pustz notes, Wertham was a quintessential outsider to the unusual culture of the comic book consumer: “[T]he few outsider perspectives on comic books — Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent is a classic example — are perhaps even more flawed by denying consumers the power to explain how they use their favored texts” (Pustz 202). In general, Wertham was motivated by his good intentions, “modern” psychiatric studies, overconfidence in his dubious interpretive skills, and a poorly articulated devotion to literate culture. Entrenched in the conventions of high
literacy, Wertham’s awkward commentary often indicates what this fledgling artform is as well as is not. Wertham’s biographer, James Reibman, identifies Wertham’s concerns as quin -tessentially Platonic, fearing that the influence of art will distort the mind. Something fre-quently lost in the summaries of Seduction of the Innocent is that Wertham identified several tiers in the negative consequences that he associated with comic books: (1) illiteracy, (2) juve -nile delinquency, and (3) problems with psychosexual development. In order to set up the first of these three areas, Wertham stated: “Comic books are death on reading. The dawn of civilization was marked by the invention of writing. Reading, therefore, is not only one of the cornerstones of civilized life, it is also one of the main foundations of a child’s adjustment to it” (121). Clearly articulating his bias toward the literate world and inability to completely apprehend or appreciate the experience of the comic book, Wertham would later demonstrate a literate sensibility with his description of the “inartistic” illustration of comic books.
I know that quite a number of [comic book artists] are highly gifted; but they have to turn out an inartistic assembly- line product. That is what is essentially wrong with comic books: there are too many pictures. The mass effect of the stereotyped, standardized images is something totally different from and much inferior to the well- spaced illustra-tions in a good children’s book. Instead of helping a child to develop his artistic imagina-tion, they stifle it. Even if the drawing were good, which they are not, their numbers would kill their artistic effect [267].
In this quotation, Wertham manages to cover several of my major points within this book (but he is uniformly negative about them all). Implicit within this quotation is many of the central tenets of literate society: that pictures are inferior to text, that stereotype and cliché are wrong, and that realistic drawing is good; in addition, picture books are for children and text should be eventually preferred to pictures.
Regardless of the overall motivation behind his work, Wertham’s book would be the primary mover toward the 1954 Senate hearings at which he was a star witness10 and at which Bill Gaines became the scapegoat for the fears of adults facing the Red Menace, juve-nile delinquency, and a medium that literate culture couldn’t fully comprehend. Although Wertham claimed to not encourage censorship, this was essentially his aim and he used a convoluted argument about the majority in a democracy to justify it (Wertham 302). To satisfy an outraged public legally held in check by the first amendment, the industry agreed to regulate itself through the Comics Code. Modeled on the Hollywood production code and the unenforced code drafted earlier by the Association of Comics Publishers in 1948, the Comics Code contained rules primarily designed to eliminate depictions of sexuality, excessive violence, and drug use; some publishers like DC had long been an advocate of such self- regulation, in the hopes of staving off something like the 1954 hearings.11However, the code went further in its dictates; in concept, authority figures must always be portrayed with respect, and good must always defeat evil, and in literal fact, vampires, werewolves,
Regardless of the overall motivation behind his work, Wertham’s book would be the primary mover toward the 1954 Senate hearings at which he was a star witness10 and at which Bill Gaines became the scapegoat for the fears of adults facing the Red Menace, juve-nile delinquency, and a medium that literate culture couldn’t fully comprehend. Although Wertham claimed to not encourage censorship, this was essentially his aim and he used a convoluted argument about the majority in a democracy to justify it (Wertham 302). To satisfy an outraged public legally held in check by the first amendment, the industry agreed to regulate itself through the Comics Code. Modeled on the Hollywood production code and the unenforced code drafted earlier by the Association of Comics Publishers in 1948, the Comics Code contained rules primarily designed to eliminate depictions of sexuality, excessive violence, and drug use; some publishers like DC had long been an advocate of such self- regulation, in the hopes of staving off something like the 1954 hearings.11However, the code went further in its dictates; in concept, authority figures must always be portrayed with respect, and good must always defeat evil, and in literal fact, vampires, werewolves,