A

COMIC BOOKS AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY

Increasing Youth Crime

During the decade the problem of juvenile delinquency reached alarming proportions. As director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations J. Edgar Hoover reported in 1953, that "persons under the age of 18 committed 53.6 percent of all car thefts; 49.3 percent of all burglaries; 18 percent of all robberies, and 16.2 percent of all rapes."

Sadistic Acts

Americans were concerned not only by the number of youth crimes but by their ferocity. Reports abounded of sadistic acts committed by young criminals who often expressed no remorse. Dr. Frederic Wertham reported of a teenager who tortured a four-year-old boy because he "just felt like doing it." Dr. Wertharn was one of the many self-proclaimed experts who offered an explanation for the alleged juvenile crime wave. A leader of the New York psychiatric community, he published the book Seduction of the Innocent in 1954, based on seven years of research. The book laid the lion's share of the blame for juvenile delinquency on comic books, which had previously been considered harmless entertainment for children. According to Dr. Wertham, comics were a "locust plague" that had settled on the children of America. Crime comics, which featured graphic depictions of torture, murder, and mutilation, were singled out as the most harmful. But even such icons as Batman and Superman came under fire: Superman was condemned as a symbol of "violent race superiority," and the Dynamic Duo of Batman and Robin was "like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together." Under the influence of such reading matter, Dr. Wertham asserted, children would inevitably suffer psychological harm.

Senate Hearings

Wertham's thesis was accepted by many people looking for a scapegoat for the juvenile-delinquency problem. He was asked to speak to community groups around the country and in 1954 was one of the star witnesses before the Senate subcommittee, headed by Senator Estes Kefauver, investigating the causes of juvenile crime. Testifying for comic books was William Gaines, the editor of EC Comics, publisher of some of the industry's grisliest horror titles. Gaines, and the industry in general, mistakenly underestimated the seriousness of Wertham's charges: they counterattacked with portrayals of meddlesome quack psychiatrists in their titles.

Self-Regulation

It soon became clear, however, that some form of regulation of the industry was inevitable. Rather than wait for regulations to be imposed by the government, comics publishers created the Comics Code Authority in 1954 to establish a set of guidelines as to what was and was not acceptable in comic books. Under the code, crime could be depicted only as "a sordid and unpleasant activity," no comic could use "Horror" or "Terror" as part of its title, and "Scenes dealing … with walking dead, torture, vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism and werewolfism are prohibited," among other restrictions. To the comic book fans of later decades, many of whom remembered fondly the comics of the 1950s, the establishment of the Comics Code marked the end of the medium's creative golden age.