The Comic-Book Industry Jeffery Kahan
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The Comic-Book Industry Versus the United States Government Jeffery Kahan “It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed.” — Abigail Adams. “With great power comes great responsibility”— Stan Lee.i If the paragone is dedicated to exploring the competitive factors that affect artistic creation, then there must always be winners and losers. On that score, we can be clear. Until recently, comic books were considered to be the lowest of the literary low, and their readers addicted to a “shameless love of trash.”ii Indeed, in the “Golden Age” and “Silver Age” of comic books, the industry was often defined (and not without reason) as a form of pornography.iii Particularly after World War II, political forces exerted their own forms of compliance on the industry. The influence radically shifted the sexual nature of comic book story and image; at the same time, the very fear of a McCarthy-like blacklist forced artists to create new forms of collective creation wherein everyone and no one was the “author” or “creator” of a character or work. Comic Books, Pin-ups and the Second World War The earliest American comics were merely anthologies of strips printed in the newspapers. The modern superhero comic book, as we know it today, was very much a product of war propagan- da. Superman, Captain America, and Wonder Woman were all introduced in World War II and all of the aforementioned fought the Nazis. While seen today as a child-friendly medium, war-era comics, as detailed in a Life magazine retrospective called Life with the Comics: In Praise of a Classic American Art Form, were extremely popular with soldiers (Fig. 1).iv Of course, G.I.s were not just reading about muscled heroes defeating the Nazis. They were also looking at images of beautiful women, particularly pin-ups. Maria Elena Buszek (2006) has recently argued that ogling over the latest Hollywood starlet or pinup initiated the viewer into 81 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:22:45AM via free access a complex web of sexual soft core and fetish. At the same time, these images were “high-mind- ed:” the focal point was the “lone female figure.”v Comic books, then, were far more sexualized because, in addition to displaying all of the features of the pin-up, their popular viragos interact- ed with men, and not just super-men. Within the pages of the comics, Wonder Woman and other female characters fought alongside regular G.I.s. The comics offered a fantasy world of male interaction with pin-ups, so much so that caped super-heroine pin-ups were often painted on the side of bombers as mascots or troop “protectresses:” a bombshell for a flying shell carrying bombs (Fig. 2).vi Post-War Boom and Bust By the end of the war, adults, once the purveyors of comic books, began to take a more puri- tanical view of their former favorite literary pastime. Martin Barker, for example, argues that post-war America tried to make women feel “guilty” about factory work.vii After the war, wom- en needed to be debilitated and re-domesticated. Not surprisingly, a favorite target was Wonder Woman, created by William Moulton Marston. During the war, a muscular woman who could do anything a man could do was fine — another Rosie the Riveter. After the war, society tried to put women “back in their place” — and Wonder Woman was clearly out of place. Big-breasted and barely clothed, Wonder Woman served as an outlet for Marston’s sexual obsessions, “fantasies and fetishes.”viii The fetishistic aspect of Wonder Woman is clear. She has the requisite bond- age gear: a lasso and “bracelets of submission.” In her initial incarnation, she was also fond of getting her own bottom paddled as seen in the July Sensation, no. 91 scene where the superhero is straddled across the lap of a child and winks at the viewer.ix Likewise, in the pages of Batman, the Caped Crusader sometimes revealed a kinky predilection, especially when it came to the highly-nubile villainess Catwoman. In his first encounter with her, Batman warns: “Quiet or papa spank!” The story ends with Batman releasing her because she “has lovely eyes.” He then adds, “Maybe I’ll bump into her again sometime.”x In addition to super-hero comics, readers could also buy unregulated “girlie” digests, such as Humorama (founded in 1938, but which reached its zenith in the 1950s). The digest often fea- tured the soft core “one-shot” art of Dan DeCarlo, who also drew Archie Comics, which featured a monthly pin-up, often of a scantily clad Betty or Veronica, and Millie the Model, aka, “The Blonde Bombshell.” Humorara’s distributor was Abe Goodman, who was a brother to Timely (later Marvel) comics owner, Martin Goodman. A further link between comic books and pornog- raphy: Dan DeCarlo’s Millie the Model was scripted by Martin Goodman’s son-in-law, Stan Lee, later the creator of Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, Daredevil, and other heroes. Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:22:45AM via free access Given the crossovers between adult and kid-friendly comics and their writers and artists, some confusion among nonreaders was to be expected. The problem was exacerbated by nearly two decades of negative social commentary. The New Republic remarked: “Comic books in their present form are the absence of thought. They are, in fact, the greatest intellectual narcotic on the market […] Every hour spent in reading comics is an hour in which all inner growth is stopped.”xi Sterling North, the Literary Editor for the Chicago Daily News, wrote that comics were “poisonous mushroom[s].”xii Ethel C. Wright, writing in Library Journal, complained that comic books were “devoted to killing, cruelty, gangsterism, sadism, [and] holdups.”xiii Cultural critic and reporter Marya Mannes quipped that “there are enough mammary glands protruding through the pages [of your average comic book] […] to make a Freudian field day.”xiv Given the negative press, comic books were linked to all sorts of anti-social activities. In New York City, Judge David P. McKeen tried some young defendants and commented that “You look like you come from decent families, and all you have done is brought them pain and suffering.You boys have been reading too many comic books.”xv Then the finalcoup de grace for the Golden Age of comics: psychologist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Wertham’s major concern with comic books was that they exposed children to casual sex, including such “deviant behavior” as sadomasochism and homo- sexuality. In his seventh chapter (titled “I Want to Be a Sex Maniac!”), Wertham, the Chief Psy- chiatrist for the New York Department of Hospitals, presents case after case in which “normal” children become perverts because of repeated exposure to the comic-book superhero Superman: “In one such drawing (from one of his patients), a girl is tied nude to a post. A handkerchief is stuffed in her mouth. On the floor are her discarded panties. In front of her is a boy heating some torture instruments over a fire. On his chest is the S of the superman.”xvi The more that Wertham studied the comics, the more he worried. Comic books famously represented the heroic actions of powerful men, but they also depicted heroes enjoying situations of intense sadomasochism: “A nineteen-year-old boy told me about his high-heel fantasies: ‘You are the first one I tell it to. I think of girls twisting their heels on my chest and face.’ His first complete sexual stimulation had come from masochistic scenes in comic books at the age of about ten or eleven.”xvii And as follows: “A twelve-year-old sex delinquent told me, ‘In the comic books sometimes the men threaten the girls. They beat them with their hands. They tie them around to a chair and then they beat them. When I read such a book I get sexually excited. They don’t get me excited all the time, only when they tie them up.’”xviii Wertham argued that we could not view these reactions as the isolated behavior of a few sick children. The notoriously repetitious nature of the comics themselves was pounding sick images 83 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:22:45AM via free access into impressionable minds. Seeing the same heroes undergo the same adventures month after month turned situations into set pieces, and so, by dint of familiarity, children learned the mecha- nisms of deviant sex. Thus, reading Superman led children to crave sadomasochism, while read- ing Batman and Robin turned them gay. Wertham objected to Bruce Wayne’s handsome features, money, and all-male household, including his butler, Alfred, and young ward, Dick Grayson (a.k.a. Robin). Indeed, Wertham argued, that depictions of Batman and Robin were frequently homoerotic, as seen in a frame showing the two seemingly in the same bed (Batman #84 of June 1954).xix Wer- tham wrote that the world of Batman and Robin “is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. Sometimes they are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket off, collar open, and his hand on his friend’s arm;” he added, “Robin is a handsome ephe- bic boy, usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. He is buoyant with energy and devoted to nothing on earth or in interplanetary space so much as to Bruce Wayne.