Seduction of the Innocent

Supervillains, Real and Imagined

On a nondescript afternoon, a preteen boy arrives at home from school. He scrounges something to eat in the kitchenette—leftovers, a can of Spaghetti-Os, or maybe a tortilla with lettuce and shredded cheese. Out of routine, he eats while watching a re-run on the old black & white TV with tinfoil “ears” on the antenna: Get Smart, F-Troop, or I Dream of Genie.

(Never Batman. He knows that the live-action 1960s Batman show comes on in other areas, but never anywhere he’s lived. Adults occasionally make references to the show. He’s even met other kids who have seen it. He’s jealous of them.)

The rerun ends and now there’s nothing but news and game shows being broadcast. He shuts the TV off.

Bored, he ponders how to spend the evening. There’s nothing to do and he hasn’t lived here long enough to make friends yet. He would draw, but he can’t find any blank paper.

He pulls a cardboard box over to the couch. The box contains the belongings he’s managed to retain over the last few changes of residence. From the box he extracts a large red-and-white hard bound book—one of his most prized possessions. The book jacket is missing and the spine is sun-bleached from when he once kept it on a windowsill. He opens it.

Inside are colorful reprints of Golden Age comic stories. He has read all the sequential art so many times, he knows all the stories by heart. Once, maybe a year before, he got so bored he tried reading the lengthy text section in the front of the book. Of what he understood, not much of it appealed to him. But today, he will try again, because there’s not much else to do.

This time, it’s easier to understand. The text describes the impact superhero comics had on the author (compiler) as a boy growing up during the Great Depression. He shares his opinions about the characters, the art, and the storylines. He provides morsels of insight as to the workings of the comic book industry—still brand new during the author’s childhood.

On the couch with his nose buried in this hardcover book, the boy is immersed in the world behind the world of the first superheroes. It was a sort of Wild West of creativity. Despite the poverty, seedy offices, long hours and low pay, it all sounds quite glamorous to the young boy reading about it. The artists behind Superman, the Sub-Mariner, Batman and the Spirit were pioneers blazing a trail that would lead, over half a century later, to the spinner rack where the boy first discovered comics.

Comics introduced him to a world where a boy not unlike himself could speak a word and be transformed by magic lightning into Captain Marvel, who could fly, throw train cars around like toys, defeat bad guys, and save the world. Or be a sidekick to a superheroic grownup like the Batman, Captain America or the Human Torch.

As he reads on in the prose introduction of the book, the villain is introduced. It reads like nonfiction—all this stuff ostensibly happened—and yet there is a dastardly bad guy who is determined to destroy this fantastic world of wonder which brought joy into the reading boy’s life.

The villain was named Fredric Wertham—a psychiatrist or psychologist or one of those psycho ‘ists. The reading boy forms a mental picture of the Diabolical Doctor Wertham which rather resembles Dr. Sivana (one of the original Captain Marvel’s adversaries). Wertham wanted to abolish comics because, he claimed, they caused juvenile delinquency.

The boy reads on, and just can’t believe what Wertham said about Wonder Woman and the Batman. Wertham was a real-life supervillain. A mad scientist trying to destroy the world. Or, at least, trying to ruin its best parts for everybody.

The book was The Great Comic Book Heroes. The author of the autobiographical prose section was Jules Feiffer. The boy reading it was me.

I read other books which covered Wertham’s attack on comics, and they reinforced my opinion on the Diabolical Doctor. My fascination with those pioneer days of the medium (“the Golden Age of Comics”) continued into adulthood, and, though my loathing of Wertham abated and was all but forgotten over time, a more complete picture of that controversy has come into focus.

Just as jazz, the blues, and rock & roll (plus all their derivatives) comprise the American contribution to music, so is sequential art (specifically, the comic book) to literature and the visual arts. It is a bridge between the visual and the literary which can appeal to all ages, and inspires all other mediums. It is powerful, having helped shape the young minds of three generations who grew up in an America so idyllic as to seem unbelievable from our present dystopia—unbelievable from my perspective as a boy, too.

Just like music and film, this once distinctly American art form has been subverted by talentless cultural saboteurs to the point that creatives from other countries have surpassed, in quality, what is traditionally published (“tradpubbed”) in our erstwhile republic.

Foreign creatives have been beating us at our own game, so to speak. “Us,” I utter, through gritted teeth, while gesturing air quotes.

The talentless propagandists at Marvel and DC would have you believe that what they’re producing now is the pinnacle of American sequential art, but of course it’s inferior to its foreign competition because America was never great or exceptional to begin with.

According to that (per)version of history, the brave visionaries of today (whose creative genius consists solely of race and/or gender swapping characters created by others...and pandering to the LGBTQ Mafia) have rescued the medium from heteronormalcy, pedophobia, and the Patriarchy.

By obediently conforming to Current Year Establishment narratives, they prove themselves to be courageous rebels, you see. They are the valiant Resistance.

What, exactly, are they resisting? The aforementioned doldrums of an age that ended before most of us were born.

That age, when it comes to comic books, was ruled by something called the Comics Code Authority (CCA).

The CCA would become irrelevant and disappear altogether eventually, but for a couple decades, no comic publisher dared ignore the standards of decency it enforced. Few failed to display the CCA stamp of approval on their covers.

Some of those standards seem silly or Victorian today, such as forbidding depiction of criminals getting away with crimes, or portrayal of police as anything but honest, morally pure guardians of peace and order. (You must consider the target audience of comics during the postwar years. It wasn’t the middle-aged nerds who spearhead comic fandom today, but children.)

The CCA was instituted following Senate hearings on comic books and juvenile delinquency. At those hearings, portions of Wertham’s book, Seduction of the Innocent, were read and entered into the record.

Later, he was called as an expert witness and testified before the Senate.

(One detail which should be divulged right away is that Wertham never blamed juvenile delinquency exclusively on comic books—it was one influence among many he believed contributed to the phenomenon. He made this point repeatedly in his testimony and in print.)

Wertham’s primary targets were crime and horror comics—very popular genres since the decline of Superhero comics after the conclusion of the Second World War. The publisher which suffered the most scrutiny was E.C. (of Mad Magazine fame).

Wertham showed images from some of these comics at the hearing, including a depiction of a baseball game wherein a severed human head is used for the ball, spilled intestines mark the base lines, and the torso of the corpse is used as a chest protector for the catcher. He revealed another comic in which somebody tries to rip a girl’s tongue out of her mouth. He testified regarding an apparent eye-gouging fetish evident in the panels of several comics. He showed a comic story about a 10 year-old girl who murdered her father, framed her mother for the crime and, after the mother was executed by electric chair, winked at the reader because she got away with all of it. He displayed a photostat of a story in which a woman murders her husband, then eats his organs. He also showed the Senate the title of one comic story: “Friendship is for Suckers! Loyalty—that is for Jerks!” Wertham had evidence to corroborate all his assertions regarding what was in the respective comics.

Wertham testified that repeated exposure to gruesome or disgusting images/concepts could desensitize young children to depravity, lead to moral confusion, and perhaps cause them to reject traditional morality and accept disgusting behavior as normal.

Aside from an incoherent aside about Superman, Wertham didn’t speak much about superheroes in the hearing. In his book Seduction of the Innocent, however, Wertham purported a homosexual subtext in the Batman comics, with Wonder Woman being the Darknight Detective’s lesbian counterpart.

I didn’t want to believe any of this—especially about Batman, who had always been my favorite (with Spiderman firmly in second place). Wertham noted panels wherein Bruce wore a house robe around Wayne Manor, and, when injured, Dick would enter his bedroom to check on him. I scoffed at this. Wertham was just looking for excuses to destroy the medium, sez I.

Years after that afternoon reading Feiffer’s foreword in The Great Comic Book Heroes, as an adult with spending money, I bought several Batman reprint anthologies from the Golden and Silver Ages. Three or four end panels from those stories showed Batman and Robin (plus Superman once, if I remember right) skipping along the sidewalk arm-in-arm. Again, the audience was largely prepubescent boys. Maybe that was something boys did back then? Nevertheless, it looked pretty damned gay.

The allegations of deviant sexual subtext in the Wonder Woman stories aren’t nearly as easy to dismiss.

Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston, decided he should create a female Superman, since “the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity.” His admitted motive was to use the medium as a propaganda vehicle for gender confusion. In his own words:

“Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.”

Marston was a married psychologist who not only had an affair with one of his students (niece of Nazi-sympathizing eugenicist and feminist icon Margaret Sanger, no less), but brought her into his home and pressured his wife into a menage a trois lifestyle with her. His academic papers were rife with his justification for sexual fetishes. Marston was the proto-White Knight who helped pave the way for the legions of male feminists who infest the culture across the political spectrum today. Knowing his proclivities makes it fairly clear what he meant by statements like this:

“If they go crazy over Wonder Woman, it means they're longing for a beautiful, exciting girl who's stronger than they are. By their comics tastes ye shall know them! Tell me anybody's preference in story strips and I'll tell you his subconscious desires. These simple, highly imaginative picture stories satisfy longings that ordinary daily life thwarts and denies. Superman and the army of male comics characters who resemble him satisfy the simple desire to be stronger and more powerful than anybody else. Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them."

It’s surprising to note how many bondage themes show up even back in the earliest Wonder Woman comics—in an era wherein we assume arts and entertainment were tame and wholesome. The craftiness of it was that a normal person could view all the kinky imagery never suspecting that it had sexual undertones; but a sexual deviant (or somebody at least tempted by deviancy) would view those same panels and immediately decode the subtext for what it was.

When Wonder Woman wasn’t tying up another woman, a woman was binding her. She physically dominated men, of course, but if a man ever fused her bulletproof bracelets together, she would become his slave.

Whereas Green Arrow had his bow and trick arrows; Batman had his utility belt and batarangs, Wonder Woman went nowhere without her magic lasso. Anybody she roped with that lasso was helpless and had to confess their guilt to her. The BDSM implications went completely over my head as a kid, but I was fairly innocent—sheltered, even—compared to kids who grew up in the big cities who saw prostitutes walking the streets from an early age and probably found X-rated magazines in the dumpster.

In the beginning, the Wonder Woman canon was steeped in Greek mythology. She battled gods—male gods—and put them in their place. She was an Amazon from an island with an exclusively female population. Marston probably couldn’t have gotten away with calling it Lesbos back then, so he named it “Paradise Island.” Doubtless such a place was his idea of paradise, where all his fantasies of lesbian mistresses could become reality.

Marston wasn’t just a feminist; he believed in female supremacy—and wanted an entire generation of young, impressionable kids to believe in it, too. Female domination went far beyond a kinky sexual fetish for him. His wishful thinking undergirded his entire worldview:

"I tell you, my inquiring friend, there's great hope for this world. Women will win! Give them a little more time and the added strength they'll develop out of this war (WWII) and they'll begin to control things in a serious way. When women rule, there won't be any more (war) because the girls won't want to waste time killing men.”

My perspective on Wertham changed. He hadn’t fabricated the subtexts he warned about. Just as McCarthy was demonized for exposing communist infiltration of our government (posthumously vindicated by declassified Soviet documents and intercepted radio messages), Wertham had been vilified in the subculture of comic fandom.

Where I still differ from Wertham is the nature and scope of his warnings. He was worried about an immediate uptick in juvenile delinquency (which he supported with anecdotal, rather than statistical, evidence). From where we sit, it appears he missed the far more insidious, far more dangerous threat.

Two generations composed the audience for comic books when he wrote his book and testified before the Senate: the Silent and Baby Boom generations.

The Silents were, on average, the most well-behaved, obedient, respectful, and conformist generation of the 20^th Century. They married young, raised families, worked hard at respectable jobs, kept their neighborhoods clean and safe. One needed not even lock his doors when all the neighbors were Silents.

The Boomers didn’t cause trouble as juveniles. It wasn’t until, as young adults under the influence of drugs, “free love,” psychedelic music and Marxist professors, that an outspoken minority of them threw a collective temper tantrum. The true danger of their immoral influences would become more obvious the older they grew.

Boomers would eventually take over the institutions and corrupt all subsequent generations up to the present day. If you haven’t noticed, cultural Marxist Boomers are still running everything—from Congress to the universities to Hollywood.

Wertham was right that the perverse subtexts in comic books were not the only corrupting influence. The same insidious conditioning was deployed in the publishing industry at large, in Hollywood, the music industry, the news media and academia. They were all pushing America toward the same “fundamental transformation” Barrack Hussein Obama would brag about after the cancer had permeated the entire country and groomed him into a twisted Messiah figure. The longer this cultural rot was allowed to fester, the faster it spread and the bolder its peddlers became.

Wertham was also right about desensitization. Repeated exposure to perversion causes most people to accept it. Immorality in general, and sexual perversion in particular, are so pervasive today that we hardly bat an eye. The most scathing criticism “conservatives” even dare to level against the latter is something along the lines of “...not that there’s anything wrong with that…” We have gone from “You’re a crackpot—there’s no such messages hidden in entertainment!” to “You’re a bigot—there’s nothing wrong with those messages in entertainment!”

Some may wonder how we got to “drag queen story hour,” and public schools signing children up for sex-change surgery, then having parents arrested if they object. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from a coordinated assault on the moral foundations of a once-Christian republic, from every medium in pop culture, with such frog-boiling patience and subtlety that it wasn’t an obvious assault until recent decades. (And to a coincidence theorist, the idea that it’s a coordinated assault is still scoffable.)

The assault launched with baby steps. Rosie the Riveter. The Women’s Army Corps. Postwar comedies featuring masculine women and effeminate men. Heroic warrior Amazons like Wonder Woman rescuing Dudes-in-Distress like Steve Trevor, proving anything a man could do, they could do better.

Gender confusion has hit critical mass in recent years, and, ironically, debunked Marston’s wishful thinking that woman could ever be man’s physical equal. Mediocre male jocks pretend to be women and utterly dominate the very best female athletes in sport after sport. It never happens the other way around. But don’t you dare object to putting women in combat, or elite military units, or Secret Service protective details, you neanderthal sexist.

Gender confusion stems from fetish, not science. It defies scientific reality. Yet accepting it is mandatory in our present dystopia which functions a lot like a society ruled by women. A matriarchy Marston peddled that fetish to promote. A fetish Wertham warned us about.

Comic readers, including me, once dismissed the idea of a homosexual Robin. Yet in recent comic books, that is exactly what has been foisted on the readers. This ubiquitous and mandatory perversion of iconic characters didn’t just pop into 2024 America out of thin air. It started somewhere.

The innocent were, indeed, seduced. Those seduced were corrupted, or at least cowed into tolerance of what would corrupt others. This established a toehold for greater seduction, corruption, and perversion. While juvenile delinquency never became the catastrophe Wertham feared it would be, just look at what is being done to children in the Current Year. Were he still alive today, even Wertham would probably wonder how we got to this point.

His misplaced emphasis on postwar juvenile delinquency notwithstanding, Wertham was a maligned prophet. A hapless Jor-El trying in vain to warn his fellow Kryptonians about a danger they denied.

Wertham was right.

This was originally written for an online publication which evidently no longer exists.

Shame on me for not thinking of this before, but speaking of comic books: visit another stack of mine, Tales of the Earthbound, where I’m posting episodes of my new graphic novel, Threat Quotient, which you can read now for free.