This truly kicks ass. Well done. Call me politically correct, but you’ve inspired me to change my pronouns from “conspiracy theorist” to “coincidence noticer.”
Even as a kid, I never liked Wonder Woman and viewed all female superheroes with deep suspicion. I couldn't explain why. I think I must have picked up on those undertones. Instead I watched every rerun of the 1960s Batman show and loved every slice of cheese. :-D
I never got into the comic-book except for a brief time when George Perez was illustrating it. His artwork was always beautiful. And he drew beautiful women.
The television was great back then though. I believe every red-blooded American boy wished they were Major Steve Trevor. Some of their fathers as well. Any show where the superhero fought Nazis was always good fun. And the effect of her stopping bullets with her bracelets was great.
I remember - as kids - we all thought her Invisible Plane looked a little cheesy. Even then! Whereas The Green Hornet had a great car: The Black Beauty. And Adam West's BATMOBILE? That is still the coolest of all Batmobiles EVER - in my book. Although The Green Hornet still had a cooler sidekick.
And speaking of sidekicks, and Wonder Woman, does anyone remember who portrayed Wonder Girl?
I remember there was a Wonder Girl in a few episodes but have no clue who played her.
I’m right there with you about the modified Lincoln Futura being the best Batmobile ever. IMO 2nd place goes to the street machine Batmobile from The Batman—one of the great elements of that flick squandered by the Globohomo virtue signaling.
She was a big deal in the 1980s: Debra Winger. Starred in Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentleman, Terms of Endearment, and Shadowland before her career went down the drain. The second best Batmobile? Agreed. There was definitely some MOPAR going on there. Like you, I found it to be the ONLY good thing about the movie. I liked the comic-book back from the 80s: BATMAN: YEAR ONE. But if this was trying to be that? It failed.
Wertham was indeed a prophet, but one in the wilderness. Like Peter The Hermit during the Crusades, he spoke the words the nation wanted to hear to be invigorated into a moral fight, with no one even considering the fact that he might possibly have more selfish intentions (which I am convinced he really did).
For one thing, Wertham’s blueprint for censorship was also used against network television animation programs between the 1960s and the 1980s in the same way the CCA regulated comics. But the network censors had more clout than the CCA, and they essentially lobotomized the genre creatively, which stood until the 1990s.
Ah, OK. That’s probably part of the reason Tom & Jerry fell from an amusing children’s cartoon to an abysmal waste of celluloid. And why nobody in The Superfriends ever threw a punch.
In my 70's I am still a fan of graphic novels. I actually did some illustrating in the 1970's but found it a mean living compared to what a skilled tradesman could make at the time. Jules Feiffer is one of my all-time favorite cartoonists. I will see if Amazon has any copies of that book. I discovered the Resident Alien graphic novels from the TV show. Different but equally enjoyable (even without Alan Tudyk)
I really need to read some of Feiffer’s prose novels. I’ve read his chapters in Great Comic Book Heroes so many times by now, I’m quite comfortable with his style.
My completely unsubstantiated and almost certainly false conspiracy theory is that the government artificially elevated Wertham to substantiate their anti-comics case because the mob, which was gaining enough power to rival them, was using comics to launder money.
"Gender confusion stems from fetish, not science."
I'm going to disagree slightly here. Im seeing a mass of my peers that go through some kind of gender dysphoria or sexual alignment change going through stress and or trauma.
Again rightly blaming Boomers for failing the nation on mass, lack of coping mechanisms, which boomers filled with drugs and sex, seem to be filling with even more drastic sexual issues in later generations.
The feequency in molestation and later dysphoria or problamatic fetish is also far beyond mere corralation.
Its the moral duty of a parent to not protect thier children from life, but prepare them for it, an that preperation has been cascadingly worse for generations. Leading to insane issues and a loss of life skills.
According to science, there are male chromosomes and female chromosomes, and that’s it. No “trans woman” chromosomes. No “furry” chromosomes, etc. These individuals weren’t “born that way.”
Bad parenting, molestation, and perverse social conditioning absolutely play a part; but none are aligned with nature.
To specify. I feel the term "fetish" lacks context, which I provided. I'm making no attempt to argue the scientific portion other than it applys to psychology. As far as I am aware there is no gene for liking big titties, being whipped, or bondage. Those are fetishes. I just see a contextual distiction between Uncle Timmy jumbled my giblits as a child and regular BDSM. One is a fetish, the other is a abborant event leading to trauma expressed through sexual deviancy. Not completly mutually exclusive, but distinct enough to warrant seperation.
I understand your point. I let our discourse get off-track because I didn’t recognize the misunderstanding I now think I do.
By “gender confusion” I wasn’t referring, specifically, to the transmania of today. I meant masculine women and effeminate males, swapping gender roles, etc. Wonder Woman rescuing Steve Trevor, dominating men in combat, etc. To me (and William Moulton Marsten) that is a fetish. It is a step onto the slippery slope of gender confusion which led us to where we are now. “Gender confusion” is a spectrum. The subtle (?) Wonder Woman stuff, for example, is on one end. The “gender is a social construct” argument and contriving excuses to put women in combat and elite units are on the other.
Or who knows? Something even more ridiculous could be forthcoming.
I'm much younger than you old foggies who read the originals. I've not read any, but I've seen some of the shows in the decades that followed. I've enough cultural context to identify certain characters here and there... and that's about it.
I've instead taken to webcomics. The global reach has me reading German, Finnish, and Japanese originating material, at least as off-the-top things. A smattering of other things I thought looked good, some dead projects, etc. Traditional messaging is rare. It can be found, but quite rare.
It is interesting to think that the comics code, or variant of the Hays code as a possible good. I can see the argument. Especially as it relates to media primarily finding itself in the hands of children. However given our present circumstance, I wonder if there was a possible route where something like it would have held the line, instead of resulted in the present crisis.
Yeah—I wonder if it could have been done without neutering creativity. I think the Hays Code worked well for the most part, and most of my all-time favorites were made during that epoch. The CCA had some stupid provisions, but some great stories were told under it. Writers occasionally managed to sneak in some messaging that I as a parent would not want children reading. That might be because the misdirection regarding juvenile delinquency had the censors straining out flies while swallowing camels.
Hey—if you don’t mind superhero stories, I hope you’ll check out the graphic novel I’m sharing digitally.
Absolutely fascinating! Thank you so much for this insightful article. It's much to your credit that you were willing to revise your earlier assessments--a thing I can relate to, speaking as a former liberal turned very right-wing. Cheers!
I don’t like being wrong, but I’ve had plenty of practice. This was just one of my childhood beliefs I would be disabused of.
In young me’s defense, I was kind of set up. Feiffer, Bridwell and others only told part of the story and conveniently omitted all the evidence that would have corroborated some of Wertham’s claims.
I went through something similar with music. I knew the rock on the radio was all about sex and drugs, but assumed oldies were innocent. I became a big fan of early rock & roll. Most of it WAS innocent, but once I began considering the lyrics, I realized why those “narrow-minded reactionaries” in the ‘50s had been so opposed to it.
Well done. I grew up a huge fan of EC comics thanks to their reprints in the 90s. Those books were the gateway to me becoming a voracious reader of all sorts of books. I'd never be a writer or even adult reader had it not been for those "trash" comics.
Without comics, I might not have ever been a voracious reader. Or any kind of reader at all. They were my gateway to prose, though I never lost my affinity for the medium.
The same thing happened with the violent video game crisis 20 years ago. It's not that GTA 3 turned them into violent criminals - quite the opposite. The early exposure to violent imagery turned them into r-type, democrat voting, cuttlefish.
I originally posted this in a publication which appears to no longer exist, and all the links I had were nuked with it. However, @atomvalleybulletin did a lot of legwork on the subject of Wertham, which I heavily relied on. He still might have those links handy. In any case, I highly recommend his stack (https://substack.com/@atomvalleybulletin) for lots of great comic-related content.
I agree. I've done a 180 on Wertham as well. What turned me around was reading a book called The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hadju. Hadju's intent was to paint the 1950s in a pallette of bigotry and ignorance (in the same way the movie PLEASANTVILLE did). After reading it Hadju's intent backfired. I miss the CCA. Children can't read comic books any longer. As an adult I get the best of all worlds but children's innocence ought to be preserved. VAMPIRELLA is for 15 and 16 year olds not 5 and 6 year olds. The pervs won't draw a line. Speaking of Vampirella, that is a beautiful work of art by the late and great Dave Stevens!
I archived a Stevens illustration of Bettie for a future article. Vampirella seemed to fit this title better.
Another thing about Pleasantville I’ve mentioned before is the Hollywood Boomer phobia of being unable to act out from their emotions whenever they please. It’s interesting. Like one reason they hate the postwar Eisenhower years is because everyone had to repress their wonderful perversities or something.
The pin-up calendars, the movies, Bettie Page, famous burlesque queens, SHEENA: Queen of the Jungle, and plenty of other examples belay their lies.
I'll take the beautiful, the true, and the good of the 50s female aesthetic of Grace Kelly (for example) over the nose-pinned, blue-haired, and tattooed female standard of "unrepressed" any time.
Dave Stevens artwork is what our "modern" rulers consider "the objectified male gaze."
Back then if you wanted bombshells, Sophia Loren, Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe fit the bill (probably plenty more I don't know of). Then there were the B actress classy ladies (in appearance, at least) like Barbara Rush, Deborah Kerr, Linda Darnell, very feminine and enthralling for it. The tattooed, pierced dudes-with-tits passed off as sexy today are...well, indicative of what happened to our culture.
Dave Stevens knew how to draw a dame, for sure. All of his art made his stories sing.
You got it. All of Dave Stevens' girls were knock-outs. They were hyper-real. Beautiful in an incredible way. Frazetta also drew beautiful women also but he never nailed down elegance. Dave Stevens got that right, also.
Thank-you, sir.
This truly kicks ass. Well done. Call me politically correct, but you’ve inspired me to change my pronouns from “conspiracy theorist” to “coincidence noticer.”
LOL. Good one!
Even as a kid, I never liked Wonder Woman and viewed all female superheroes with deep suspicion. I couldn't explain why. I think I must have picked up on those undertones. Instead I watched every rerun of the 1960s Batman show and loved every slice of cheese. :-D
I liked the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman show. But that was the only superhero show available to watch, once upon a time.
I never got into the comic-book except for a brief time when George Perez was illustrating it. His artwork was always beautiful. And he drew beautiful women.
The television was great back then though. I believe every red-blooded American boy wished they were Major Steve Trevor. Some of their fathers as well. Any show where the superhero fought Nazis was always good fun. And the effect of her stopping bullets with her bracelets was great.
I remember - as kids - we all thought her Invisible Plane looked a little cheesy. Even then! Whereas The Green Hornet had a great car: The Black Beauty. And Adam West's BATMOBILE? That is still the coolest of all Batmobiles EVER - in my book. Although The Green Hornet still had a cooler sidekick.
And speaking of sidekicks, and Wonder Woman, does anyone remember who portrayed Wonder Girl?
I remember there was a Wonder Girl in a few episodes but have no clue who played her.
I’m right there with you about the modified Lincoln Futura being the best Batmobile ever. IMO 2nd place goes to the street machine Batmobile from The Batman—one of the great elements of that flick squandered by the Globohomo virtue signaling.
She was a big deal in the 1980s: Debra Winger. Starred in Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentleman, Terms of Endearment, and Shadowland before her career went down the drain. The second best Batmobile? Agreed. There was definitely some MOPAR going on there. Like you, I found it to be the ONLY good thing about the movie. I liked the comic-book back from the 80s: BATMAN: YEAR ONE. But if this was trying to be that? It failed.
Superb! Thanks!
Outstanding, and well said.
Thanks, Hans.
Wertham was indeed a prophet, but one in the wilderness. Like Peter The Hermit during the Crusades, he spoke the words the nation wanted to hear to be invigorated into a moral fight, with no one even considering the fact that he might possibly have more selfish intentions (which I am convinced he really did).
Interesting. I'm all ears.
For one thing, Wertham’s blueprint for censorship was also used against network television animation programs between the 1960s and the 1980s in the same way the CCA regulated comics. But the network censors had more clout than the CCA, and they essentially lobotomized the genre creatively, which stood until the 1990s.
Ah, OK. That’s probably part of the reason Tom & Jerry fell from an amusing children’s cartoon to an abysmal waste of celluloid. And why nobody in The Superfriends ever threw a punch.
Yes- that’s it exactly!
In my 70's I am still a fan of graphic novels. I actually did some illustrating in the 1970's but found it a mean living compared to what a skilled tradesman could make at the time. Jules Feiffer is one of my all-time favorite cartoonists. I will see if Amazon has any copies of that book. I discovered the Resident Alien graphic novels from the TV show. Different but equally enjoyable (even without Alan Tudyk)
I really need to read some of Feiffer’s prose novels. I’ve read his chapters in Great Comic Book Heroes so many times by now, I’m quite comfortable with his style.
My completely unsubstantiated and almost certainly false conspiracy theory is that the government artificially elevated Wertham to substantiate their anti-comics case because the mob, which was gaining enough power to rival them, was using comics to launder money.
As for the mob having “comic publisher” front companies, apparently that was a thing back then. Charleton was one such publisher, IIRC.
"Gender confusion stems from fetish, not science."
I'm going to disagree slightly here. Im seeing a mass of my peers that go through some kind of gender dysphoria or sexual alignment change going through stress and or trauma.
Again rightly blaming Boomers for failing the nation on mass, lack of coping mechanisms, which boomers filled with drugs and sex, seem to be filling with even more drastic sexual issues in later generations.
The feequency in molestation and later dysphoria or problamatic fetish is also far beyond mere corralation.
Its the moral duty of a parent to not protect thier children from life, but prepare them for it, an that preperation has been cascadingly worse for generations. Leading to insane issues and a loss of life skills.
According to science, there are male chromosomes and female chromosomes, and that’s it. No “trans woman” chromosomes. No “furry” chromosomes, etc. These individuals weren’t “born that way.”
Bad parenting, molestation, and perverse social conditioning absolutely play a part; but none are aligned with nature.
To specify. I feel the term "fetish" lacks context, which I provided. I'm making no attempt to argue the scientific portion other than it applys to psychology. As far as I am aware there is no gene for liking big titties, being whipped, or bondage. Those are fetishes. I just see a contextual distiction between Uncle Timmy jumbled my giblits as a child and regular BDSM. One is a fetish, the other is a abborant event leading to trauma expressed through sexual deviancy. Not completly mutually exclusive, but distinct enough to warrant seperation.
I understand your point. I let our discourse get off-track because I didn’t recognize the misunderstanding I now think I do.
By “gender confusion” I wasn’t referring, specifically, to the transmania of today. I meant masculine women and effeminate males, swapping gender roles, etc. Wonder Woman rescuing Steve Trevor, dominating men in combat, etc. To me (and William Moulton Marsten) that is a fetish. It is a step onto the slippery slope of gender confusion which led us to where we are now. “Gender confusion” is a spectrum. The subtle (?) Wonder Woman stuff, for example, is on one end. The “gender is a social construct” argument and contriving excuses to put women in combat and elite units are on the other.
Or who knows? Something even more ridiculous could be forthcoming.
Well written, flowed well.
I'm much younger than you old foggies who read the originals. I've not read any, but I've seen some of the shows in the decades that followed. I've enough cultural context to identify certain characters here and there... and that's about it.
I've instead taken to webcomics. The global reach has me reading German, Finnish, and Japanese originating material, at least as off-the-top things. A smattering of other things I thought looked good, some dead projects, etc. Traditional messaging is rare. It can be found, but quite rare.
It is interesting to think that the comics code, or variant of the Hays code as a possible good. I can see the argument. Especially as it relates to media primarily finding itself in the hands of children. However given our present circumstance, I wonder if there was a possible route where something like it would have held the line, instead of resulted in the present crisis.
Yeah—I wonder if it could have been done without neutering creativity. I think the Hays Code worked well for the most part, and most of my all-time favorites were made during that epoch. The CCA had some stupid provisions, but some great stories were told under it. Writers occasionally managed to sneak in some messaging that I as a parent would not want children reading. That might be because the misdirection regarding juvenile delinquency had the censors straining out flies while swallowing camels.
Hey—if you don’t mind superhero stories, I hope you’ll check out the graphic novel I’m sharing digitally.
Absolutely fascinating! Thank you so much for this insightful article. It's much to your credit that you were willing to revise your earlier assessments--a thing I can relate to, speaking as a former liberal turned very right-wing. Cheers!
Thanks, Michael.
I don’t like being wrong, but I’ve had plenty of practice. This was just one of my childhood beliefs I would be disabused of.
In young me’s defense, I was kind of set up. Feiffer, Bridwell and others only told part of the story and conveniently omitted all the evidence that would have corroborated some of Wertham’s claims.
I remember having a similar epiphany with the whole violence in video games debate.
Is it actually false or do I simply wish it to be false?
It’s kind of disillusioning, right?
I went through something similar with music. I knew the rock on the radio was all about sex and drugs, but assumed oldies were innocent. I became a big fan of early rock & roll. Most of it WAS innocent, but once I began considering the lyrics, I realized why those “narrow-minded reactionaries” in the ‘50s had been so opposed to it.
Early exposure to ultraviolence turns children into soft, horny coward.
Well done. I grew up a huge fan of EC comics thanks to their reprints in the 90s. Those books were the gateway to me becoming a voracious reader of all sorts of books. I'd never be a writer or even adult reader had it not been for those "trash" comics.
Thanks, Big Philly.
Without comics, I might not have ever been a voracious reader. Or any kind of reader at all. They were my gateway to prose, though I never lost my affinity for the medium.
The same thing happened with the violent video game crisis 20 years ago. It's not that GTA 3 turned them into violent criminals - quite the opposite. The early exposure to violent imagery turned them into r-type, democrat voting, cuttlefish.
I'm guessing you are familiar with r/K theory?
I just came here to say, "JUMPING JEHOSE-FAGGOT, BATMAN!"
I missed all of it. Whoosh! I guess I was too heterosexual at too young an age or something.
Amazing. Thanks for this. I'll be thinking about this for a while.
Where are those Marston quotes from?
LOL.
I originally posted this in a publication which appears to no longer exist, and all the links I had were nuked with it. However, @atomvalleybulletin did a lot of legwork on the subject of Wertham, which I heavily relied on. He still might have those links handy. In any case, I highly recommend his stack (https://substack.com/@atomvalleybulletin) for lots of great comic-related content.
I just found a series Man of the Atom did that probably has some of those Wertham links IIRC. This is Part 1: https://atomvalleybulletin.substack.com/p/the-american-comics-codes-part-a
I agree. I've done a 180 on Wertham as well. What turned me around was reading a book called The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hadju. Hadju's intent was to paint the 1950s in a pallette of bigotry and ignorance (in the same way the movie PLEASANTVILLE did). After reading it Hadju's intent backfired. I miss the CCA. Children can't read comic books any longer. As an adult I get the best of all worlds but children's innocence ought to be preserved. VAMPIRELLA is for 15 and 16 year olds not 5 and 6 year olds. The pervs won't draw a line. Speaking of Vampirella, that is a beautiful work of art by the late and great Dave Stevens!
I archived a Stevens illustration of Bettie for a future article. Vampirella seemed to fit this title better.
Another thing about Pleasantville I’ve mentioned before is the Hollywood Boomer phobia of being unable to act out from their emotions whenever they please. It’s interesting. Like one reason they hate the postwar Eisenhower years is because everyone had to repress their wonderful perversities or something.
That's what they say.
The pin-up calendars, the movies, Bettie Page, famous burlesque queens, SHEENA: Queen of the Jungle, and plenty of other examples belay their lies.
I'll take the beautiful, the true, and the good of the 50s female aesthetic of Grace Kelly (for example) over the nose-pinned, blue-haired, and tattooed female standard of "unrepressed" any time.
Dave Stevens artwork is what our "modern" rulers consider "the objectified male gaze."
Screw 'Em . . . !!!
Back then if you wanted bombshells, Sophia Loren, Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe fit the bill (probably plenty more I don't know of). Then there were the B actress classy ladies (in appearance, at least) like Barbara Rush, Deborah Kerr, Linda Darnell, very feminine and enthralling for it. The tattooed, pierced dudes-with-tits passed off as sexy today are...well, indicative of what happened to our culture.
Dave Stevens knew how to draw a dame, for sure. All of his art made his stories sing.
You got it. All of Dave Stevens' girls were knock-outs. They were hyper-real. Beautiful in an incredible way. Frazetta also drew beautiful women also but he never nailed down elegance. Dave Stevens got that right, also.
He was an astounding talent.