What does /co/ think of Seduction of the Innocent and the controversy

>>93033464
Looking at Marvel now I would have to say this book was prophetic

Literally killed the medium

>>93033464
>comic fans and creators are degenerates into bondage, mind control, hypnosis, transformation, size changes, skintight latex, and harems

Wertham did nothing wrong.

Wertham was a hack who ran out of actual good causes to fight for, and his book was a huge hype scare based on many things taken out of context.

All those kids he interviewed for his focus group were black, and he didn't DARE bring that up, for instance because he damn well knew that would hurt his 'career' because all the white people he wanted to rally to his cause would drop it fast.

And yet alot of the controversy against comics was there whether or not he fanned the flames. We think of Superman as a can do no wrong boyscout today, but parents, *churches* and other 'authoritative' figures hated his comics because he was technically operating outside of the law and his powers made him anti-god or something. Book burnings that pretty much only used comics for fuel were organized by Churches left and right.

And it was really the crime and horror comics that pushed these authorities over the edge even more than Supes being so powerful it defied the laws of man and God or Batman and Robin 'turning kids gay.' It all comes down to comics having grown into such a huge medium like film and news paper print before it that the people who want to control society tried to control it, but here it was such a negative reaction to the changing times that it didn't just come down to control, like a ratings system, it came down to trying to stamp the medium out.

I mean seriously, the reaction was worse than the rise of Rock n Roll.

It was fucking stupid like all moral panics, it creatively stifled the major industry leading to their stagnant capeshit dependence and drove indie comics from the marketplace, both situations we still haven't really recovered from.

But of course history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce and now we have liberals worried about comics turning readers into misogynists and demanding they change instead of conservatives worried about comics corrupting readers' Christian morals and demanding they change.

Of course what was and is needed in both cases is for the industry to tell those people to all FUCK OFF and ignore them, and for the government to say it doesn't give a fuck. Ron Paul 2020.

>>93033919
you didn't read it. stop pretending you did

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>>93033464
Wertham is a fraud and a hack.
Correlation does not equal causation

I heard his data gathering methods weren't reliable or just made up too?

>>93034099
Like I said, some of his study/focus groups involved talking to black kids from urban areas and Wertham kept that aspect hidden in his book.

>>93034047
I read about it in a book published in the eighties that I read in the nineties

>>93034021
>It all comes down to comics having grown into such a huge medium like film and news paper print before it that the people who want to control society tried to control it, but here it was such a negative reaction to the changing times that it didn't just come down to control, like a ratings system, it came down to trying to stamp the medium out.
When you put it like that, I hope something similar doesn't happen to the Internet.

>>93033464
Could have been nothing but thanks to the overblown reaction that led to the CCA we're stuck.

It severely damaged the fantasy comics genre on this side of the world, which pisses me off to no end.

>>93034201
Oh they've been trying dude. The FCC is run by a shithead who wants to get rid of net neutrality and people in the House have already agreed to let providers sell private information to whomever the fuck they want.

I feel like we can recover from this given that the internet was able to flourish for so long without this kind of bullshit that people won't ultimately stand for it, but this isn't /pol/...

>>93034047
Not that Anon but my local library had it, so I was compelled to read it after I read Les Daniels' "Comix: A History of the Comic Book in America".

Wertham was a nut.

It ruined horror, adult romance and fantasy comics in the states.

Quite possibly crippled the American comic book industry for at least a few decades, probably still to this day and for a long time to come short of some total industry reset. He wasn't 100% wrong, look at stuff like what Wonder Woman was originally, but he should have stopped at just trying to get parents to pay more attention to what their kids read. But these people can never stop there.

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>>93033464
>one man single handedly dismantling the comic book industry with a bullshit book

Is he, dare I say it, /ourguy/?

Does it mention at all how Wonder Woman was filled with BDSM imagery and written by a man who shared one of his students with his wife?

>>93035057
Yeah, it's one of the examples of this ulterior motive that comic writers have to turn us into depraved freaks

>>93035057
As far as I remember it mentions how Wonder Woman is a lesbian who indoctrinates young readers into her dominatrix ways.

Which isn't all wrong. I mean that was a big part of her original purpose, to make male readers realize they needed to submit to a stronk woman.

>>93035102
>>93035132
Well, at least he did a bit of actual research and didn't pull it completely out of his ass like his "Comics turn kids violent" shit that he built by looking for kids that already had a long list of issues and asking how many read comics.

Is this shit still in print, if only for the novelty of it?

>>93035182
>Is this shit still in print, if only for the novelty of it?

Yeah. They keep putting out versions with risque covers for hipsters.

>>93035182
It is. It's pretty mind-baffling. That guy really hated comics.

>>93034034
Indie comics didn't really exist back then, at least not in the way we know them today. As far as genre stifling it really only killed crime and horror comics, comedy books were mostly unaffected, romance books continued strong until the 70s market crash, and war comics didn't peter out until the 80s.

>>93035781
I always get a chuckle when people talk about Indie comics taking a hit. During the Golden and Silver Age, if you made comics you needed capitol, infrastructure and connections to a distributor or printer. This is why most of these magazines were initially created as mob fronts or other means of laundering money. Some were legit, but they had money behind them. It wasn't until the late 60's and 70's that head shops gave an outlet for underground artists and hippies to sell their cheaply made comics. Eventually some would become lucrative enough that they could form their own imprints and publications.

Indie comics existed prior, but mostly as dirty fucking cheap TJ bibles.

>>93033464
A complete fucking idiot buoyed by his high-falutin degree that he got as a result of his upper-class privilege.

As a result, he ruined comics for 25 years for no other reason other than him being autistic and wanting to try and prove that he was relevant.

>>93033464
It is responsible for everything terrible about comic books today, including the fact that there are only two giant megacorps of comics.

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>>93033464
This board shows that comic book fans are degenerates, and prefer to masturbate to the characters and their fanart than actualy read good comics.

They are also pretty dumb.

So I guess...he had a point?

>>93036929
In America.

It was bad for a long time

>>93034099
http://cbldf.org/2013/03/carol-tilley-on-her-wertham-research/

>>93036929
>Courts go "yep, this clearly is a monopoly, but it's comics, so we don't give a fug"

OH BOY BETTER BLAME WERTHAM

>>93033464
It was the "video games turn kids into serial killers" argument of that era.

>>93041779
The difference is that the vieogame companies endured the criticisms and weren't forced to change. The comics companies back in the day were shit out of luck, there were serious boycotts, and because of to this day comics in America are still considered either a kids' medium or a superhero thing.

>>93034034
>now we have liberals worried about comics turning readers into misogynists and demanding they change
The difference is that these people have nowhere near the same influence Wertham and the people that bought into his bullshit did back in the day.

>>93034099
>>93040074
>"Huh, these bad kids read comics, clearly the comics are the reason why they're bad!"
>Proceeds to ignore the fact that back then pretty much all kids read comics

>>93033464
It pretty much ruined the industry for decades to come and America still hasn't recovered.
If it weren't for Wertham, we'd probably have a much more varied selection of comics that would be read by a greater chunk of the population, like in Europe.

I don't know what you expect me to feel about a flimsy medium which marketed exclusively to little children being disturbed by rabble-rousing soccer moms, but all the story makes me think of is the parallel controversies surrounding video games and how little effect they had on the medium because, unlike comic books, it actually had a spine.

>>93034021
Wertham also had a huge chip on his shoulder over being humiliated by another psychologist, one named Charles Marston or as people here knew him, Charles Moulton. This was petty revenge.

>>93033464
I can't believe that Chuck Dixon actually believes that the CCA was a good thing.

>>93041943
>unlike comic books, it actually had a spine.
It's not about having a spine, it's about the realities of the market.
The videogame industry is a multi-million dollar venture run by huge corporations with vested interests, as well as a huge player base composed of people who aren't gonna care about boycotts or controversies.
The comic book indusry was a bunch of much smaller publishers with a lot less money and influence, and their readers were mostly kids, so if their parents prevented them from buying comics they'd be screwed.
More importantly, the CCA was created because there was a serious danger of the government create its own legally-binding censoring body, since many politicians were hyping up the controversy. By creating the CCA the comic book companies could at least do things on their own terms.

>>93041856
>The difference is that the videogame companies endured the criticisms and weren't forced to change.

Meh, the video game market had PCs and new companies breaking into it as the outlets weren't controlled by a monopolist. For the video game market to be as terrible as capeshit, Nintendo and Sega would have be the only games in town and Toys'R'Us the only chain store where one can buy video games and game systems in the US.

>>93036976
But he also has a jewish sounding name, so I can safely disregard everything he said

>>93042010
>More importantly, the CCA was created because there was a serious danger of the government create its own legally-binding censoring body,
It's worth noting that congress eventually decided Wertham was full of shut and that there was no justification for censorship. But by then the CCA had already been formed. In the end the CCA is less about how a bunch of moralists managed to bring down an industry. Rather it's about a bunch of industry insiders using a passing fad to justify creating a protected market for themselves. It's a lot like the MPAA in that regard

>>93042121
Sorry but that is a German sounding name, since he was born as German Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer. And he was just a hack, a succesful hack mind you.

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>>93042121
"Fredric Wertham" sounds Jewish to you? Do you just assume everyone with a German name is Jewish?

It's worth noting that Wertham made a sequel book, where he blamed TV for violence, but nobody gave a fuck.

Also, later in his life, Wertham attened one of the comic-cons, and he wrote a positive review, where he mentioned that comic books actually have a positive influence on young people, because comic book readers form a strong community, and etc.

>>93041876
Would you want these people to have the same power? Do you know how it would end? Protip: Auschwitz

>>93046022
Yiddish, nigga

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He was right! Don't give in to the Oblivion Machine! Put the comic down!

>>93041947
Really how? I didn't know this part.

>>93034201
it is, net neutrality will end and we will all be slave

>>93046618
Relax, I have a sigil

>>93034294
I thought /pol/ would be happy, they clearly wanted this.

>>93046719
they want WWIII

>>93034019
>implying that's only true of comicfags
It's like when people try to stop piracy by taking down a website, you're only acting on the consequences, not the causes.

>>93033464
It influenced and in some ways stifled the medium for decades to come, and was a fine precursor to the satanic panics that would rise some twenty or thirty years later.

There are those among we fa/tg/uys that still remember those times, /co/mrades. Still remember.

>>93041856
By the time that kind of outrages were sparked against videogames and other mediums the public was already desensitized to some degree precisely because the attack on comics turned out to be completely unjustified. Comics pretty much took a bullet for the team.

>>93034201

Remember guys, vote Tory, for an entirely new British government controlled internet!

I wish I were joking.

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>>93046618

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>>93049084

>>93034034
>drove indie comics from the marketplace,

The only "Indie conics" were Tijuana Bibles, m8.