Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [62]
The feud turned out to be nothing but a setup. Eisner held up his end of the deal, producing “Li’l Adam” for the Sunday Spirit. The following week, he heard from a Newsweek reporter interested in the feud. The reporter, Eisner surmised, had been contacted by Capp, who had a wealth of media connections. Eisner gave him a brief telephone interview. The interview appeared in the newsmagazine, and then … nothing. Capp never produced his parody of The Spirit and never addressed the feud, which effectively left Eisner looking like a young, envious artist taking cheap shots at a popular, established colleague.
Three and a half decades afterward, Eisner still fumed about what he felt was nothing less than a betrayal on Capp’s part.
“I always harbored a kind of anger at him for doing something like that,” he said. “It seems that all the contacts I had with him ended short of fruition. He was always offering something interesting that never materialized.”
In March 1948, Collier’s magazine published “Horror in the Nursery,” an article profiling Dr. Fredric Wertham and his theories connecting comics and juvenile delinquency. The article, accompanied by lavishly staged photographs of a young girl, bound and gagged, and of a young boy being stabbed in the arm by a fountain pen, provided Wertham with a national audience while stoking the fires of an already mounting crusade against comic books. Waving around Wertham’s credentials as a clinical psychiatrist, Judith Crist, the article’s author, sounded an alarm that couldn’t be ignored: comic books, which Wertham estimated were being read by nine out of ten kids, led to juvenile delinquency. This was an all-out parental alert, voiced by an indisputable authority who claimed that, through countless encounters with teenage kids, he had seen comic books’ harmful effects on impressionable minds. According to Wertham, the mass market was flooded with comic books—up to sixty million sales per month—all unregulated by the government and publishers, all capable of flipping an unstable mind toward frightening behavior. “We found that comic book reading was a distinct influencing factor in the case of every single delinquent and disturbed child we studied,” Wertham stated, concluding that “the time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of candy-stores.”
Wertham was no fool. He’d come to the magazine interview armed with statistics, anecdotes from his clinical research, open contempt for colleagues who didn’t fall in lockstep with his thinking, a crusader’s sense of self-righteousness, and a skill for using hot-button words and phrases guaranteed to seize attention. Wertham’s arrogance bubbled like lava near the surface of every statement he issued in the article: he was the authority, he knew what was best, and if parents allowed their kids to read comic books, they should be prepared to face the consequences. After all, they’d been warned.
One look at Wertham made you believe that you were dealing with a serious man. He rarely smiled for photographs, and as a result, he came across like the neighbor who frightened you for reasons you couldn’t quite pinpoint or the high school principal who kept a perpetual eye on you because, while he had no proof, he was certain you were up to no good. He had a long, narrow head, with pinched features capped by a receding hairline, glasses perched on a slender nose, and a chin that narrowed to an almost perfect point. Worry and scowl lines made him look older than his fifty-three years.
Wertham, whose name would become synonymous with the crusade against comics, defied simple definition. Shrewd enough to cultivate the kind of favorable public image beneficial to his almost unquenchable thirst for publicity, Wertham was a mass of contradictions. No one seemed to notice—until, that is, he had insinuated himself into the public consciousness in so many ways that it was all but impossible to stage a meaningful offensive against him.