Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [64]
If nothing else, 1948 saw the gathering of thunderheads in the distance. Comic book burnings, organized by schools and churches, flared up across the American landscape; concerned parents threatened to boycott drugstores and other outlets stocking titles deemed to be offensive. Newspaper and magazine editors, noticing the trend, ran articles in their publications. To hear their opponents talk, comic books derailed the mind, created juvenile delinquents whose disrespect for authorities would eventually devolve into a life of crime, festered communism, and usurped the roles of both God and country.
Wertham, for his part, was just beginning. His article “The Comics … Very Funny,” published in the May 29, 1948, issue of the Saturday Review of Books and later reprinted in the August Reader’s Digest, reiterated his earlier statements from Collier’s while pushing his case even further. Comics, he suggested, didn’t affect only those predisposed to bad behavior; they affected everybody, including, he insinuated, your previously well-mannered children. The article’s illustrations, offered for maximum shock value, included a comic panel from the 1947 True Crime #2, drawn by Jack Cole, depicting a close-up of a hypodermic needle about to be shoved into someone’s eye. The magazine’s offices were flooded with letters.
Wertham’s genuine concern for the welfare of youthful readers, though it never wholly disappeared, was now crowded out by the attention he was receiving. The comic book controversy was seductive. It offered the promise of advancing his career by anointing him the authority for a cause he truly believed in and, in the process, bringing him the kind of publicity that he could parlay into book contracts, public appearances, and positions on important government or educational boards.
To begin with, those creating and publishing comic books paid little heed. As long as sales continued to rise—or at least hold steady—there was no cause for alarm. A handful of publishers and distributors, in an effort to calm the critics and, in the best-case scenario, slow down the actions against the industry, banded together and formed the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers (ACMP), which in July 1948 adopted a formal code to address content, artwork, language, and attitudes in comic books of the future. The ACMP would act as the industry’s self-policing agency, offering assurance to the public that ultraviolence, obscenity, and profanity would be absent in their code-approved books and that figures of authority, honored civic and religious groups, and racial and ethnic groups would not be ridiculed or improperly portrayed. Henry E. Schultz, a highly regarded attorney and academician, was installed as the ACMP’s first executive director.
Will Eisner felt he had no reason to worry. The Spirit, in comparison with other available features, was tame stuff. Violence was carefully depicted; huge pools of blood were nonexistent. From the beginning of his career, Eisner had self-censored more cautiously than anything proposed by the Chicken Littles presently condemning comics, and even if he had been inclined to present material that some might find objectionable, newspapers (more prudish than those who stocked the drugstore racks) would never have stood for it.
This self-assurance led him to take a swipe at comics’ early critics. In “The Spirit’s Favorite Fairy Tales for Juvenile Delinquents: Hänzel und Gretel,” Eisner included a pointed, satirical notice. “This is a public service feature and is based upon the requests of public-minded citizens who feel that juvenile crime is largely a result of deficiency in the wholesome literature we used to enjoy,” Eisner wrote. “The author (who believes ’tis better late than never) is glad to cooperate. He hopes to ‘reach’ those strayed little lambs and perhaps fill a gap in their twisted lives.”
When discussing the story in 1986, Eisner explained that the note not only addressed efforts to censor comics,