Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [78]
“I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry,” Wertham told the committee. “They get the children much younger. They teach them race hatred at the age of four, before they can read.” Wertham didn’t bother to explain how a child might be influenced by offensive words published in a comic book he couldn’t read.
The highly anticipated clash between Wertham’s testimony and that of William Gaines, publisher of “The Whipping” and an aggressive opponent of what the EC publisher believed to be a witch hunt against comics, was memorable, but not because of the quality of the debate. Gaines had spent considerable time preparing a statement for the committee, but he grossly miscalculated the committee’s disposition. EC was indeed publishing some of the goriest work around, but its horror line featured some of the highest-quality writing and art in the industry, which Gaines arrogantly believed would be enough to win the day. He fully expected to enter the courtroom, sit down, calmly but firmly present his case before the committee, and, by the hearing’s end, squeeze Wertham and his case like a bothersome tick in the woods. After all, this was America, home of freedom and the First Amendment, and Wertham and his opinions were more of an annoyance than a real threat.
He withered under questioning, which he would later blame on the adverse combination of the lengthy testimony earlier in the day and the effects of the diet pills he was taking. “I felt that I was really going to fix those bastards,” he told biographer Frank Jacobs, “but as time went on I could feel myself fading away.”
The low point of his appearance arrived when Kefauver confronted Gaines with one of his own company’s publications, featuring a cover depicting a murderer holding a woman’s severed head in one hand and a bloody ax in the other. Only moments earlier, Gaines had stated that, in terms of what he would consider inappropriate, “my only limits are bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.”
“Do you think that is in good taste?” Kefauver asked Gaines, indicating the cover with the beheading.
“Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic.”
Gaines attempted to explain his position—how that particular cover might have crossed his bounds of good taste had it been presented in another way—but there was no saving the moment, either at that point or when Gaines addressed “The Whipping.” The next day’s papers, including the New York Times, excoriated Gaines’s testimony, adding credibility to Fredric Wertham’s attacks earlier that same day. In the weeks to come, newspapers rushed comic book features and editorials to their pages. Senator Hendrickson, in the interest of obtaining information, tacked on an additional day of testimony nearly two months later, but it was anticlimactic. The same public that bought into Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red-baiting was now turning against comics.
Rather than face the full wrath of the anti-comics crusaders, complete with new legislation, more comic book bonfires, and additional bad press and plummeting sales figures, comic book publishers acted as swiftly as possible. William Gaines, soon to announce that EC was suspending publication of all its horror and crime comics, called for a banding together of publishers. On August 17, 1954, thirty-eight publishers, printers, and distributors gathered at New York’s Biltmore Hotel and, to Gaines’s consternation, rather than developing strategies to fight