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Theater 33.1 (2003) 18



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Excerpts from the Writings and Speeches of Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham (1895-1981)

[The Ephemeral Page Meets The Ephemeral stage: Comix in Performance]

Comic books have nothing to do with drama, with art, or literature.

Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954), 241.

The very fact that crime comics are socially tolerated shows how much expression of hostility we tolerate and even encourage.

Seduction, 117.

My assistants and I studied children very carefully and off and on we made the observation that children who got into some special trouble were especially steeped in comic-book reading.

—"The Curse of the Comic Book: The Value Patterns and Effects of Comic Books," Religious Education 49 (1954): 394.

The comic-book publishers, racketeers of the spirit, have corrupted children in the past, they are corrupting them right now, and they will continue to corrupt them unless we legally prevent.

—"It's Still Murder: What Parents Don't Know about Comic Books," Saturday Review of Literature, April 9, 1955, 48.

Some time ago some boys attacked another boy and they twisted his arm so viciously that it broke in two pieces, and just like in a comic book, the bone came through the skin.

Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books): Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 83d Cong., 2d sess., April 21-22, June 24, 1954, 85.

The lack of respect for human life can begin in childhood in the comparative indifference to torture, mutilation, and death so rife in comic books. The comic books are obscene glorifications of violence and crime, of sadistic and masochistic social attitudes.

—"Wertham on Murder," Newsweek, May 9, 1949, 52.



 

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