Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium

From Love and Death: A Study in Censorship

112 Gershon Legman From Love and Death: A Study in Censorship New York: Breaking Point, 1949, pp. 33–43 Disguises are still necessary. The public can hardly be told what is being done to it. And so, super-imposed on the pattern violence of its children’s comics, there is a variety of titles, a variety of formulas suited to the age-groups and sexes the industry proposes to exploit: under six, six to ten, ten to fourteen, fourteen to sixteen, and up. The principal formulas, in the chronology of the age-groups they appeal to, are: the floppity-rabbit or kid comics, representing a tenth or less; the crime comics, one tenth last year, this year—having been legalized—a third or more; classical and educational, a tenth between them; Superman and his imitators, the most popular formula until the advent of crime, with about one third last year, this year a fifth; the squinkie or sex-horror group, another fifth; and the teen-age or sexhate group, a final fifth specifically for adolescent girls. At the lowest age-level the necessary violence is presented as between little anthropomorphic animals—gouging, twisting, tearing, and mutilating one another (as will be seen) to a running accompaniment of all the loud noises and broad swift motions enjoyed by, and forbidden to, small children. The Katzenjammer pattern is abandoned . Menaces are created, because, against a menace, no extreme of brutality is forbidden, where, against Der Captain or Foxy Grandpa, or ‘Uncle’ Donald Duck, nothing rougher than a pea-shooter and ridicule may be used. Also, and very importantly , where even the slightest overt hostility against these real parent-surrogates will inevitably be followed by punishment; no punishment at all, but rather rewards, will follow the total brutalization of a “menace.” In our culture the perversion of children has become an industry. When Mr. Walt Disney, the dean of that industry, sits down with his artists to put a nursery story into animated pictures, color, and sound, what do they do to it, to insure their investment of time & money? What did they do to The Three Little Pigs, their greatest triumph ? They changed a story of diligence rewarded and laziness punished into a Grand Guignol of wolf-tortured-by-pigs, complete with house-sized “Wolf Pacifier” beating the wolf over the head with six rolling-pins, kicking him in the rump with as many automatic boots, and reserving bombs and TNT beneath, and a potty-chair overhead, to finish him off with. Pictures of this mechanism may be examined in Alfred H. Barr’s Fantastic Art (1937) item 536. The explanation—if anyone ever notices that an explanation is called for—is never, frankly, that the wolf is papa, tricked out in animal falseface so he can be righteously beaten to death. At most, one is privately given to understand that without this continual drug of violence, parents could not be protected from their children. The horsedosage of sadism supplied for this purpose to nursery and crib, gives pause even to murder-movie director, John Houseman. Says Mr. Houseman—observing, naturally the mote in his neighbor’s eye to the exclusion of the beam in his own— I remember the time when Disney and his less successful imitators concerned themselves with the frolicsome habits of bees, birds, and the minor furry animals. Joie-de-vivre was the keynote. Sex and parenthood played an important and constructive role, illustrated by such cheerful fertility-symbols as storks, Easter eggs, bunnies, et cetera. Now all this is changed. The fantasies which our children greet with howls of joy run red with horrible savagery. Today the animated cartoon has become a bloody battlefield through which savage and remorseless creatures, with single-track minds, pursue one another, then rend, gouge, twist, tear, and mutilate each other with sadistic ferocity. (“What makes American movies tough?” Vogue Jan. 15, 1947 pages 88, 120.) One thing is certain: in our violent popular arts—and comic-books and Disney cartoons and Punch & Judy shows are only a few of them—children do not generally identify themselves with the victims of the violence. These are daydreams not nightmares. It is the child who is gloriously violent in these fantasies, as he dare not be in fact. And his victim is everyone else. It was for lack of discernment on this point that critical surprise was expressed during the war—as by “George Orwell” (Eric Blair) and the rest of the shabbygenteel school—when murder...