Beschreibung:

SEDUCTION of the INNOCENT Author: Wertham, Fredric Place: NY Publisher: Rinehart & Co. Date: 1954 Description: 397 + [16] black & white illustrated pp. Lacks bibliography, which was removed from most copies at the insistence of the comics publishers named therein. 8vo. Cloth-backed boards, jacket. First Edition. VG/Fine in VG- jacket. Tears and creases to jacket, chips to corners and spine ends, price-clipped, spine lettering faded; a few bumps to cloth, binding solid. "Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's disastrous but maddeningly well-intentioned attack on horror and crime comics which, he asserted, were ruining American youth. This notorious tome became the fulcrum of a widespread assault on the comics industry, leading to the creation of the Comics Code Authority and almost destroying an art form." -EC, MAD and Pre-Code HORROR Comics of the 1950s [Green Apple: 1997]. Wertham is the ultimate supervillain to many comics fans, but it's worthwhile to consider his deeper influence on 20th century American affairs. Wertham championed the psychological health of New York's underserved African-American community, opening the Lafargue Clinic, Harlem's first low-cost mental health clinic (the clinic charged 25¢, just twenty cents more than Lucy Van Pelt). His findings on the psychological effects of segregation were cited in the landmark Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court case. Wertham, a German-Jewish emigre, opposed fascist ideology, campaigning against lenient treatment for Nazi sympathizer Ezra Pound after his 1945 arrest for treason. His anti-comics campaign is considered by his defenders as an outgrowth of his concern for the economically, socially and politically disenfranchised (see Bart Beaty's Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, University of Mississippi Press: 2005). Wertham's methodology has been largely discredited, his motives have been questioned, and his alarm over colorful children's pamphlets seems quaint in the modern era. One of the central questions of Seduction of the Innocent, however, remains a provocative mystery: "What is the social meaning of these supermen, superwomen, superlovers, superboys, supergirls, super-ducks, super-mice, super-magicians, super-safecrackers? How did Nietzsche get into the nursery?" When Wertham's papers were unsealed by the Library of Congress in 2010, Carol Tilley, an information science professor, investigated his research and deemed his findings rubbish: "Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised and fabricated evidence - especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people - for rhetorical gain." As Stan Lee observed, "There was little scientific validity to it. And yet because he had the name 'doctor' people took what he said seriously, and it started a whole crusade against comics." Mark Seifert, managing editor of the Bleeding Cool website, is one of the leading voices of the new generation of comics scholars. His critique of Wertham hinges upon a series of inferences suggesting that Wertham's comics hate was disingenuous, part of a strategy of political subterfuge. According to Mr. Seifert, it's highly suggestive that Wertham named his Harlem clinic after Paul Lefargue, a physician who married Karl Marx's daughter: "Lafargue played a role in the Paris Commune, and in 'Communard" agitation tactics... [He] was an ardent disciple of Karl Marx who moved him around Europe like a pawn. Lafargue was a very good propagandist and agitator... [and] a radical Marxist revolutionary who worked to destabilize the governments of France and Spain... A curious choice after whom to name a psychiatric clinic in Harlem. Unless you've got similar ideas yourself, of course... And it should come as no surprise that communists around the world were amplifying Wertham's work to create division between America and its European allies." -Mark Seifert in conversation, Jan. 2020. Mr. Seifert's remarks notwithstanding, it should be noted that, accord