Will Eisner (17 page)

It started innocently enough, with a phone call from Capp, who proposed that he and Eisner stage a feud through their respective work. The loud, blustery Capp, one of the most popular daily comic strip artists in the business, had become famous for his feuds, real or fictitious, which, after the first one with Ham Fisher, he used for publicity.

“We’ll have a little running feud,” he suggested to Eisner. “I think that would be good for us.”

Eisner, by his own admission, was starstruck.

“I thought it was great,” he said of the proposed feud. “We would take potshots at each other’s characters.”

Eisner might have known better; his previous encounters with Capp had been less than stellar. They’d met briefly at a function when Eisner was in the army and working at the Pentagon. Capp had invited Eisner to one of his exhibitions in Boston, supposedly to get together and tour the city, but he was a no-show when Eisner flew up for the meeting. They crossed paths again a couple of years later, shortly after the end of the war, at a meeting of the National Cartoonists Society. Milton Caniff had invited Eisner to the gathering—a true honor for Eisner, since comic book artists, considered inferior by the daily strip artists, were excluded from the society.

As Eisner recalled, Capp approached him and, in his booming voice, made a big production of their meeting:

“I
caught
your
stuff
in the Philadelphia papers,” he said. “It’s really good stuff. You’re quite talented.” Of course, I was impressed.

“But,” he said, “you’ll never make it in this business.” Inside, I collapsed, and said, “How come?”

He said, “You’re too goddamn normal!” Then he threw his head back and gave a bellowing laugh.

Rather than being put off by Capp’s showboating, Eisner felt anointed. As he viewed it, “any attention on his part was kind of an admission into the hierarchy of comic book artists.”

The feud turned out to be nothing but a setup. Eisner held up his end of the deal, producing “Li’l Adam” for the Sunday
Spirit
. The following week, he heard from a
Newsweek
reporter interested in the feud. The reporter, Eisner surmised, had been contacted by Capp, who had a wealth of media connections. Eisner gave him a brief telephone interview. The interview appeared in the newsmagazine, and then … nothing. Capp never produced his parody of
The Spirit
and never addressed the feud, which effectively left Eisner looking like a young, envious artist taking cheap shots at a popular, established colleague.

Three and a half decades afterward, Eisner still fumed about what he felt was nothing less than a betrayal on Capp’s part.

“I always harbored a kind of anger at him for doing something like that,” he said. “It seems that all the contacts I had with him ended short of fruition. He was always offering something interesting that never materialized.”

In March 1948,
Collier’s
magazine published “Horror in the Nursery,” an article profiling Dr. Fredric Wertham and his theories connecting comics and juvenile delinquency. The article, accompanied by lavishly staged photographs of a young girl, bound and gagged, and of a young boy being stabbed in the arm by a fountain pen, provided Wertham with a national audience while stoking the fires of an already mounting crusade against comic books. Waving around Wertham’s credentials as a clinical psychiatrist, Judith Crist, the article’s author, sounded an alarm that couldn’t be ignored: comic books, which Wertham estimated were being read by nine out of ten kids, led to juvenile delinquency. This was an all-out parental alert, voiced by an indisputable authority who claimed that, through countless encounters with teenage kids, he had seen comic books’ harmful effects on impressionable minds. According to Wertham, the mass market was flooded with comic books—up to sixty million sales per month—all unregulated by the government and publishers, all capable of flipping an unstable mind toward frightening behavior. “We found that comic book reading was a distinct influencing factor in the case of every single delinquent and disturbed child we studied,” Wertham stated, concluding that “the time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of candy-stores.”

Wertham was no fool. He’d come to the magazine interview armed with statistics, anecdotes from his clinical research, open contempt for colleagues who didn’t fall in lockstep with his thinking, a crusader’s sense of self-righteousness, and a skill for using hot-button words and phrases guaranteed to seize attention. Wertham’s arrogance bubbled like lava near the surface of every statement he issued in the article:
he
was the authority,
he
knew what was best, and if parents allowed their kids to read comic books, they should be prepared to face the consequences. After all, they’d been warned.

One look at Wertham made you believe that you were dealing with a
serious
man. He rarely smiled for photographs, and as a result, he came across like the neighbor who frightened you for reasons you couldn’t quite pinpoint or the high school principal who kept a perpetual eye on you because, while he had no proof, he was certain you were up to no good. He had a long, narrow head, with pinched features capped by a receding hairline, glasses perched on a slender nose, and a chin that narrowed to an almost perfect point. Worry and scowl lines made him look older than his fifty-three years.

Wertham, whose name would become synonymous with the crusade against comics, defied simple definition. Shrewd enough to cultivate the kind of favorable public image beneficial to his almost unquenchable thirst for publicity, Wertham was a mass of contradictions. No one seemed to notice—until, that is, he had insinuated himself into the public consciousness in so many ways that it was all but impossible to stage a meaningful offensive against him.

Born Frederic Wertheimer in Munich in 1895, Wertham spent the early portion of his life racking up impressive credentials in psychiatry. He earned a medical degree at the University of Würzburg and studied in Paris and London before moving to the United States in 1922 and taking a job at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Five years later, he legally changed his last name. (The alteration of his first name came later.)

While at Johns Hopkins, he built an impeccable reputation as a clinician, teacher, and scholar. After eight years, he left Johns Hopkins for New York City, where he conducted psychiatric evaluations of convicted felons for the New York Court of General Sessions and later worked for Bellevue Hospital, a facility known for its psychiatic treatment of patients. While at Johns Hopkins, he had worked for Dr. Adolf Meyer, who strongly believed in a correlation between environment and mental disorders, and in New York, while working with criminal and troubled juveniles, Wertham began to apply Meyer’s beliefs to his own theories. In 1946, he opened the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, a facility offering free or low-cost psychiatric services to the neighborhood’s poor, non-white residents.

He also learned how to gain the spotlight in the country’s largest city. His courtroom testimony, offered as an expert witness, made headlines; the press knew he was always good for a quote or two. His fluid writing style, found in his 1941 book,
Dark Legend
(an account of a seventeen-year-old’s murder of his mother that was later made into a Broadway play), garnered him writing assignments for newspapers and magazines.

In his landmark book,
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
, David Hajdu might have offered the best capsule characterization of Wertham to date:

Wertham was a nest of contradictions—intelligent and contemplative, yet susceptible to illogic, conjecture, and peculiar leaps of reasoning; temperate in appearance and manner, yet inclined to extravagant, attention-grabbing pontification. He abhorred comics, which were born of the immigrant experience, while he was deeply empathetic to the Negro condition …

The
Collier’s
article added an air of legitimacy to anti-comics rumblings heard since the end of the war. Local church, education, and civic groups around the country were making noises about what they considered to be inappropriate material in comics, especially the most mature material aimed at soldiers returning home from the war—young men no longer as captivated by superheroes as they might have been at one time but now definitely interested in true-crime and detective stories. The anti-comics crusade followed a tried-and-true method of attacking almost anything in popular culture: first, intellectuals (critics, writers, teachers) vilified, ridiculed, and cast doubts on the value of the target; if that failed, there were attacks on the local level, where greater degrees of success might be expected than on a national scale; if that failed, you brought out the big guns—the national press and authorities. The key was to be relentless.

The same month in which the
Collier’s
article appeared, ABC radio broadcast a panel discussion, “What’s Wrong with the Comics?” on its
America’s Town Meeting of the Air
program. John Mason Brown, drama critic for the
Saturday Review
, and novelist Maryn Mannes, author of “Junior Was a Craving,” an article in the February 1948 issue of
New Republic
, took the anti-comics side; Al Capp and George Hecht, publisher of
Parents
magazine, spoke in defense of comics. The overheated rhetoric hinted of the days ahead, when an all-out assault on comics would prompt Senate hearings. Brown, taking the lead from Mannes’s
New Republic
piece, in which she labeled comics “the greatest intellectual narcotic on the market,” called comics “the marijuana of the nursery; the bane of the bassinet; the horror of the house; the curse of the kids; and a threat to the future.” Capp, known for his quick wit and biting sarcasm, must have wondered what gods he might have offended to find himself trapped in a radio booth with the hyperbolic Brown.

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, it also commented on his long-standing disgust at the general perception of comics being for kids only.

“This was before the Comics Code, but there already was a big flap about comics being bad and naughty, destructive psychologically,” he said. “The critics were talking about comics in general. This was still a time when comics were regarded strictly as children’s literature. Comics are still regarded that way when you see them discussed in newspapers, but the idea that only children read comics was more prevalent than it is today.”