Conscious imitation is only a small part of the psychological processes initiated by comics reading. Beneath is a kind of subconscious imitation called identification. The bridge of associations that links a child in this way to a comic-book figure and causes identification may be very slight. Rational resemblance or logical comparison has relatively little to do with identification. What is important is the emotional part of the reaction. The child gets pleasure from poring over what a comic-book figure does, is emotionally stirred and identifies himself with the figure that is active, successful, dominates a situation and satisfies an instinct, even though the child may only half understand what that instinct means. He looks for the same sensation again and becomes conditioned to identify himself with the same type that stimulates him to seek and satisfy the same pleasure again.
In investigating the mechanism of identification in individual children with individual comic books, it became clear to me that comic books are conditioning children to identify themselves with the strong man, however evil he may be. The hero in crime comics is not the hero unless he acts like a criminal. And the criminal in comic books is not a criminal to the child because he acts like a hero. He lives like a hero until the very end, and even then, he often dies like a hero, in a burst of gunfire and violence.
Identification, which is part of the conditioning process, is of course greatly influenced by a child's other or earlier experiences. So that even when one studies such a factor as comic books in relative isolation, one must take into account many other factors in a child's life. The mechanism of identification, therefore, is at the same time a cause and a result. Identification itself may or may not lead to imitative action. The reading of crime comics is not a release in action but leads more to passivity and daydreams. Where it does result in activity, the actions are never constructive. The scenes of sadism, sex and crime in comic books arouse the child's emotions but leave him only a limited scope of release in action. These actions can only be masturbatory or delinquent.
Since the heroes of crime comics invariably commit violent acts of one kind or another just as the criminals do, the child must identify himself with violent characters.
Blue Beetle #54 (Fox Features Syndicate, 1948). Art by Baker or Kamen (???)
It has been claimed that if a child identifies himself with a violent character in a comic book it shows the individual child's psychological need to express his own aggression. But this reasoning is far too mechanical. Comic books are not a mirror of the individual child's mind; they are a mirror of the child's environment. They are a part of social reality. They not only have an effect. They also have a cause. When we level a constant barrage of crime and violence at young children, it leads them inevitably to preoccupation with these subjects. Subjective and objective factors are closely interwoven in a reciprocal relationship.
In this preoccupation there is an element of projection of inner factors and an element of selection from the environment. The very fact that crime comics are socially tolerated shows how much expression of hostility we tolerate and even encourage. The more hostility there is in a child's home, the more threatening he finds his school and social environment, the more likely he is to show identifications with people who fight each other as they do in comic books.
I had occasion to follow the development of a girl from the age of two to nine. Before she had learned to read, she began to pore over comic books. Her favorites were Westerns. She got them from her older brothers who had stacks of all kinds of crime comics. There was considerable conflict in their home, which this little girl witnessed. In conversations with her, as well as on projective tests, it was noteworthy that she was mostly preoccupied with people and animals being "mad" at each other. You might say that this preoccupation with hostility could not come from the comic books because so many children who do not have it read comics. You could also say that her preoccupation could not come from the conflict at home because so many young children have a similar home environment and do not have such fantasies.
The correct interpretation is that both factors were operative, interacting with each other and reinforcing each other.
The general lesson we have deduced from our large case material is that the bad effects of crime comic books exist potentially for all children and may be exerted along these lines:
1) The comic-book format is an invitation to illiteracy.
2) Crime comic books create an atmosphere of cruelty and deceit.
3) They create a readiness for temptation.
4) They stimulate unwholesome fantasies.
5) They suggest criminal or sexually abnormal ideas.
6) They furnish the rationalization for them, which may be ethically even more harmful than the impulse.
7) They suggest the forms a delinquent impulse may take and supply details of technique.
8) They may tip the scales toward maladjustment or delinquency.
Crime comics are an agent with harmful potentialities. They bring about a mass conditioning of children, with different effects in the individual case. A child is not a simple unit which exists outside of its living social ties. Comic books themselves may be the virus, or the cause of a lack of resistance to the social virus of a harmful environment.
Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham (Rinehart & Company, Inc. New York, Toronto 1953, 1954)
Noteworthy
You could buy Detective Comics 27 on 30 Mar 1939 for 10 cents. Though not the first of the series, issue 27 is considered a landmark as the first appearance of Batman. Originally starting out of an anthology series focusing on crime stories, the iconic superhero would be introduced by Bob Kane and Bill Finger to National Comics Publications (now DC Comics).
A Detective Comics 27 (graded 6.5) realized $1.74 million in a 21 May 2022 auction. The price is a record for the issue. One may only wonder how many extant copies might be graded higher.
Fred’s Video Collection
Detective Comics #1 (Mar 1937) featured stories in the "hard-boiled detective" genre, with such stars as Ching Lung, Slam Bradley (from Siegel & Shuster) and Speed Saunders. Its first editor, Vin Sullivan, also drew the debut issue's cover. The Crimson Avenger debuted in issue 20 (Oct 1938). Early issues of the series have been criticized for their racism and xenophobia.
Check out those impressive Creig Flessel covers. He began drawing for the pulp magazines of the time, including Street & Smith's The Shadow.
"They would give you a copy of a story and the space. Double spread would be $15. Single would be seven, sometimes ten," he recalled in 2001. Flessel broke into comics after answering an ad in The New York Times by Major Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (whose National Allied Publications would eventually become DC Comics) and began freelancing there.
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