Your Favorite Western Star

"Since when do we worry about killin' people?"

What about the "wholesome" adventure stories, the "Westerns," for example? The vast majority, if not all Western comic books are crime comic books. They describe all kinds of crime and brutality. For example, one marked on the cover as "Your Favorite Western Star" has an "arsenal advertisement" on the inside cover with the endorsement of ___ M.D., psychiatrist, on the page facing it. On the back cover is a full-page advertisement with a gun pictured across the whole page. This book is especially badly printed, and shows, among other things, the close-up of a dying man with blood streaming from his mouth.

In another Western, one man has gold dust thrown in his eyes (an example of what I call the injury- to- the- eye motif, this being a very frequent feature in comic books).

Another comic book expresses the whole philosophy: "Since when do we worry about killin' people?"

Between its gory pages is a whole page devoted to an attack on "A Dr. Wertham [who] discussed the problem of juvenile delinquency in America today and pinned the blame for some of these cases on comic magazines." This page ends by drawing attention to "Dr. ___ 's [a psychiatrist] endorsement on the first page of every one of our magazines."