The archive / Film, TV and books
1948–1956 · USA and Sweden
Comics are ruining our children!
Comic books
Panic meter
The verdict
Comic books were said to create juvenile delinquents. The research behind the alarm later turned out to be faked.
Reality meter
What was said?
After the Second World War almost every child read comics – and the gory horror and crime titles were the most popular of all. In his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham claimed that comics led to crime, and the US Senate held hearings that same year. The industry responded with its own censorship, the Comics Code.
In Sweden, the physician Nils Bejerot published Barn – serier – samhälle ("Children – Comics – Society", 1954), and the comics debate became one of the decade's great cultural controversies.
The verdict: what happened next?
Comics did not die out, and the generation that read them did not become noticeably more criminal. The Comics Code lost its influence and was abandoned altogether in 2011.
When Wertham's papers were opened to researchers in 2010, the library scholar Carol Tilley showed that he had altered children's ages, distorted quotations and merged different patients into one to support his conclusions.
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