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For the past forty years the content of comic books has been governed by an industry self-regulatory code adopted by publishers in 1954 in response to public and governmental pressure.

This book examines why comic books were the subject of controversy, beginning with objections that surfaced shortly after the introduction of modern comic books in the mid-1930s, when parents and teachers accused comic books of contaminating children's culture and luring children away from more appropriate reading material.

It traces how, in the years following World War II, the criticism of comic books shifted to their content, and the reading of comic books became linked with the rise of juvenile delinquency. This resulted in attempts at the local, state, and national level to ban or license comic book sales.

A major figure in the crusade against comic books was the psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham. While he played a significant role in the postwar attack on comics, his accusations against the comic book industry have been misunderstood by comic book fans and media scholars alike. They have accused him of being a naive social scientist who saw direct causal links between the reading of comic books and delinquency. In fact, Seal of Approval shows that Wertham's work is much better understood in the intellectual tradition of media criticism of the Frankfurt school and their critique of mass culture.

The negative publicity aroused by the controversy, coupled with fears that the government would pass censorship legislation, led publishers to adopt the self-regulatory code. It has been changed only twice, once in 1971 and again in 1989.

The legacy of the comics code is that it continues to define the comic book medium as essentially juvenile literature. While the code offers protection against those who attack the media (and not just comic books), it also reaffirms the public perception of comic books as children's fare. As a result, the comic book has yet to achieve legitimation as a unique form of expression that blends words and pictures in a way that no other medium can duplicate.

In tracing the evolution of the controversy and the resulting code Seal of Approval examines important issues about children, media effects, and censorship. It is the first booklength scholarly study of this period of comic book history.

Amy Kiste Nyberg is a professor in the Department of Communication at Seton Hall University.

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In 1955 a New York City court sentenced Puerto Rican immigrant and teenage gang member Frank Santana to twenty-five years to life for second-degree murder. Fredric Wertham (1895-1981), one of the most influential authorities on child psychology in the twentieth century, was outraged and felt compelled to write The Circle of Guilt.

He had conducted multiple interviews with Santana and created an extensive psychological profile on him. Wertham saw unsettling patterns in the ways in which the case was reported, investigated, and deliberated. Media portrayed the victim, a white teenager named Bill Blankenship, as a "model boy," and reported the killing as "unprovoked." In the furor surrounding the case, Santana was often called a "hoodlum." Wertham suspected otherwise.

In The Circle of Guilt, the psychiatrist uncovers a paradigm of fear, racism, distrust, and prejudice. He argues that the press's presentation of the case reflected extreme cultural bigotry. Wertham also reveals Blankenship's activity within teen gangs and asserts that Santana's actions were shaped in part by his unmediated exposure to mass media. This reprinted edition includes a new introduction by history professor William Bush that places both the crime and Wertham's work into cultural and historical context. Bush argues that much of what Wertham decries in mass media and its impact on justice and race applies equally today.

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Too often remembered solely as the psychiatrist and cultural critic whose testimony in Senate subcommittees sparked the creation of the Comics Code, Fredric Wertham was a far more complex man. Author Bart Beaty traces the evolution of Wertham’s attitudes toward popular culture and re-assesses his place in the debate about pop culture’s effects on youth and society.

When The Seduction of the Innocent was published in 1954, Wertham (1895-1981) became instantly known as an authority on child psychology. Although he had published several books before Seduction, its sharp criticism of popular culture in general—and comic books in particular—made it a touchstone for debate about issues of censorship, child protection, and freedom of speech. Despite the nuances of his arguments in that book and his evolution as a critic throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Wertham is best remembered as one of the most inflexible critics of popular culture in postwar America.

Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture is an examination of Wertham’s career, providing a fresh perspective that re-interprets Wertham’s intellectual legacy, and challenges received notions about his assumed cultural conservatism. Beaty analyzes all of Wertham’s published works, as well as his heretofore unreasearched and unpublished private papers, correspondence, and notes. In the process, Beaty reveals a man whose opinions on culture and media were not nearly as cut-and-dried as suggested by his books, and whose life and career offer more subtlety of thought than previously assumed. In particular, the project examines Wertham’s change of heart in the 1970s, when he began to claim that comics could be a positive influence in American society. Beaty explores Wertham’s career as a child psychologist, communications scholar, and public intellectual.

The Wertham that emerges is a critic who was significantly more progressive and multi-faceted than those who condemn him would ever assume..
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