Introduction

This thesis aims to tell two stories. Rather, it uses one story in service of better understanding the

other. The first and most important story is that of the Cincinnati Committee for the Evaluation of

Comics, a civic moral advocacy group that operated from 1948 until 1979, although it did not perform

any significant work after 1956. Formed by a Covington, KY Methodist minister named Jesse L. Murrell

at the urging of the local Council of Churches, the Cincinnati Committee’s operations followed closely

the trajectory of the outcry against comics and the moral panic of juvenile delinquency in that its activity

steadily rose after 1948, peaked in 1954, and dissipated quickly after that year. The story that the

Cincinnati Committee helps to understand is that of the American anti-comics movement of

approximately 1940 to 1956. Sparked initially by a vicious editorial from Chicago children’s author and

later articles and books by a New York psychiatrist the anti-comics movement accused comics chiefly of

pulling children away from great works of literature, dulling their senses, operating as blueprints for

juvenile delinquency, and functioning as Communist propaganda to cause the moral degradation of youth.

The Cincinnati Committee published evaluation lists of hundreds of comics yearly from 1948 to

1956 using criteria developed by University of Cincinnati psychology professor H.B. Weaver, and from

1949 until 1957 the group enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with Parents’ Magazine, which

reprinted its evaluations and articles about the changing nature of the comic book to a subscribing

audience of nearly a million readers. In addition, the committee’s articles and materials were used as

reference files by senators serving on the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency,

which investigated the purported harmful nature of comic books multiple times in the 1950s, by Fredric

Wertham, the most famous member of the anti-comics movement, and by the National Organization for

Decent Literature, the largest such decency group of the time.

The group Rev. Murrell eventually created possessed three unique qualities that allowed it to

garner acclaim and interest at a much higher level than any other civic or ecclesiastical decency group in

the late 1940s and early 1950s. The first of these was the makeup of the group itself. Murrell consciously
made the group interdisciplinary, saying “...this work should be widely distributed as to creed and sect,” 1

and the Cincinnati Committee comprised not just members of the ecclesiastical community but also

members of parent-teacher associations, juvenile court personnel, YMCA staffers, and university

professors.

The Cincinnati Committee also benefited from the improved attention of a singular focus; they

only targeted comic books for evaluation and did not see their mission as improving the moral content of

reading material in general, refusing several requests to evaluate and criticize “dirty” books or

magazines.2 Always cognizant of being perceived as a pro-censorship organization, Murrell and the

committee stressed in their letters that their goal was to educate and improve, not intimidate. In

1950, H.B. Weaver, a University of Cincinnati psychology professor and creator of the Cincinnati

Committee’s evaluation system, boasted in a letter to a member of the American Bar Association that

much of the group went to a Cincinnati City Council meeting to protest a proposed pre-publication

censorship ordinance.3

All in all, these previously mentioned policies of interdisciplinarity, education, and a singular

focus served primarily to differentiate the Cincinnati Committee from the other major private regulatory

body for print culture in America in the same period, the National Organization for Decent Literature.

Founded in 1938 by a Catholic bishop from Fort Wayne, IN, the NODL “was to printed materials what

the better-known Legion of Decency was to motion pictures.”4 Where the Cincinnati Committee searched

for mutual cooperation of publishers, distributors, and newsdealers in improving the content of comic

books, the NODL used volunteers from local Catholic parishes to pressure dealers into removing

1
Letter from Jesse Murrell to Cincinnati Public Library, May 17, 1948. Box 3, Folder 1: Correspondence prior to
1950. Committee on Evaluating Comic Books collection, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Main
Branch.
2
The NODL, again the largest such decency group, attacked magazines, pocket books, and comics.
3
Letter from H.B. Weaver to Arthur Freund
4
Thomas F. O’Connor, “The National Organization for Decent Literature: A Phase in American Catholic
Censorship,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 65, no. 4 (Oct., 1995), i.
objectionable materials from their shelves with the promise of favorable mention in parish magazines if

they did so.

Due to the lack of a comprehensive study of the Cincinnati Committee using the group’s original

documents and only minor references to the group in secondary literature of the already small comics

history field, no serious argument has been made for recognizing the committee’s rightful place in the

greater historiography of the anti-comics movement.5 This essay contends that the Cincinnati Committee

should be considered the most influential local decency group of the postwar era, especially in the context

of the anti-comics movement. The most significant contributor to this was the committee’s partnership

with Parents’, which reprinted their critiques to a subscribing audience totaling nearly one million,

culminating in the group’s articles being entered as evidence into the record of the Senate Subcommittee

on Juvenile Delinquency hearings in 1954. I argue that the Cincinnati Committee was not just a localized

response to the growing panic over comic books, but decisively shaped the national discussion about

comics and kids as well as the Comics Code itself.

The story that the Cincinnati Committee helps to better understand is the American anti-comics

movement of approximately 1948 to 1956. The history of the anti-comics movement is a fascinating one,

and one that is sadly quite understudied. While some works, such as Bradford Wright’s 2001 Comic Book

Nation have chapters that detail the anti-comics movement, it is only engaged in the context of a survey

of the American comic book’s history, and far fewer works engage in a full-length treatment of the anti-

comics movement. Amy Kiste Nyberg’s Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (1998) and

David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comics Scare and How It Changed America are the

main book-length histories of the anti-comics movement, while John A. Lent’s collection of essays, Pulp

Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign, is one of the only edited

collections in the field.

5
Paul Blanshard dedicated a few pages of his 1954 anti-censorship book The Right to Read to the Cincinnati
Committee, and Otto N. Larsen, who would become the head of Lyndon Johnson’s President’s Committee on
Obscenity, featured a short history of the group penned by Murrell in his 1968 collection of essays Violence and the
Mass Media.
 According to Lent’s introduction in Pulp Demons, in the introduction to his edited collection of

essays, “How far one traces the attacks on comics depends on how broad their definition of the medium

is.”6 In truth, there was a reasonably rancorous opposition to newspaper comic strips in the early 1900s,

and indeed later critics of comic books recycled some of the same objections, but this thesis focuses

instead on criticism of comic books proffered primarily after 1940. The first recognized piece of anti-

comic book writing came in 1940, when children’s author Sterling North lambasted the “sex-horror

serials” and “graphic insanity” of comic books in a column for the Chicago Daily News in May 1940.

North’s editorial threw down the gauntlet, as it were, to the comic book industry, its critics, and outside

observers. The movement was revived in 1948, when the superhero genre fell out of with the publication

of Dr. Fredric Wertham’s “The Comics…Very Funny!” in The Saturday Review of Literature.

Wertham’s criticisms, that comic books were inherently pathological and harmful to children,

sparked a vehement opposition to comic books from a perplexing array of sources, and for an astounding

amount of reasons. The anti-comics movement became a fascinating and unorthodox union of moral

conservatives and antiviolence liberals, with membership across professional, religious, and ideological

lines. These individuals accused comic books of a myriad of maladies: inciting juveniles to crime,

actively decreasing the intelligence of children, and functioning as coded Communist propaganda to cause

the moral degradation of the nation’s youth.7 The conservative Cold War political climate, in which the

most critical events of the anti-comics movement occurred, provide several frameworks for understanding

the anti-comics movement. The 1950s demonstrated a measured inferiority complex to the Soviet

education system, a sacralization of American civic culture as a response to the perceived atheism of

Russia, and an authoritarian parental response to a freer, consumption-driven model of childhood and

child-raising.

6
John A. Lent, ed., “Introduction: The Comics Debates Internationally: Their Genesis, Issues, and Commonalities,”
in Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1999), 9.
7
Lent refers to the diverse group of critics in his introduction as “self-anointed moralists, anti-communist (and in
some instances, communist) factions, and governmental, religious, and educational authorities.” Lent, 9.
 It is not the intention of this thesis to suggest that the general push towards regulation of comic

books was wholly unnecessary. Comic books were the least-regulated medium of the time, and many

contained wanton brutality and crass ethnic stereotypes. However, this thesis does contend that the anti-

comics movement was guilty of the following: Unfairly scapegoating the comic book industry and

purposely misunderstanding causalities of juvenile delinquency as well as the general readership of

comics, fostering the creation of a technocratic system of moralizers more interested in campaigns of

emotionality rather than conclusive evidence that comic books were harmful, arguing in bad faith for the

regulation of comics, and using the anti-comics movement as a pretext for inflammatory anticommunism

and authoritarian social control of children.

The first chapter of this work, “Foundations of a Moral Panic: 1940-1947”, explores both the

formative years of the anti-comic book movement as well as the voices that provided more moderated and

less emotional viewpoints. Beginning with a brief discussion of how anti-comics moral entrepreneurs

borrowed and reused criticisms from critics of newspaper comic strips in the 1900s and 1910s, the aim of

the section is to provide a general narrative for understanding the grounds on which individuals like

Fredric Wertham, Jesse Murrell, Sterling North, and others constructed the anti-comics movement as well

as those who spoke out against them. Chapter 1 also charts the scholarly response to Sterling North’s

article, which took the form of peer-reviewed studies on children’s interest in reading comics, didactic

studies of comic books themselves, as well as more rigorous psychological examinations of child comic

book readers. The key contention this chapter seeks to make with regard to scholarly considerations of

comic books is one that appears again in Chapter 3 – members of the anti-comics movement deliberately

ignored decisive evidence that comics were not harmful to children, and exaggerated claims of violent

comics in order to continue their campaigns of emotionality and social control.

Chapter 1 ends by providing some comparative background on the National Organization for

Decent Literature, the organization that performed work like the Cincinnati Committee and began to

seriously consider comic books two years before the formation of the Cincinnati Committee, in 1946. The

NODL and its head, reactionary Archbishop of Fort Wayne John F. Noll, served as an extremely large
and vocal, if rather ineffective foil to the Cincinnati Committee. Also discussed are the changes in the

comic book industry that led to the editorial shift towards more mature and violent comic books, and

subsequently the renewal of the anti-comics movement in 1948.

The second chapter, “The Rise of the Cincinnati Committee and the Ascendant Anti-Comics

Movement, 1948-1953”, details the formation and early years of the Cincinnati Committee, supplemented

by a narrative of the anti-comics movement that percolated alongside the Committee’s work. Chapter 2

will not solely consist of anti-comics historiography, for to wholly understand the movement, readers

must possess an awareness of the moral panic that ran corollary, even parallel to the anti-comics

movement: juvenile delinquency. In many ways, the trajectory of the anti-comics movement mirrored the

moral panic over juvenile delinquency almost perfectly. The prime similarity, as mentioned earlier, was

that both began to form in 1948, increased in tenor and alarmism until a peak in 1954, after which they

rapidly dispersed. The key difference between the two is that outcries over juvenile delinquency flared up

briefly during World War II and dissipated before returning in force after the end of the war. The anti-

comics movement and the moral panic over juvenile delinquency became almost inseparable once Fredric

Wertham began publishing his views in 1948, and Americans quickly latched on to what seemed to be an

easy solution to concerns about juvenile delinquency.

To better provide an understanding of how moral panics over both comics and juvenile

delinquency formed, this thesis engages with the work of Albert Cohen, author of Folk Devils and Moral

Panics, considered the primary sociological work on the methodology of understanding moral panics. In

addition, this thesis takes some methodological cues to understand the Cincinnati Committee from Paul

W. Facey’s The Legion of Decency: A Sociological Analysis of the Emergence and Development of a

Social Pressure Group, a 1950s study of the NODL’s predecessor, the Legion of Decency, that makes

several important inferences about the nature of cultural social control as enacted by pressure groups. Commented [EA1]: Steve,

The third chapter of this thesis, “The Anti-Comics Movement Triumphant, 1954-1956” examines Do I really need this? I’ve thought it would be helpful but
cannot find a way to get it in the body.

the events of 1954 as an extension and culmination of the narratives from Chapter 1. The chapter attempts

to demonstrate the significance of that year, especially with regard to the anti-comics movement, as it
represented the pinnacle of their achievements, but also the beginning of a downturn for the most

vociferous opposition. The key events of 1954 were the publication of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of

the Innocent, which became the anti-comics movement’s tome, and the 1954 session of the Senate

Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, which utilized the resources and energy of the

government to assess whether comic books were actively harmful to children. While the subcommittee

eventually reported that they could not definitively say that delinquency sprang from comic books and

that it came instead from a multitude of sources, the behavior of publisher Bill Gaines during the

hearings, where he appeared to be indifferent to children potentially seeing graphic images, led to the

comics industry forming its stringent censorship body, the Comics Code Authority (CCA).8

This section also discusses the greater relevance of the Cincinnati Committee to the events of the

comic book hearings and their aftermath. The Subcommittee’s executive director, Children’s Department

staffer Richard Clenenden, testified to the group’s evaluation work during the hearings, and entered some

of their Parents’ articles into the records of the proceedings. In addition, the Subcommittee records show

that senators on the committee used the group’s evaluation criteria and articles as research files while

preparing for the hearings. Rev. Murrell also kept up a frequent correspondence with Charles Murphy, the

New York judge appointed to lead the Comics Code Authority, and even visited the offices of the CCA

while on a trip to New York in December 1954. In a June 1955 article for Federal Probation, where

Murphy boasted of the work that the CCA was doing, he noted that he had studied “codes of good taste”

from groups like the Cincinnati Committee in preparation for his job of leading the CCA.9

This chapter also claims that the anti-comics movement proper ended in 1954, though extends its

periodization to 1956 as that was the year that the Cincinnati Committee ceased its comprehensive yearly

evaluations, leading to the cessation of its Parents’ Magazine partnership the following year. As evidence

of a decisive 1954 ending to the movement thanks to the Comics Code, the chapter proffers a bevy of

8
Peter Kihss, “No Harm in Horror, Comics Issuer Says,” New York Times, April 22, 1954.
9
Charles F. Murphy, “A Seal of Approval for Comic Books,” Federal Probation 19
retrospective scholarship, mainly legal, published in the years 1955 to 1957 that commented on the legal

dimensions of comic book regulation.

As to the historiography consulted for this work, this thesis makes heavy use of books in the

small comics history field, some of which appear already in this introduction. The works of Amy Nyberg

and David Hajdu provided a comprehensive legal and social history of the Comics Code and anti-comics

movement, while Steven Starker’s Evil Influences: Crusades Against the Mass Media and Paul Facey’s

Legion of Decency provided important methodological cues relating to theoretical aspects of cultural

criticism.

A supplementary work that was a joy to continuously consult was Fred Van Lente and Ryan

Dunlavey’s Comic Book History of Comics, a skillful, well-documented, and most importantly

informative graphic history of the comic book medium. For a backgrounding of the culture of the early

years of the Cold War, the collected essays in Rethinking Cold War Culture, edited by James Gilbert and

Peter J. Kuznick, as well as Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, edited by

Lary May, were instrumental in constructing an understanding of the ways in which “consensus politics”

of the 1950s seeped into the cultural landscape.

Identifying, as Godfrey Hodgson put it, the “gigantic deal” that was the ideal of “consensus” in

the mid-1950s was a key part of understanding the greater context behind the anti-comics movement, as

well as why the moral panics over both juvenile delinquency and comics books seem so exacerbated

when viewed through a modern lens. Godfrey’s 1972 book America in Our Time, and especially its “Age

of the Liberal Consensus” chapter, was one of two works that clearly and forcefully articulated the ideal

that went for a long time without a definitive name, and still affects modern American politics. The other

work that offered meaningful analysis of consensus was James Gilbert’s Another Chance: Postwar

America, which highlighted not only the geopolitical realities of the postwar era that frequently go

ignored, but also how consensus, typically viewed as an Eisenhower creation, had its roots with Truman.

For survey histories of the 1950s, I consulted works like David Halberstam’s The Fifites and I.F.

Stone’s The Truman Era, but easily the most helpful (historically and methodologically) was The Fifties:
The Way We Really Were by Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak. Published in 1978 after a wave of 1950s

nostalgia, the work takes an unflinching critical view of the cultural, social, and political history of the

1950s. Theorizing a tripartite periodization of the decade, the work candidly dismantled modern

assumptions about the political and social economies of the time period, illustrating a tangible

undercurrent of fear and anxiety under the maudlin haze of consensus.

Readers will note several sub-contexts within this thesis that analyze the anti-comics movement.

For the sub-context of consumption, more specifically the rise of the consumer economy and changes in

child-raising to a freer, consumption-driven model, Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumer’s Republic was a

comprehensive reference. For the family-oriented side of the new consumption-driven economy, Elaine

Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, The Politics of Childhood in

Cold War America by Ann Marie Kordas, and Margaret Peacock’s Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and

American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War all provided me with a thorough understanding of the

ways in which concerns over comics tied in with the rigid policing of youth during the Cold War.

Another aspect of the postwar years that I felt deserved analysis was the rapid redevelopment of

organized religion--after all, the founder of the Cincinnati Committee was a Methodist minister and the

largest decency organization was Catholic-led. Will Herberg’s work Catholic, Protestant, Jew, one of the

most important works of religious sociology, was invaluable in providing a synthesis of religious history

as well as coverage of the contemporary upswell in religion after the end of World War II. Additionally

helpful was Jonathan Herzog’s Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against

Communism in the Early Cold War, which provided a compelling narrative for religion during the

beginning of the Cold War. Herzog’s thesis is, in essence, that the government deliberately used its

resources to bring about a spiritual revival in the early years of the Cold War. This was done, Herzog

argues, to fend off communism and prevent the United States from becoming a “colossus of straw,” a

phrase borrowed from Arnold J. Toynbee, which is a mighty power that becomes morally bankrupt and

therefore susceptible to subversion.

 This thesis project is an ambitious one, and one that marshals a bevy of information. However, it

is a necessary project. As mentioned earlier, the anti-comics movement is among the most understudied

facets of American history. This is unacceptable, especially in light of the wealth of scholarly literature

published on the push to regulate the content of films in the 1930s, a movement with significant

similarities to the anti-comics movement of the 1950s. The push to regulate film content was headed by

the Catholic church through the Legion of Decency. The outcry against immoral films found support in a

state Supreme Court case, Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, and the industry

eventually formed a third-party group to oversee the regulation film content in order to stave off federal

regulation. With regard to the anti-comics movement, the Legion’s successor, the NODL, did significant

mobilizing against the supposedly immoral comic books. Though a key difference was that a state

Supreme Court ruling, Winters v. New York, prevented nearly all pre-publication censorship, the industry

eventually formed a third-party group to regulate comic book content from what became a Catholic-

influenced moral viewpoint in order to stave off federal regulation.

This thesis seeks to perhaps undo some of the conceptions held by Americans about the Cold War

by revealing the motivations of entities that sought to regulate comic books, and the ramifications of their

actions not just on children, but on the social and political culture of 1950s America as a whole. This is

where the new information provided by a history of the Cincinnati Committee helps to better illustrate the

ways in which the Cold War shaped domestic culture. An investigation of the Cincinnati Committee, as

well as the larger anti-comic movement, in short, provides an untrodden path towards understanding that

part of the domestic Cold War.

Chapter 1: Foundations of a Moral Panic, 1940-1947

Graphic Insanity…? The Early Anti-Comics Movement and its Discontents

“Virtually every child in America is reading color “comic” magazines—a poisonous mushroom of the last

two years,” thundered Sterling North, children’s author and literary critic for the Chicago Daily News,

“Ten million copies of these sex-horror serials are sold every month. One million dollars are taken from

the pockets of America’s children in exchange for graphic insanity.”10 North’s column, titled “A National

Disgrace,” ran parallel to another article of his that both celebrated the high quality of recent children’s

books and provided a “rapturously sexual” account of how his family delighted in the act of opening new

books.11

Nary a soul brought up that much of North’s tirade was filled with professional jealousy, as

comic books were rapidly outselling traditional children’s novels (of which North was a writer).

Comichron, a repository of comic sales data, shows that in January 1939 alone, four titles published by

National Comics Publications (later to become DC), sold 709,379 copies.12 While North was hardly the

first critic of the comic medium, he recycled many criticisms from the pushback against comic strips from

the early 1900s, most notably from Atlantic Monthly writer and poet Ralph Bergengren, who called

newspaper comic strips a “national shame.”13 Says Hajdu, “The charges of vulgarity, prurience, and and

an absorption with violence returned, and North’s supporting description of comic book pages as filled

with portrayals of superhuman derring-do, titillating women, gunfire, and vigilantism was not inaccurate,

broadly speaking.”14 In a New York Times article the following year, George Hecht, publisher of Parents’

Magazine (to become a major character in this story) called comic books “injurious to children’s

10
Sterling North “A National Disgrace,” Chicago Daily News, May 8, 1940.
11
Quote from David Hajdu, The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America
(New York: Macmillan, 2008), 39.
12
John Jackson Miller, "Detective Comics Sales in the 1930s and 1940s." Comichron: A Resource for Comics
Research. June 2, 2009. Accessed August 13, 2018. http://blog.comichron.com/2009/06/detective-comics-sales-in-
1940s.html.
13
Ralph Bergengren, “The Humor of the Colored Supplement,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1909, 269-273.
14
Hajdu, Ten Cent Plague, 41.
character,” and declared he would be happy if “all comics, including our own, were put out of business.” 15

As a measure of illustrating the stark divide between sales of children’s books and comics, Hecht noted

that a publisher would deem a children’s book successful if it sold 1,000 copies, with 5,000 sales being

“good.”16

An element of earlier comics criticism not directly addressed by North but that would come

perspicuously true with time was the Christian morality professed by major critics of comics. In “The

Humor of the Colored Supplement,” Bergengren proposed that comics editors “be given a course in art,

literature, common sense, and Christianity,”17 and New York Christian newspaper The Outlook published

five articles between 1909 and 1915 that attacked comic books for their purportedly negative effect on

children.18

Another aspect of A National Disgrace that differed from earlier criticisms is that North, rather

than just criticizing the purveyors of graphic entertainment (although he does call them “completely

immoral” and responsible for a “cultural slaughter of the innocents”), punches down at parents “who

don’t know and don’t care what their children are reading,” and “unimaginative teachers who force

stupid, dull twaddle down young throats.”19 North’s hostility reverberated through parenting and

education circles, and, not wanting to let themselves be cast as irreverent towards their pupils, teachers

quickly joined the war against comics. The staff of Childhood Education subsequently reprinted North’s

column in the second issue of their 1940-1941 publication, which lent a pedagogical credibility to North’s

thinly-veiled professional diatribe. Teachers would become an integral part of both the Cincinnati

Committee and the anti-comics movement due to their proximity to children.

15
“Comics’ Effects on Youth Scored,” New York Times, November 6, 1941. Parents’ published several “clean”
comic books and magazines between 1941 and 1950. Their longest running titles were True Comics, a “real fact”
comic series that featured pro-American and pro-authority messages and Calling All Girls, a combination magazine
and comic book aimed at young female readers.
16
Ibid.
17
Bergengren “Colored Supplement,” ibid.
18
“The ‘Comic’ Nuisance,” Outlook, March 6, 1909
19
North, “A National Disgrace,” ibid.
 Thanks to the increased publicity offered North’s writing after the Childhood Education reprint,

debates began to swirl in educational and parental circles over whether the formerly innocuous comic

book was truly as malevolent as North swore it was. Articles such as “Children’s Interest in Comic

Books” and “Taking The Comics Seriously” appeared in scholarly publications in 1940 as well,

indicating that North had caused figures of authority to turn a more watchful eye to the consumption of

their students and children.20

Figure 1: A cartoon by Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould for the "Are Comics Bad for Kids?" debate between Gould and
journalism critic Silas Bent in The Rotarian, March 1940. Facsimile of original in author’s collection under fair use
guidelines.

Modern Folklore: Comics as an Aid to Children

In July 1941, Lauretta Bender, a psychologist who later became embroiled in debates with Fredric

Wertham over her perceived conflicts of interest (Bender was employed by National as an editorial

consultant), published “The Effect of Comic Books on the Ideology of Children” in the American Journal

of Orthopsychiatry alongside influential child psychiatrist Reginald S. Lourie. 21 The first serious, peer-

20
George E. Hill and M. Estelle Trent, “Children’s Interests in Comic Strips,” Journal of Educational Research 34,
no. 1 (September 1940), 30-36. George E. Hill, “Taking The Comics Seriously,” Childhood Education 17 (May
1941), 413-414.
21
Bart Barnes, "Prominent Child Psychologist Reginald S. Lourie, 79, dies," Washington Post, March 22, 1988.
Accessed August 15, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1988/03/22/prominent-child-
psychiatrist-reginald-s-lourie-79-dies/a6b151ea-ec3e-4416-bbfb-fd12d1e99517/?utm_term=.7a604a7c09c1. His
obituary refers to him as “[having] a major impact on [the development of child psychiatry].”
reviewed study of comic books, Bender’s study concluded that comic books were “the folklore of this

age” and that comic books provided catharsis for children who naturally sought adventure. 22 Bender and

Lourie also noted, as many future defenders of comics would, that demonstrating a definitive causality

between comics and developmental maladjustment was nigh-impossible: “If the child seems to react with

some emotional or behavior disorder to reading the comic books, the reason predisposing him to the

trigger action it supplies lies within the should and should be sought.” 23

Furthermore, Bender and Lourie believed that the problem was not necessarily with comic books

but with the minds of adults attempting to exert control over their children. Understanding that comic

books were relatively uncensored due to not needing to meet the editorial demands of a newspaper editor,

the pair provided an anecdote about a villainous character named “The Face,” whose appearance was

toned down after a number of complaints from adults. Apparently, “a flood of letters came from children

asking for the fangs, horns, and weird color restored.”24 In a rebuff to critics of comics, Bender and

Lourie referred to North and other anti-comics provocateurs as having little efficacy in their critiques, as

comics artists responded to the wants and needs of their fans and displayed “a strikingly advanced

concept of femininity and masculinity” in their work.25

The work of Bender and Lourie provided important scholarly precedents for analyzing both

comic books and children’s attitudes toward them. In their “Child Development” issue, the second of two

publications for the year, The Journal of Experimental Education published articles by educational

psychologists Paul Witty of Northwestern and Robert L. Thorndike of Columbia.

Witty’s articles, “Children’s Interest in Reading the Comics” and “Reading the Comics: A

Comparative Study” sought to provide a more complete understanding of children’s interest in comic

books. Witty’s results, taken from studies of fourth through sixth-graders in Evanston, IL, indicated that

22
Lauretta Bender and Reginald S. Lourie, “The Effect of Comic Books on the Ideology of Children,” American
Journal of Orthopsychiatry 11, vol. 3 (July, 1941), 546.
23
Ibid., 547.
24
Ibid., 549.
25
Ibid.
“[r]eading the comics occupies an important place in the list of children’s favorite leisure activities.”26 As

a response to critics’ “dogmatic statements” about the influence of comics on children’s development,

Witty analyzed the children who read the most comics and compared them to those that read the least and

found no significant differences: “The boys and girls in the two groups received almost the same average

marks and were considered by their teachers to be about equally well-adjusted and effective in social

relationships.”27 To end his article, Witty encouraged teachers to appraise and provide guidance to

children as they supplemented their reading with comic books.28

Thorndike’s article, “Words and the Comics,” was a study of vocabulary used in comics.

Thorndike, son of Edward Thorndike, one of the founders of the educational psychology field, used his

father’s word lists to great extent in his comics research. Though Thorndike’s sample size was small (he

comprehensively evaluated four comic books and snippets of others), he still wrote definitively that

comics were substantial supplements to children’s reading. His quantitative counts indicated that each

comic contained 1000 words beyond the 1000 most common words on the Thorndike list, and that

together they accounted for 3000 new, more advanced words.29 Thorndike also did away with the notion

that comics were wholly comprised of street slang (thereby damaging children’s vocabularies), noting that

while slang was present, the writing was mostly standard English at a fifth to sixth-grade reading level.30

To summarize, Thorndike wrote,

“It appears, then, that the ‘comics’, whatever their other vices or virtues, do provide a substantial amount of

reading experience at about the level of difficulty appropriate for the upper elementary school or even junior high

school child. In view of the apparent interest and appeal of this material for the child, the facts presented above

26
Paul Witty, “Reading the Comics: A Comparative Study,” Journal of Experimental Education 10, no. 2
(December 1941), 109.
27
Ibid., 108.
28
Witty, “Reading the Comics,” 109.
29
Robert L. Thorndike, “Words and the Comics,” Journal of Experimental Education 10, no. 2 (December 1941),
113.
30
Thorndike, “Words and the Comics,” 113.
suggest that this supplementary resource may have real value for the educator who is interested in working with the

child as he is and in leading him on from his present.”31

Opposing Voices: Frank, Branley, Cutright

The spring of 1942 was a notable one for educators and observers of the increasingly popular

debate over the didactic or anti-didactic nature of comic books. The Elementary School Journal devoted a

portion of its introductory editorial section to a summation of both sides of the debate, reprinting portions

of Sterling North’s invective, but also offering commentary from Child Study Association member

Josette Frank and University of Pittsburgh education professor W.W.D. Sones that said comics were

relatable to children, and parents should accept them as to not promote rebelliousness.32 The article also

reiterated the findings of Witty and Thorndike, and noted the adoption of a editorial board by National as

well as the introduction of true fact comic books by the Parents’ Magazine Institute.33

Elementary English Review followed suit in the exploration of the comics debate but did so in a

different manner. Rather than publish findings or summarize debate, they ran two opposing articles

regarding children and comic books in their May 1942 issue. Franklyn M. Branley, a teacher from Spring

Valley, NY who later became an advocate for science education, as well as—you guessed it—a

bestselling children’s author, argued against comics, calling comic books “small, insidious, and

colorful.”34 Like North, Branley believed that the “antidote” to comic books lay in exposure to great

works of classic literature: “The comics have something that appeals to children; they have pictures,

colors, thrills, adventure, imagination. The thrills and excitement of Treasure Island, The Wonderful

Adventures of Nils, Jungle Book, Daniel Boone must be brought to the attention of children.”35

Lastly, he declared “We must do something and do it now. We cannot stand idly by and allow

these immoral publishers of the comic serials to fill the minds of our youth with the murder, corruption,

31
Ibid.
32
“Issues Relating to the Comics,” Elementary School Journal 42, no. 9 (May, 1942), 642.
33
Ibid, 643.
34
Franklyn M. Branley, “The Plague of the Comics,” Elementary English Review 19, no. 5 (May, 1942), 181.
35
Ibid.
machine gunning, cheap justice, frowsy political propaganda that crowd the pages of their publications.”36

Like North, Branley evoked an accusation of political propaganda where none existed. David Hajdu

refutes this point by saying that early comic books were largely apolitical, but that “their penchant for

bestowing great powers on the weak could have struck conservatives [like North and Branley] as

suspiciously left-leaning.”37

Franklyn’s sparring partner was Frank Cutright, Jr., a professor at Nashville, Tennessee’s George

Peabody College for Teachers. A reader of comic strips and books for over twenty years, Cutright shared

his warm personal anecdotes with readers, refuting the oft-used argument that comics were worse in 1940

than in 1920, saying “My rejoinder is that it is also a long jump from the Model T Ford to the airplane.”38

Cutright grouped comics criticism into three main schools, first that they provided “unhealthy

excitement” through horror, second that that comics were pornographic, and third that they were not

artistic.39 “I rather suspect,” wrote Cutright, “that the detractors of the comics are influenced either

consciously or unconsciously by that part of the American literary and moral heritage which is derived

from the Puritan suspicion of anything pleasurable.”40

Cutright wholly believed pedagogical potential of comics, which comics scholar Carol Tilley

alluded to in her essay “Educating with Comics,” published in Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan’s

Secret Origins of Comics Studies: “Cutright argues that comics can serve [as instructional materials] as

well as offer spurs for teachable moments and ‘teaching tolerance and understanding.’”41 Of Cutright’s

critique of the moralizing nature of educators, Tilley writes, “That suspicion, if Cutright is correct, created

far more educators and educational researchers who for decades viewed comics as an enemy to overcome

in battle rather than as a tool to enhance learning.”42 Commented [EA2]: Talk about Johnny Everyman here???

36
Branley, “Plague,” 182.
37
Hajdu, Ten-Cent Plague, 41.
38
“Frank Cutright, Jr., “Shall Our Children Read the Comics? Yes!” Elementary English Review 19, no. 5 (May
1942), 165.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 166.
41
Carol Tilley, “Educating with Comics,” in The Secret Origins of Comic Studies, edited by Matthew Smith and
Randy Duncan (New York: Routledge, 2017), n.p.
42
Tilley, “Educating with Comics,” ibid.
 The Child Study Association, which later became a significant, if dispassionate contributor to the

later debates over comics and juvenile delinquency, more fully entered the discussion over comic books

and children also in spring 1942. Children’s reading expert Josette Frank, whose earlier pleas for fair

treatment of comic books were reprinted by the Elementary School Journal, became the Child Study

Association’s most familiar face in the comics debates thanks to her books and articles promoting comics

reading for children bolstered by hints at strong parental oversight.43 Frank features prominently in comic

historiography as one of the leading pro-comics voices, but most fail to grasp that her progressive views

on comics began far earlier, in 1937. Frank promoted her then-new book, What Books For Children?, at

the New York Times National Book Fair, which brought her liberal views on children’s reading to a much

larger audience. In an article describing her promotion of a freer, child-guided program of reading, Frank

remarked thusly on comics:

My little girl, now 12 years old, is reading Van Loon's The Arts, but her favorite reading is the Sunday
colored funnies. It seems to me that a child's interest in these 'funnies' has nothing to do with her intelligence
quotient. One great reason may be that in the comic strips something is happening very fast and always comes to a
dramatic close. i think that children like that swift, sudden action. At any rate the question is not whether children
should read the comics, but how are you going to stop them?44

Like Lauretta Bender, Frank was a member of the editorial board of National (she joined in 1941)

and received criticism in later years for her perceived conflicts of interest. However, Frank remained a

popular voice among parents due to her history as an expert on children’s reading, and likely because she

refused to completely exonerate comics:

“There are, unfortunately, some few comic magazines which fall far below acceptable standards of

suitability for children. These appear to be addressed to older adolescents and adults, appealing to sex interests

beyond the level of children of the greatest comics reading ages. If young children were the only purchasers of

43
The 1941 second edition of Frank’s What Books For Children? featured an added chapter on comic books, where
Frank made the controversial claim that children’s reading “need not be saturated with sweetness and light.” Josette
Frank, What Books For Children?, 2nd ed (New York: Doubleday, 1941).
44
“Latitude Urged for Child Reader,” New York Times, November 11, 1937, pg. 29.
comic books, this type would undoubtedly die a natural death (a number of the most objectionable already have).

The titles of these books have never been found on the lists of children's favorites.”45

The point that Frank made, about the adult nature of some comics and that children did not read

those, was a point frequently missed by anti-comics critics who grouped even more mature comics with

the pedestrian superhero stories like Batman and Superman (the most popular titles in Witty’s 1941

study). The following year, Frank published a report on the various types of comics in the Child Study

Association’s journal, where she reiterated her points about the universal nature of comics’ appeal.

Ruth Strang and the Child Study Association: Guides for Parents and Teachers

In 1943, Ruth Strang of Columbia University performed another child interest study in comic

books and listed the most common pros and cons of comic reading. On the pro-comics side, Strang

largely reiterated the points that Bender and Lourie made in their 1941 article, that comics constituted

modern folklore, nurtured children’s imagination, and provided catharsis. Furthermore, comics allowed

poor readers to have an accessible reading pursuit and were beneficial to a child’s vocabulary. 46

On the opposing side, Strang summarized anti-comics arguments as pushing children away from

“more desirable” reading, that children who were poor readers would simply read the pictures, that the

fantasy worlds presented disconnected children from the real world, that comics impeded reading

progression, and that the art was of poor quality.47 According to Strang, most children believed that their

parents took comic books too seriously. To summarize, Strang noted that adults “should advocate

moderation rather than total abstinence,” and that parents needed to recognize that the vast number of

comic book titles meant that they were useful at certain stages of a child’s development, and that comics

should be used to stimulate an interest in reading. “Realizing the power of the comics,” wrote Strang, “the

dissenting educator might wisely turn his objections into a positive program. . .he should work with,

45
Josette Frank, “Let’s Look at the Comics,” Child Study, Spring 1942, 90.
46
Ruth Strang, “Why Children Read The Comics,” Elementary School Journal 43, no. 6 (February 1943): 336-337.
47
Ibid.
rather than futilely against, the comic strip artists and thus mold this naturally attractive medium to

educative purposes.”48

In their 1943 report, Frank and the CSA’s Children’s Book Committee defined 10 different types

of comic books: adventure (the most common type and the most general), fantastic adventure (adventure,

but with superpowers), crime and detective (which represented police and G-Men “usually (but not

always) as being on the job and competent”), real stories and biography (such as Parents’ Magazine

Institute’s True Comics), War (seen as mostly for adults), retold classics (Classics Illustrated and other

bible stories), love interest (which at the time was not featured prominently in comics), jungle adventure

(containing “cruelty linked with sexual suggestion”, Frank deemed it as “certainly not desirable for

children’s reading”), animal cartoons (antics of Mickey Mouse, among others), and fun & humor (mostly

reprints of newspaper comics).49

In addition to definitions of the genres and summaries of the scopes of their content, Frank also

provided evaluations of each of the genres from a parental interest standpoint, urging familiarity with the

categories. For example, Frank warned that children “on the verge of unsocial behavior” might find

blueprints for petty crimes in crime and detective stories and scolded adults who insisted real stories and

biography comics were the only good comics.50 The article also listed some of the general features of

comics, such as language, drawing, and color. Parents were encouraged to help make their children aware

of good and bad printing techniques in comics, for Frank said that the quality of printing, inking, and

lettering was far too inconsistent and could potentially strain the eyesight of children.51

Teachers continued to run discussions and studies on comic strips and comic books for much of

1943, and the consensus was one of cautious acceptance. A study from Duluth, MN that referred to

comics as the 4th type of “universal literature” called the amount of children that read comics

“disconcerting,” but ultimately concluded that balancing comic reading with other types of reading was

48
Strang, “Why Children Read The Comics,” 342.
49
Josette Frank and Flora Stieglitz Straus, “Looking at the Comics,” Child Study, Summer 1943, 112-115.
50
Frank and Straus, “Looking at the Comics,” ibid.
51
Frank and Straus, “Looking at the Comics,” 116.
the ideal solution.52 A Phoenix, AZ freshman English teacher named Fleda Cooper Kinneman noticed the

enormous readership among her own students, and felt a need to discover why comics were so appealing.

Kinneman’s students were thrilled that their teacher was interested in their pursuits, rather than

condemning them, writing “The room was quiet long before the tardy bell rang. The children smiled upon

me. Here, at last, was the kindred soul for whom they had been looking.”53 Kinneman’s study also did

away with the notion that comics caused illiteracy (calling the assertion “scarcely justified”), and found

that students were quick to acknowledge the flaws of the comics—namely the emphasis on violence,

simple plot structures, and low-quality art.54

On The Radar: Harvey Zorbaugh and the Journal of Educational Sociology

1944 became the most significant year for academic treatments of comic books, as the Journal of

Educational Sociology, edited by urban sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh of New York University, dedicated

their entire December issue to the question of comics, titling it “The Comics as an Educational Medium.”

Zorbaugh opened the issue with an editorial wherein he reprinted Sterling North’s “A National Disgrace”

in full, adding that pulpits thundered, the National Congress of Parents and Teachers took North’s crusade

into their own hands, and one (unspecified) Midwestern town even organized a comic book burning. 55

Zorbaugh remarked that more than 70,000,000 children and adults read comic books, and firmly stated “It

is time the amazing cultural phenomenon of the growth of the comics is subjected to dispassionate

scrutiny. Somewhere between vituperation and complacency must be found a road to the understanding

and use of this great new medium of communication and social influence. For the comics are here to

stay.”56

52
M. Katharine McCarthy and Marion W. Smith, “The Much Discussed Comics,” Elementary School Journal 44,
no. 2 (October 1943): 97-101.
53
Fleda Cooper Kinneman, “Comics and the Appeal to the Youth of Today,” English Journal 32, no. 6 (June,
1943): 332.
54
Kinneman, “Comics and the Appeal,” 332-333.
55
Harvey Zorbaugh, “Editorial,” Journal of Educational Sociology 18, no 4. (December 1944), 193-194.
56
Ibid.
 The writers solicited by Zorbaugh, are, by and large, familiar voices from this story. Lauretta

Bender wrote an article titled “Psychology of Children’s Reading and the Comics,” where she reiterated

some of her earlier points about comics, most notably that they provided healthy escapism to children. 57

W.W.D. Sones, the University of Pittsburgh professor of education from the 1941 issue of Elementary

School Journal, wrote extensively on the ways in which comics could be used in a classroom, from

“horrible examples” to starting points for discovering finer forms of literature.58 The CSAA made an

appearance too, as Josette Frank and director Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg both contributed articles.

Frank’s article, “What’s In The Comics?” was largely a reprint of her 1943 article in Child Study, but

Gruenberg’s was a comprehensive review of the history and social potential of comics—with a special

scolding for teachers who took a reactionary stance against comics:

Teachers, bent upon diffusing culture and raising standards, sometimes manifested their disapproval of the
comics by ostentatiously tearing up captured copies of the contraband which the children had hidden behind the
geography books. . .They merely made the children feel that there was something wrong with them to merit such
violent disapproval, or that the teachers were mean kill-joys.59

Zorbaugh’s contribution to the issue was an exculpatory celebration of the wide readership of

comic books titled “The Comics—There They Stand!” Zorbaugh cited a study by the Market Research

Company that indicated a circulation of comic books larger than that of newspaper comics, and that

overwhelming amounts of children read comic books. The same study claimed an average 92.5% of

children ages 6 to 11 read comic books, while 84% of children ages 12 to 17 did so. The numbers began

to decline when youth turned 18, as only an average 34.5% of adults aged 18-30 read comic books, with

men reading almost twice more than women. Only 14% of adults over 30 admitted to reading comic

57
Lauretta Bender, “Psychology of Children’s Reading and the Comics,” Journal of Educational Sociology 18, no. 4
(December 1944): 223-231.
58
W.W.D. Sones, “The Comics and Instructional Method,” Journal of Educational Sociology 18, no. 4 (December
1944): 232-240
59
Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, “The Comics as a Social Force,” Journal of Educational Sociology 18, no. 4
(December 1944): 204-213
books regularly.60 “Comic strips,” said Zorbaugh, “are read by all the sorts of people who make up

America—young and old, poor and rich, those who never got beyond the sixth grade and Ph.D’s, soldiers

and civilians.”61

In fact, the overwhelming adoration that American GIs showed to comic books in WWII and the

Korean War was a major rhetorical advantage for those that sought to downplay later criticisms of comic

books. According to the article, comic books outsold more traditional magazines like Saturday Evening

Post, Time, and Reader’s Digest by a ten to one ratio, and basic training officers reported that comics

“…were passed from man to man until there is nothing left of them.”62 The success of comics in

advocating for the war effort and providing entertainment for GIs no doubt contributed to the decreased

levels of criticism leveled at them for the majority of World War II.

Figures 2 and 3: Covers of the January and July 1943 issues of World's Finest Comics, a DC anthology series that began in 1941.
Art by Jack Burnley. Replicated from author’s personal collection under fair use guidelines.

60
Harvey Zorbaugh, “The Comics—There They Stand!” Journal of Educational Sociology 18, no. 4 (December
1944): 204-213
61
Ibid.
62
Zorbaugh, “There They Stand!,” 198.
The Declension of the Superhero

As mentioned in the previous section, superheroes and the war effort enjoyed a mutually beneficial

relationship. Comic books were by far the preferred entertainment for servicemen stationed overseas, and

the presence of the Axis gave comic book writers and artists relevant, infinitely reusable villains that

readers both on the homefront and battlefront could delight in seeing get pummeled by the heroes. While

casual observers and historians both point out that portrayals of other races, especially the Japanese,

contained crude ethnic stereotypes amplified by the primitive printing techniques of the day, this view

ignores the progressive strides by some companies, namely DC/National, to promote progressive

messages of tolerance in their comics.

Pearl S. Buck, a Nobel laureate (in literature, for The Good Earth) who also sat on DC/National’s

editorial board, founded an organization named the East & West Association (EWA) in 1942, dedicated

to promoting liberal internationalism and dialogue with overseas allies. Buck, a lifelong supporter of

progressive causes, declared that she was going to “get down to the level of the comic strip” to spread the

EWA’s message through comic books. Though one of the EWA’s first sponsored stories, “Filipinos Are

People,” which appeared two years later in DC anthology Comic Cavalcade #9 came off as somewhat

infantilizing and condescending, the EWA rectified this by introducing a “superhero” of their own,

Johnny Everyman.

A civil engineer rather than an alien refugee or a billionaire-turned-martial artist, Johnny

Everyman approached his problems not through violence (though in a contradictory manner, the comic

introduces him hoisting a Chinese bandit over his head) but through reasoned and nuanced calmness.

Johnny Everyman’s adventures were at first largely internationalist with an Asian focus, keeping in line

with the mission of the EWA and Buck’s background in Chinese advocacy. His later stories, especially

the ones published in DC’s World’s Finest anthology series, dealt explicitly with discrimination at home

in America, of which a notable tale was Johnny Everyman’s encounter with black war heroes denied

service at a diner.
 However, Johnny Everyman’s critical internationalism was not to last, as he shared the same fate

with many of his superhero brethren as the war drew to a close--the superhero was quickly going out of

fashion. Comics historians have never quite been able to draw a definitive conclusion on why the genre

fell into disfavor (as circulation data from the 1940s remains almost nonexistent), but many proffer that

Americans were simply weary of fighting, war, and constantly reused comic plots. The United States and

its allies were dealing defeat after defeat in both the European and Pacific theatres, so the exaggerated

villains of war-era comics seemed less and less threatening. Historian William Savage Jr. typifies

“redundant deeds of redundant heroes”

Whatever the real reasons for Americans growing tired of the superhero genre were, some limited

circulation data from the period illustrates just how great the drop-off in superhero sales was. Captain

Marvel Adventures, the flagship series of Fawcett Comics and one that outsold Superman during the war

years, saw a perspicuous drop in its sales every year after 1945. By 1949, the comic’s circulation dropped

by over 1 million issues, to half its wartime sales rate. Apart from DC/National’s flagship series,

Action/Detective/Adventure Comics, and the solo comics of the DC/National triumvirate

Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman, nearly all of their more minor superhero titles were cancelled

outright or merged into new titles.

The Flash and Green Lantern, staples of the modern DC Universe, lost their solo comics

immediately, and made their final appearances in anthology titles in 1951. Wonder Woman lost her self-

emancipatory feminist edge after creator (and professional eccentric) William Moulton Marston’s death in

1947 and became a model of placid 1950s domesticity, while Superman no longer intervened in domestic

disputes or dragged munitions manufacturers to the frontlines to see the carnage their products enacted.

Though DC did run public service announcements in conjunction with the National Social Welfare

Assembly until writer Jack Schiff’s departure in 1967, the announcements rarely took on the progressive

tenor of their earlier years and instead spoke of the need for youth to be polite and respect authority. The

need for superheroes, which according to comics scholar Bradford Wright stemmed from a need for
heroes that “could relieve tensions of individuals in an urban, consumer-driven, and anonymous mass

society,” rapidly became superseded by inoffensive humorous juvenile fantasy.63

The Criminal Turn of Comics

Owing to the rapid decline in superhero sales, comics companies began to explore more varied

domestic themes in their products. Comics such as Crime Does Not Pay, which began publication in the

early years of the war, became rapidly more popular after the war’s close. Crime comics in their earliest

form came from a most unlikely progenitor--someone who, years later, became one of America’s top

moral guardians, a rancorous voice against subversion of any kind, and above all, a fierce opponent of

comic books--J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, a master at using the press to influence public opinion, came to

the Philadelphia Ledger syndicate with the idea for the strip that would become War on Crime: True

Stories of G-Men Activities Based on Records of the Federal Bureau Of Investigation in May 1936.

Though War on Crime was a newspaper strip, it may still be considered the original crime comic

as it was reprinted for several volumes of Famous Funnies, the first full-length comic book sold on

newsstands. Reflecting Hoover’s support of the comic strip, the two weeks of it celebrated the work done

by Hoover and the FBI in sending criminals “to jail. . .or the morgue,” and boasting of how Hoover

rounded up anarchists, cleared unscrupulous agents out of the Bureau, and instituted a strict training

regimen for its agents. The strip ran until January 1938, and mostly featured procedural accounts of FBI

pursuits of famous organized crime figures, each story arc lasting for at least a month. Some of the

notable cases covered by the strip included the manhunt and eventual killing of John Dillinger and the

kidnapping of Charles Urschel by Machine Gun Kelly, which led to the gangster’s arrest.

Lev Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay (CDNP), which began in 1942 (and continued the numbering

of Gleason’s Silver Streak comic to avoid paying new postage fees), was the first modern crime comic

book. Though it sold modestly during the war (approximately 200,000 copies), its sales prominence

63
Wright,
increased by at least 100,000 comics a year, leading the publication to claim over a million sales and a

readership of 5 million by 1947. David Hajdu also notes that while CDNP was hardly the first comic to

portray criminality, it was without precedent in “the weight and shape of the portrayal.” Stopping just

short of glamorizing criminals, CDNP’s margins contained acts upon acts of gleeful violence perpetrated

by criminals, and those same criminals meeting equally violent ends, whereupon the magazine reiterated

the message printed in gargantuan letters on the cover--CRIME DOES NOT PAY!

Figure 3: Cover of Crime Does Not Pay #22, art by Charles Biro. Though this is the first issue, the comic continued to use the
numbering of Gleason's Silver Streak. Public domain image hosted by the Digital Comic Museum.

The success of CDNP inspired a multitude of imitators, as was practically the industry standard.

1947 saw the debuts of DC’s Gang Busters, Hillman Comics’ Real Clue Crime Stories, Marvel’s All True

Crime Cases, and Prize Comics’ Justice Traps The Guilty, created by a pair later to become comics

legends, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. Ace Magazines’ Crime Must Pay The Penalty and EC Comics’

Crime Patrol debuted the following year. With this new turn in the content of comic books, newsdealers

suffered from some stocking confusion. Were they to place crime comic books alongside “funnies” like
Superman, Batman, and Archie? Or were they to put them alongside the more lurid, explicitly adult pulp

detective novels? Newsdealers made their moves, and the moral guardians of the country blinked.

The Origins of the NODL and Catholic Cultural Anticommunism

The National Organization for Decent Literature (NODL), successor organization to the Legion

of Decency, a Catholic group instrumental in the passage and enforcement of Hollywood’s Hays Code,

began to seriously consider comic books in 1946. George Sokolsky, a close confidant of J. Edgar Hoover

and later a fierce McCarthy supporter, wrote derisively of a 1946 Johnny Everyman story in which the

title character intervened on behalf a young Soviet boy accused of stealing a piece of cloth.

Johnny Everyman explains to Nikky, a dark-skinned lad, that the Soviets may not have luxuries,

but that they are busy working to provide necessities. The story did not tell any mistruths about either the

Soviet Union or the United States—apparently even the smallest of compliments towards our former ally

were too much for Sokolsky, as well as any acknowledgement of race prejudice in the United States.

“When the United States is poohpoohed and Soviet Russia is made out to be better than the is, the minds

of our children about their own country are corrupted.”64 The same report claims that comic books

“…promote infidelity and irreligion and also attack morals on the theory that after one’s heart will have

been corrupted one will not bother about religious practice.”65

Founded in approximately 1938 by John Francis Noll, bishop of Fort Wayne, IN, the NODL was

one of several outputs for Noll’s reactionary moralizing; he claimed since at least the 1910s that

magazines (and later comic books) were communist plots to degrade the morals of children. Noll’s

primary body of commentary, his popular weekly Our Sunday Visitor, was founded as a response to the

popularity of socialist and anti-Catholic newspapers in the early years of the 20th century. The NODL was

one of the most powerful decency groups of the 1940s and 1950s, even coining the term “decency

crusades” to describe their localized campaigns of newsdealer visits where they attempted to persuade

64
George E. Sokolsky, “Comics,” in NODL Report: 1946, Box 199, CUA.
65
Sokolsky, “Comics,” ibid.
dealers to remove objectionable titles, with the promise of favorable mention in parish publications if they

did so.

The NODL played an important part in defining what Jonathan Herzog refers to as the “spiritual-

industrial complex,” or the deliberate usage of government resources to stimulate a religious revival in the

immediate postwar years. The formation of the spiritual-industrial complex, which formed more fully in

the early 1950s, benefitted from a groundswell of religious participation after the end of World War II.

After a brief drop in church attendance immediately following the war, church membership as well as

individuals who identified as members of a church or otherwise religious skyrocketed. The percentage of

citizens officially enrolled in a church rose to 63%, while 73% identified as church members and a

whopping 96% identified as either Protestant, Catholic or Jewish.66

This surge in religion possessed a pronounced effect on the development of the anti-comics

movement. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, as a result of the formation of the aforementioned

“spiritual-industrial complex,” religion became the most common form of community organizing thanks

to the already strong networks of moral advocacy and hierarchies that allowed religious ideas to spread

across the country. Religion would prove to be essential to the formation of the Cincinnati Committee as

well, though it would not necessarily wholly guide its actions like the NODL.

This chapter has attempted to demonstrate a survey of the attitudes held towards comic books

from shortly after their inception when they were virulently condemned by Sterling North, to the

rumblings of criticism that began to form in the months leading up to 1948, as comics began to take a

darker and more violent turn after the end of World War II. However, this chapter also holds that by

showing the wealth of attention paid the comics by educators, as well as their conclusions that comics, by

and large, were acceptable as supplements to children’s reading, that members of the anti-comics

movement were not interested in listening to reasoned critiques of comics books, only their own

pronouncements.

66
Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were
 As the following chapter will relay, 1948 was a critical year for the anti-comics movement in

many ways—the publication of Fredric Wertham’s initial anti-comics article, municipal comic book bans

in Detroit and Los Angeles, burnings of comic books at schools, and, of course, the formation of the

Cincinnati Committee for the Evaluation of Comics. The chapter will use the Cincinnati Committee as a

central vehicle and a case study for understanding the years where anti-comics sentiment percolated

alongside fears of juvenile delinquency, from 1948 to 1953.

Chapter 2: The Rise of the Cincinnati Committee and the Ascendant Anti-
Comics Movement, 1948-1953

Beginnings of the Cincinnati Committee

Kentucky has long been home to an intense religious tradition, going as far back as the Second Great

Awakening, which took place in large parts of the state from approximately 1790 until 1840. Rejecting,

among other things, the rationalism and deism of the Enlightenment, Methodists and Baptists met and

proselytized at camp meetings across the frontier resulting in massive membership gains, especially from

young people. This movement, according to Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew, effectively turned

Methodism from a lower-class institution to a middle class one.67 However, for all the positive changes

enacted by the Great Revival (as it was also known), Protestantism, and especially Methodism developed

a pattern of intense moralizing.

One of the Methodist Church’s significant moral projects of the postwar era was its National

Family Week, first practiced sometime prior to 1948 and lasting approximately until 1969. Each National

Family Week, celebrated the first and second Sundays in May, had a unique theme. These included

“Home Builders are World Builders,” “A Christian Foundation For Every Home,” and “A Troubled

World Needs Christian Families.”68 Each day of the week had a special activity beginning on the first

Sunday, known as “Childhood Sunday.” According to the 1952 National Family Week brochure,

Childhood Sunday was celebrated to “stress the importance of the Christian nurture of children in church

and home.”69 The following week’s activities included a parental meeting to study recommendations from

the church’s National Conference on Family Life, family night at the church, parent-teacher meetings,

67
Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in Postwar Religious Sociology
68
Drew University Archives
69
National Family Week brochure, 1952, General Commission on Archives and History, Methodist Church, Drew
University Archives
family-at-home night, brotherhood night, and a night of preparations for the final day of National Family

Week, Mother’s Day.

On May 2, 1948, Rev. Jesse Murrell stepped to the pulpit of the First Methodist Church of

Covington, Kentucky to deliver his opening sermon for Children’s Sunday as part of that year’s National

Family Week campaign. Born in Columbia, Kentucky in 1889, Murrell led an exemplary life prior to

becoming ordained. He attended Drew University and Illinois Wesleyan University as an undergraduate

(earning high marks at both institutions) and received his graduate degree in theology from the Garrett

Bible Institute on Northwestern University’s campus. Rev. Murrell served in the Navy during World War

I as a pilot, and married Gladys Callahan on Christmas Day, 1918. After his full ordination in 1922, he

transferred to Ft. Lauderdale, FL, where he served as the National Director of the Youth Program of the

Methodist Church before returning to Kentucky in 1941.70

From his vantage point above the congregation, Rev. Murrell thundered, “Comic books are a

poisonous mushroom growth of the last decade. . .[t]he bulk of these lurid publications depend for their

appeal upon mayhem, murder, torture, and abduction. A child is often the victim of these cruelties.71 If

these words sound suspiciously familiar to the reader, it is because they are wholly the words of Sterling

North. Rev. Murrell, apparently without credit, simply delivered North’s vituperation against comic

books to his hundreds of parishioners. This time, however, rather than the frustrated screed of the writer

of a less popular product, Rev. Murrell importuned comic books as a direct threat to the sanctity of the

family and especially its most vulnerable, valuable asset—the child.

Rhetorical infringement notwithstanding, an excitable newspaperman approached Rev. Murrell

after the sermon and suggested to him that a story relating to the sermon be published in the Enquirer the

next day. According to a later letter sent by Rev. Murrell in reply to Otto Larsen, a University of

70
Adrian J. Roberts. “Obituary of Dr. Jesse L. Murrell”, Journal of the Kentucky Conference (Methodist Church),
1973, 238-239, Kentucky Wesleyan University Archives. Supplemented with material from Drew University and
Garrett-Evaneglical Theological Seminary.
71
“Pastor Blasts Comic Books,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 3, 1948.
Washington sociology professor, the newspaperman asked for a hard copy of the sermon, but Murrell had

delivered the speech entirely off of a few notecards, with which he let the reporter abscond.72 The story,

as promised, appeared in the May 3rd edition of the Enquirer, with the headline “Pastor Blasts Comic

Books From Covington Pulpit As Poisonous Growth Corrupting Children of Nation.”73 In addition to its

place in the Enquirer, local radio stations also got wind of Rev. Murrell’s sermon, broadcasting his words

around the greater Tri-State area. According to Rev. Murrell’s brief account of the Committee’s

formation, the local Council of Churches approached him shortly after the initial broadcast of the sermon

to head a committee dedicated to “see[ing] what, if anything, could be done about the bad comics.”74

Fan mail for Rev. Murrell came in droves following the broadcast of his sermon, even as soon as

the following day. A near-universal aspect of the letters that he received were words of congratulations

for his pursuit of those foul comic books. One of the more interesting letters came from a Mrs. Lora M.

Walker of Richmond, Indiana, who congratulated Rev. Murrell on taking steps towards “...saving the

moral[s] of our children.”75 Mrs. Walker also suggested that Rev. Murrell start a “non-prophet” (sic)

organization together with ministers of other denominations in order to “wipe out sin.”76

To cap off her letter, Mrs. Walker offered prescient foresight into the political battles that

underscored the early tenure of the Cincinnati Committee: “America was once a God fearing nation. Now

foreign nations call us decadent. We have a fight in Zionism and Communism also. Back to God and the

church is our only hope.”77 Perhaps Lora Walker is the source of the leaflets from the antisemitic and pro-

fascist Protestant War Veterans of America group located in the fan mail folder. Mrs. Walker also offered

72
Letter from Jesse Murrell to Otto Larson, February 1954. Box 3, Folder 4: Correspondence, 1954. CECBC.
Larsen went on to chair Lyndon Johnson’s President’s Committee on Obscenity and Pornography and was one of
the first people pied as an act of political protest.
73
“Pastor Blasts.” Ibid.
74
Jesse Murrell, “A Brief Report: The Greater Cincinnati Committee On Evaluation of Comic Books (June, 1964)”,
Box 3, Folder 4: Correspondence, 1954. CECBC. (The date of the report is not an error, the report was found in this
folder.)
75
Letter from Lora M. Walker to Jesse Murrell, May 3, 1948. Box 5, Folder 1: Fan mail. CECBC.
76
Lora M. Walker to Jesse Murrell, Ibid.
77
Ibid.
to distribute copies of Rev. Murrell’s sermon to ministers in Richmond and Dayton, OH, which Rev.

Murrell politely declined for lack of funds in his response.78

Rev. Murrell later wrote the main branch of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton

County (then known as the Cincinnati Public Library) on May 17th, seeking to book a conference room

for the Committee. He termed the group’s purpose in this letter “to formulate a standard by which we may

study and appraise the comic books that are circulated among our children and youth.”79 In this early

letter, Rev. Murrell lays out a unique aspect of the Cincinnati Committee that set it apart from other

cultural gatekeeping organizations in its time like the Catholic-centered National Organization for Decent

Literature. Said Murrell, “Since we feel that those who do this work should be widely distributed as to

creed and sect, we want to call the meeting at a neutral place.80 Indeed, Murrell later elucidated some

groups that he wished to involve in the organization: the Parent-Teacher Association, local children’s

recreation groups, the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University, local women’s clubs, Boy and Girl

Scouts, and groups that served Jewish and Catholic children.81

The library returned Rev. Murrell’s letter the following day, regretting to inform him that the

Central branch was too crowded for the size of meeting that Rev. Murrell sought. The responding

librarian, Carl Vitz, suggested the Walnut Hills branch on Cincinnati’s near east side as an alternate

location. Mr. Vitz informed Rev. Murrell that he was holding Tuesday, May 25th for the group and added

that the library was “...interested in reading problems including the influence of the ‘comics’,” and would

appreciate an invitation to the meeting.82

The Cincinnati Committee for the Evaluation of Comics officially began its existence on May 25,

1948 at the Walnut Hills public library. 19 individuals attended that first meeting, the main purpose of

which was to elect officers for the committee and begin to formulate criteria for rating comic books. The

78
Letter from Jesse Murrell to Lora M. Walker, May 6, 1948. Box 5, Folder 1: Fan mail. CECBC.
79
Letter from Jesse Murrell to Cincinnati Public Library, May 17, 1948. Box 3, Folder 1: Correspondence prior to
1950. CECBC.
80
Ibid.
81
Ibid.
82
Letter from Carl Vitz to Jesse Murrell, May 18, 1948. Box 3, Folder 1: Correspondence prior to 1950. CECBC.
group “unanimously” named Rev. Murrell as chairman, and chose Hildegarde Benner, the Chairman of

Juvenile Protection for the Cincinnati PTA to serve as secretary, a role she would fulfill until the group’s

folding in 1979.83 J. Louis Motz, the head of a local newspaper and stationary distribution company,

invited the meeting’s attendees to tour his warehouse and take a cursory glance at the types of comics

supplied to local newsstands and drug stores.84 Walter H. Pitts of the Northern Kentucky Independent

Druggist’s Association previously wrote to Rev. Murrell to personally guarantee the cooperation of his

organization.85

An assistant librarian at the Cincinnati Public Library named Ernest Miller suggested that the

group form a smaller committee in order to assess attempts by other municipalities to rein in comic

books, and Rev. Murrell assigned Miller, Dr. Kemper McComb, head of the Council of Churches, Rev.

Leo J. Streck, Superintendent of Education for the Diocese of Covington, Charles Dibowski of the

Juvenile Court of Covington, and a Mr. Leonard J. Brooks to the smaller inter-city research committee.

Other notable members at the inaugural meeting were George F. Veith, City Clerk and Recreation

Director of Covington, Robert Aldemayer, Covington’s chief probation officer, Mrs. William A. Thomas,

vice president of the Hamilton County PTA Council, Mrs. Archie Barnes, president of the Federation of

Catholic Parent-Teacher Associations, Willard A. Friend, director of the Boy Scouts of Northern

Kentucky, and three ladies, Mrs. Roy Melott, Mrs. Betty Harton Whiting, and Mrs. Eleanor Walker, all

affiliated with children’s ministries at local Baptist churches.

Every intersection of youth-based literary censorship had a presence at the Cincinnati

Committee's first meeting. The Parent-Teacher Associations, who united the powerful groups of teachers

and activist parents in order to attack comics from a didactic standpoint, members of the legal community,

specifically juvenile divisions concerned about the potential effect comic books had on exacerbating

83
Hildegarde Benner, Meeting minutes, May 25, 1948. Box 2, Folder 21: Minutes, 1948-1979. CECBC.
84
Hildegard Benner, Minutes 5/25/48, ibid.
85
Letter from Walter H. Pitts to Jesse Murrell, May 20, 1948. Box 3, Folder 1: Correspondence prior to 1950.
CECBC.
postwar America’s nouveau juvenile delinquency crisis, and ecclesiastical representatives from both

Protestant and Catholic camps.

Ernest Miller’s inter-city comics code committee met on the 27th of May to discuss some minor business

matters pertaining to group membership and inquiries to publishers with regard to their in-house editorial

codes.86 At their following meeting on June 10, Rev. Murrell communicated his intent to enlist local

university faculty in the committee’s work in order to provide expert opinions and an academic veneer to

the group’s criticisms. After getting bounced between faculty in the University of Cincinnati’s sociology

department, they recommended Dr. Arthur Bills of the psychology program’s measurements division,

who agreed to sign onto the committee’s cause.87

Fredric Wertham Reignites The Anti-Comics Movement

Two days later, the anti-comics movement received its most significant boost since the

publication of Sterling North’s “A National Disgrace” eight years earlier. Fredric Wertham, a German-

American psychiatrist who went on to become the comic book’s most visible foe, published his article

“The Comics…Very Funny!” in the May 29 edition of the Saturday Review of Literature. That Wertham

later served as the figurehead of the anti-comics movement pays credence to the ideological fluidity and

wide appeal of the movement. Wertham, a contemporary of the Frankfurt School who founded the

Lafargue Clinic, one of the first psychiatric clinics in New York City to provide services to blacks, made

no qualms about revealing his politics in the field of psychiatry. In fact, Gabriel Mendes, author of Under

The Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry, infers that

Wertham’s brusque manner of corresponding with important members of the psychiatric community and

his rebelling against racialist professional standards led to the Lafargue Clinic failing to receive funds

86
Jesse Murrell, Minutes of Meeting of Small Committee, May 27, 1948, Box 2, Folder 21: Minutes, 1948-1979.
CECBC.
87
Jesse Murrell, Statement of the General Chairman to Smaller Committee, June 10, 1948, Box 2, Folder 21:
Minutes, 1948-1979. CECBC.
distributed by New York City mental health boards after the passage of the state’s 1954 Community

Mental Health Services Act.88

In terms of the anti-comic movement, however, Wertham was quite reclusive about his personal

politics. Multiple scholars who analyze Wertham in the context of either the emergent panic over juvenile

delinquency or the anti-comics movement in general assert that his deliberate refusal to cast his lot

definitively with moral conservatives, antiviolence liberals, or leftist cultural critics of capitalism lent his

critiques considerable agency.89 The Saturday Review first reached out to Wertham in early 1947 to solicit

an article on comic books, but he turned them down.90 In point of fact, Wertham at that time had not

begun to truly see comics as pathological influences on children. That changed on March 19, 1948, when

Wertham organized a symposium of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy titled “The

Psychopathology of Comic Books”. Wertham wrote in the symposium’s abstract, published in the April

1948 issue of the American Journal of Psychotherapy, that

Psychiatry was practiced intramurally in institutions originally, and only gradually concerned itself with the
mental hygiene problems outside. In the same way, psychotherapy was originally confined to the consultation room
and is only now beginning to overcome its own claustrophilia and take an interest in the social influences that come
to bear on the individual. It is, therefore, in the best scientific tradition to consider a social phenomenon so
enormously widespread as comic books. 91

Wertham’s observations of black children at the Lafargue Clinic largely informed his creation of

the symposium, and his co-leader at Lafargue, Dr. Hilde Mosse (sister of famed historian of Nazism,

George Mosse) contributed a presentation titled “Aggression and Violence in Fantasy and Fact”. Mosse,

by and large, shared Wertham’s preconceptions about the perceived pathological nature of comic books

but did not engage in activism like Wertham. Other presentations at the symposium included “Comic

88
Gabriel N. Mendes, Under The Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist
Psychiatry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 160.
89
The two works that illustrate this point are James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to Juvenile
Delinquency in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Wright, Comic Book Nation
90
Letter from Norman Cousins to Fredric Wertham, January 5, 1947. Box 159, Folder 10, FWP. Wertham’s
response came on the 11th.
91
Fredric Wertham, “Introduction: The Psychopathology of Comic Books,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 2,
no. 2 (April 1948): 472.
Books and The Public”, by folklorist Gershon Legman, who dedicated a chapter of his 1949 work Love

and Death to attacking comic books, “The Child’s Conflict About Comic Books” by child

psychotherapist Paula Elkisch, and “The Practical Aspects of the Bad Influence of Comic Books” by

Marvin Blumberg, another child psychotherapist.

Now that Wertham’s name appeared in anti-comics circles, film critic Judith Crist, who recently

graduated from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, called on Wertham to consult for an article

she was to publish in Collier’s, “Horror in the Nursery.” Crist’s article, replete with a title printed as a

gargantuan bloodstain and large, full color photographs of children (“professional models”) re-enacting

juvenile delinquents staging violent acts from comic books, possessed multiple strong rhetorical bases.

With Wertham’s references to his observations at Lafargue supplemented by his sensational anecdotes of

crimes allegedly inspired by comics, his open casting of scorn at psychiatrists, “child-study” personnel,

and teachers who either used comic books for less-adept readers or claimed that they were not harmful to

children, Crist successfully gave Wertham a platform to first profess his two most frequent and wide-

reaching claims: All comic books, even educational ones, were malefactors in child development and

government regulation was necessary to protect children and clean up newsstands.92

The very next day, Wertham wrote to Saturday Review to change his mind, and indicated his

interest in writing an article to protest comic books.93 Wertham originally titled his manuscript “The Case

of the People vs. The Comic Books,” and opened it with the same text of his comic book symposium, but

later abandoned most references to psychoanalysis in favor of his dramatic anecdotes from Lafargue and

other hospitals. Wertham supplemented his article with comic panels from Fox Features Syndicate’s Jo-

Jo Congo King and an infamous panel (reproduced on the next page) from Jack Cole’s True Crime

Comics, as well as previous condemnations of comics from Saturday Review critic John Mason Brown

who referred to them as “the marijuana of the nursery”. Wertham’s article, which “refuted” in 17 points

more dispassionate comic viewpoints, gave a professionally-veneered, articulate, and coherent

92
Judith Crist, “Horror in the Nursery,” Collier’s, March 27, 1948, 22-23, 95-97.
93
Fredric Wertham to Norman Cousins, March 28, 1948, Box 159, Folder 10, FWP.
explanation for juvenile misbehavior, strengthened by his possessing “the weight of a distinguished career

in public medicine, the mystique of psychiatry, and the unflagging energy of a crusader.”94

Figure 5: The panel from "Murder, Morphine and Me!" by Jack Cole in True Crime Comics #2 reproduced by Wertham in his
Saturday Review article. Public domain image.

Reception for Wertham’s article was positive and resounding. Newspapers across the nation

reported on instances of book clubs discussing Wertham’s article or commented on the work

themselves.95 Syndicated columnist Calvin A. Byers wished “all parents of growing boys and girls” to

read Wertham’s article, and Reader’s Digest printed a truncated version of Wertham’s article in their

August 1948 issue.96 Despite this overwhelming adoration for Wertham’s work, some pro-comics

opposition came from a most unlikely source—14 year-old David Pace Wigransky of Washington, DC.

According to Carol Tilley, who wrote on Pace for her “Children and the Comics” chapter in Protest on

94
Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage
95
“Nursery Marijuana,” June 28, 1948, Wisconsin State Journal, 4.
96
Byers cited in Newark Advocate, June 26, 1948, 4. RD advertisement in June 22, 1948 edition of Baltimore Sun,
9.
the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent Since 1865, Wigransky’s elegant letter, titled “Cain

Before Comics,” “dissected, countered, and probed” Wertham’s claims.”97

Wigransky, then 14, was an avid comic reader and thus felt he was more qualified than Wertham

or Saturday Review’s John Mason Brown (who also published an anti-comics piece in Saturday Review in

March) to critique comic books. Wigransky evokes the biblical story of Cain and Abel, as well as the

slightly less distant Leopold and Loeb slayings to countermand Wertham’s alarmist critiques of comic

books: “Both boys were of well-to-do and cultured families and were readers of ‘good’ books. How then

could Dr. Wertham possible account for even the remotest thought of murder or violence entering the

minds of either?”98 Wigransky also criticized “The Comics…Very Funny,” saying that Wertham’s “$64

question” was to ask the generally maladjusted children at Lafargue if they read comics. “Of course, the

juvenile delinquent being a normal child in at least that way, will answer, ‘Yes.’ ‘Ah ha,’ says Dr.

Wertham. ‘This child is a juvenile delinquent.’ This is enough for Dr. Wertham.”99 Lastly, Wigransky

criticized the mindset of Wertham and other adults, who Wigransky felt were fine with grownups reading

anything but attempting to keep children in an “innocuous and sterile world. . .from birth to maturity.” 100

Anne Marie Kordas, in her book The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America, gives credence

to Wigransky’s observations as she writes that older Americans and European immigrants raised in an

inner-directed manner and production-based economies disliked the changes in American society of the

post war years, had difficulty understanding and tolerating the wants and needs of other-directed youth

raised in the new consumption-driven economy.101 Many subsequent letter-writers doubted Wigransky’s Commented [EA3]: I think this assertion is one of the keys
to understanding the anti-comics movement…how to have it
authorship of the letter, and even sought out his principal, who confirmed Wigransky was as erudite as his not so shoehorned in?

letter let on. Even contemporary observers, such as comics historian Michael J. Vassalo, doubted the

97
Carol Tilley, “Children and the Comics,” in Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent Since
1865, James L. Baughman et al., ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 162.
98
David Pace Wigransky, “Cain Before Comics,” Saturday Review of Literature, July 24, 1948, 19.
99
Ibid.
100
Ibid, 20.
101
Anne Marie Kordas, The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013). The
terms inner and outer-directed originate in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd.
authenticity of Wigransky’s letter (though he did admit that no one ever successfully made a case for

saying anyone else wrote it): “The letter is immaculate! It carefully refutes, rebuts and counters nearly

every point Dr. Wertham has made in his previous published comic book denouncements. In fact, it reads

like a legal brief, written by a lawyer for a comic book company preparing to go to war with Dr. Wertham

and his anti-comic book ilk.”102

Meanwhile, back in Ohio, the Cincinnati Committee’s drive continued to gain momentum. On

June 24, the full committee met for a second time, adding some new members that would prove

influential in the years to come: Dr. H.B. Weaver, a psychology professor at the University of Cincinnati

and Dr. Charles Wheeler, an English professor at Xavier University. At a previous meeting of the smaller

committee, the group mentioned Dr. Weaver as an individual with experience in formulating

measurements that hopefully would solve the committee’s early dilemma of deciding on a reviewing

criteria, or as Rev. Murrell put it, a “dependable measuring device and one that will prove reasonably

fool-proof.”103 Also at this meeting, the group decided on its wider approach to evaluating comics and

appealing to publishers. They agreed that work would not begin until the subcommittee finalized the

review criteria, which the larger committee would subsequently use to rate comic books. The final point

stated that the committee would attempt to seek cooperation of publishers “before any drastic measures

were resorted to.”104

The Ill-Fated ACMP

June 1948 also saw the reorganization of the ACMP, or Association of Comics Magazine

Publishers, thanks to the new attacks from Wertham and others. Headed by Dell founder George

Delacorte, Jr., the board of the ACMP also included Lev Gleason, president of the eponymous publishing

102
Michael J. Vassalo, “Part 1: Fredric Wertham, Censorship & the Timely Anti-Wertham Editorials,” Timely-Atlas-
Comics, February 6, 2011. https://timely-atlas-comics.blogspot.com/2011/02/frederic-wertham-censorship-anti.html
103
Jesse Murrell, Minutes of Meeting of Smaller Committee, June 22, 1948, Box 2, Folder 21: Minutes, 1948-1979.
CECBC.
104
Hildegard Benner. Meeting minutes, June 24, 1948, Box 2, Folder 21: Minutes, 1948-1979. CECBC.
company and Bill Gaines, whose EC Comics went on to become the primary subject of outrage during the

latter, more tenuous years of the anti-comics movement. The ACMP released a publishing code on July

1st, 1948, and the NODL claimed this was “provoked by the South Bend [action].105 Closer to the truth,

however, is that the ACMP’s code more closely resembled Fawcett Comics’ editorial standards, even to

the point of having the same word-for-word criteria. All three codes, however, shared the same core

principles: Comics should not glorify crime and should portray law enforcement personnel as effective as

to maintain respect for authority, should not contain sexy drawings, should not display torture, and should

not attack or ridicule races or religions. The South Bend code included a provision against “[a]dvertising

products or objects tending to contribute to juvenile delinquency,” while the Fawcett and ACMP codes

included a stipulation that divorce could not be treated humorously. 106

Comics historians rightfully assert that the ACMP and its code were, for the most part, paper

tigers. According to Bradford Wright in Comic Book Nation, the ACMP’s downfall stemmed from two

major sources: that only 12 of the 34 major comic book publishers at the time were members of the group,

and that the ACMP charged flat fees to have comic books evaluated, which high-production companies

such as Dell (famous for their Disney comics) calculated would come at a tremendous cost ($30,000 in

today’s dollars), even more insulting to the company when they believed that their comics did not need to

be subject to the same code as crime comics, since there was nothing morally objectionable about their

cartoony stories.107 Furthermore, the ACMP seal itself was often small and placed in hard-to-spot

locations on covers, as demonstrated by Crime Does Not Pay #74 on the following page. As late as 1954,

publications would carry the ACMP seal, but Henry Schultz admitted at the comic book hearings that the

ACMP had not actually reviewed comics for several years.

105
“A Code For The Comics,” NODL Report, 1948, 27. Box 119, Folder 8. CUA.
106
“Code of Ethics – Fawcett Comics Magazines Box 4, Folder 5. CECBC. ACMP code in NODL Report, op. cit.
107
Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.
 At the behest of Leo Streck, the Catholic priest who served the committee in its early days,

William C. Smith of the National Council of Catholic Men reached out to Murrell with some strategies

utilized by the South Bend Pharmacy Club, including the rudimentary code used to clean up comics in

South Bend, IN, the NODL’s birthplace: “It is my thought that perhaps you in Covington would like to

enlist the cooperation of your local druggists as well as the cooperation of other fraternal and religious

groups in the community. . .You could then start a campaign to ban from sale all comics which do not

follow this code.”108

Figure 5: Cover of Crime Does Not Pay #74 (April 1949). Cover by Charles
Biro. First CDNP to display the ACMP star, barely visible to the left of title.
Public domain image courtesy of the Digital Comic Museum.

108
William C. Smith to Jesse Murrell, July 2, 1948. Box 3, Folder 1: Correspondence prior to 1950. CECBC.
The Cincinnati Committee Gets to Work

By the time the full committee met again on October 3, the resurgent debate over comic books

continued to expand. Parents’ Magazine and Woman’s Day both ran articles on comics, though these

were of the more dispassionate type. The Parents’ article, “Common Sense About Comics,” reiterated the

educational consensus of the 1940s from individuals like Josette Frank, and maintained that some comics

were bad, but not all, and parents should educate themselves rather than condemn outright. “Certainly a

steady diet of comics is bad. So is a steady diet of jam. But we don’t throw away the jam jar—we provide

other foods along with jam.”109

Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, director of the Child Study Association of America, wrote the

Woman’s Day article, “What About The Comics Books?” In her article, Gruenberg assessed arguments

both for and against comic books, ultimately concluding that “We cannot fight what is objectionable in

the comics by calling for more censorship or police guards.”110 Keeping in line with the CSAA’s stance

on parental involvement in the supervision and selection of children’s reading, Gruenberg called for a

“wider and a more active and more intelligent interest on the part of parents” to promote good reading for

their children.

In view of the Cincinnati Committee’s executive minutes and records, the group’s meeting on

October 3 was its first as a fully functioning organization. The committee adopted Dr. Weaver and

company’s proposed criteria, created another subcommittee to select a group of “forty or fifty” comic

book reviewers, and created a finance committee to raise money and track group expenditures. The

librarian Ernest Miller, secretary Hildegard Benner, Mr. Dibowski of the juvenile court, Rev. Murrell, and

a Mrs. Rengering made up the reviewer search committee, while Murrell placed Mary Bradstreet (named

109
Katherine Clifford, “Common Sense about Comics,” Parents Magazine, October 1948. N.p.
110
Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, “What About The Comics Books?” Woman’s Day, September 1948.
treasurer at the group’s subsequent meeting), Kemper McComb, and Dr. Wheeler on the finance

committee.111

Dr. Weaver’s criteria comprised four levels of objectionality over three subject areas. Comics

could receive ratings of No Objection, Some Objection, Objectionable, or Very Objectionable. In later

years, the committee also substituted grades from A to D for these ratings, and noted that comics rated No

Objection or Some Objection were safe for children to read. To receive a rating of No Objection in the

first category, “Cultural Area”, a comic was to possess good art and diction, and have no situations which

offended good taste along with an overall pleasing effect. Breaking with other codes of the time, the

Cincinnati Committee also included a stipulation in its Cultural Area that “undermining in any way

traditional American folkways” merited Some Objection, while “[p]ropaganda against or belittling

traditional American institutions” led to an Objectionable rating.

With these pro-American criteria, the code of the Cincinnati Committee represented a break from

other editorial codes of the time in that it did not hide that it actively sought to regulate potential

criticisms of America, reflecting the backdrop of the early Cold War years in which Weaver and company

created the code. The second category, “Moral Area”, functioned as a response to crime comics, by which

standards nearly all crime titles would be considered by the Cincinnati Committee to be objectionable.

Stories with No Objection featured “properly dressed”, wholesome characters in an uplifting plot and

only incidental references to crime, with the stipulation that the story “[did] not compromise good

morals.”112 The mere appearance of a criminal or criminal act moved the story to Some Objection, and in

a direct rebuke to Lev Gleason’s series, depicting “...Crime stories even if they purport to show that crime

does not pay”, merited an objectionable rating. Also included in the Objectionable criteria in the Moral

111
Hildegard Benner. Meeting minutes, October 6, 1948, Box 2, Folder 21: Minutes, 1948-1979. CECBC.
112
Weaver, 1948 criteria.
Area was the portrayal of law enforcement as stupid or ineffective, which mirrored other codes like the

ACMP’s and reinforced a message that comics were to promote respect for authority.

The final area of Weaver’s criteria was “Morbid Emotionality”, later explained by Murrell as

functioning to keep children’s minds safe from violence or disturbing situations in comic books. A No

Objection comic simply needed to “not arouse morbid emotionality of children”, though Weaver never

entirely clarified what this meant. Deaths of any sort or the appearance of strange creatures merited a

rating of Some Objection, while nearly any form of violence, actual or implied, warranted an

Objectionable rating. The criteria for a Very Objectionable Rating was the same for each area of

Weaver’s criticism: “An exaggerated degree of any of the above-mentioned acts or scenes.” The

committee later eliminated the Very Objectionable rating due to criticism over its vague and arbitrary

nature. Weaver cautioned reviews in a subtext that

These criteria are intended to serve primarily as guides and check-points in the evaluation of comic books,
rather than as complete standards which must in all cases be applied literally and rigidly. They should be used by the
reviewer in the light of his best judgement regarding good taste, and the spirit of the story, and the context of the
individual frames of the story. 113

The committee’s report, released in November 1948, rated 378 comic books, breaking down into

the following levels of objection: No Objection, 105, Some Objection, 94, Objectionable, 102, and Very

Objectionable, 57. Some comic books that modern enthusiasts may recognize in this evaluation are Action

Comics (the home of Superman), Archie Comics, Classics Illustrated, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye, and

Walt Disney’s Comics, all rated No Objection, Detective Comics (the original home of Batman), Felix the

Cat, Mighty Mouse, and Donald Duck/Mickey Mouse, all rated Some Objection, and Adventure Comics

(home to several DC superheroes), Captain America, Bugs Bunny Super Sleuth, and Dick Tracy, all rated

Objectionable. Only two or three titles in the Very Objectionable section are recognizable as having

survived the 1950s: Batman’s solo comic, Jack Kirby’s Boy Commandos, and All-Star Comics, the

113
Weaver, “1948 Criteria”
original home of DC’s Justice Society of America. Expectedly, any comics with “crime” in the title

resided in the Very Objectionable category as well.

An inherent flaw in the Cincinnati Committee’s early method of reviewing was the ambiguity not

just of their individual criteria (such as Morbid Emotionality – Objectionable #6: Anything having a

sadistic implication), but also the general imprecision of their Very Objectionable rating. This

indistinctness led to many future instances of comic books from the same company and even of the same

character to receive differing ratings, owing to the subjectivity of each reviewer’s personal morals,

complicated further by more than the group’s later practice of having more than one reviewer per comic.

All these disparate factors of the Cincinnati Committee’s evaluation process lead to one overbearing

question: In what universe would Bugs Bunny be considered objectionable?!

Of course, not everyone was pleased with the Cincinnati Committee’s work, and an anonymous

letter presumed to also be from 1948 was, by the organization of the archival collection, the first piece of

critical mail the committee received. Signed only “a fed up citizen,” the letter read: “I am writing this

letter as to let you know what I think of you no-good stinkers who cant [sic] mind your own business.

Also I would like to offer a suggestion - the next time you fatheads don’t have anything to do - Go jump

in the lake, and take your comic book list along with you. crumbs”114

One of the first post-evaluation interactions that the Cincinnati Committee had with the comics

industry was with the newly-formed ACMP, who Murrell in a response to a letter that he sent to them on

December 7th. What Murrell said in that letter is unknown, as he did not consistently keep carbon copies

of his outgoing correspondence until 1954, but from the meeting minutes one may infer that it was either

regarding comics published by ACMP companies that the Cincinnati Committee found objectionable, or a

request for their in-house editorial code. In his response, Queens College board of trustees president

Henry Schultz, who served as executive director for the ACMP, wrote:

114
Anonymous critical letter to committee, presumed 1948, Box 3, Folder 1: Correspondence prior to 1950.
CECBC.
 My dear Reverend Murrell: We are most appreciative of your kind letter of December
7th, and I hasten to offer the fullest cooperation of which we are capable. . .[a]s I am sure you can
understand from your own experience and observations, the establishment of self-regulatory
machinery is an involved administrative task. We feel that real progress is being made. We shall
attempt to keep you informed of the activities of the Association and other pertinent
developments. We shall be most grateful of you can arrange to keep us informed of the work of
your Committee, so that we can be mutually helpful. 115

The document attached by Schultz to his letter to Murrell was a press release from the ACMP

dated December 6, 1948 that announced both the formation of an Advisory Committee, comprised of

veteran higher-education and publishing personnel in the New York City area, and an emphasized goal on

regulating, rather than censoring comic books. The ACMP wished to work in tandem with other groups

like the American Bar Association and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in order to rein in

objectionable comics, and defined the scope of their proposed improvements as improving language,

bringing up the art quality of the magazines, accurately reporting facts, creating educational opportunities

and finding ways to use the comics in public service, cooperating with New York antidiscrimination

statutes, and calling for a general study of comics to look for improvement possibilities.116

Onto the National Scene: The Cincinnati Committee and Parents’ Magazine

1949 started on a quiet note for the Cincinnati Committee, but by year’s end they would be well

on their way to the national repute they enjoyed throughout much of the early-to-mid 1950s. At their

January 11 meeting, one of two that they would hold for the year, Dr. Weaver noted that the overall

percentages of objectionable nature reflected in the 1948 evaluation were 55% objectionable or very

objectionable and 45% no objection or some objection.117 The library’s representative, Ernest Miller,

proposed that the committee publish lists of un-objectionable comics, which they released in February

115
Letter from Henry E. Schultz to Jesse Murrell, December 10, 1948, Box 3, Folder 1: Correspondence prior to
1950. CECBC.
116
Henry E. Schultz, Association of Comics Magazine Publishers press release, December 6, 1948, Box 3, Folder 1:
Correspondence prior to 1950. CECBC.
117
It is important to reiterate here that the Cincinnati Committee held that comics rated “no objection” or “some
objection” were all right for children to read.
and would do so alongside their yearly evaluations until 1956. Furthermore, the committee set a more

defined meeting schedule, deciding to meet quarterly.118

The ACMP’s Henry Schultz wrote Rev. Murrell again in early February, responding to

individual letters that Rev. Murrell wrote to ACMP-affiliated publishers to inform them of their ranking

in the committee’s 1948 evaluation. The moralizing and urgent nature of Rev. Murrell’s letters to the

ACMP-member publishers irked Schultz somewhat, and despite approaching Rev. Murrell as an equal

and complimenting him on his “reasonable, objective and American” evaluation methods, his second

letter was much harsher than his first.119 Schultz attested to the decentralized and variable structures of

comic book publishers at the time, as well as the relative youth of the comic industry compared with its

predecessors in radio and film, saying that “...it is simply impossible to effect all of our goals

overnight.”120 Since every publisher employed a different creative structure, it was nigh-impossible to

establish a criteria that would be interpreted the same by individuals from company to company.

Schultz also objected to the committee’s plans to distribute their evaluations to news companies,

fearing that small but vocal groups would “use [the committee's] work to further un-American and

abhorrent forms of censorship.”121 More importantly, Schultz articulated at an early stage one of the most

frequent criticisms of the Cincinnati Committee’s evaluation methods, that too many of the individual

criteria relied heavily on matters of personal opinion. Schultz made specific reference to Moral Area – No

Objection #4, “Any situation that does not offend good taste,” and was also highly critical of the

committee’s Very Objectionable criteria (an exaggerated amount of any of the preceding criteria), noting

that it was “predicated upon a subjective measurement” and seemed arbitrary in the face of the neatly-

defined Objectionable criteria.122 Schultz ended his letter by respectfully asking Rev. Murrell not to

118
Hildegard Benner, Meeting minutes, January 11, 1949, Box 2, Folder 21: Minutes, 1948-1979. CECBC.
119
Letter from Henry E. Schultz to Jesse Murrell, February 3, 1949, Correspondence prior to 1950.
120
Ibid.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid.
publish announcements related to specific comic book titles (as he feared they would lead to a downturn

in sales, or worse), and hoped that they could continue to cooperate.123

After Schultz’s letter, the year progressed rather quietly for Rev. Murrell and the committee. A

few weeks later in February, the committee released the list of un-objectionable comics proposed at the

January meeting, earning them a small mention in the Cincinnati Enquirer. In the last weeks of February

and early weeks of March, Rev. Murrell wrote to several notable magazines, ostensibly to offer the

group’s evaluation campaign as a source for an article. Sadly, all the publishers that Rev. Murrell wrote to

during this time turned him down.

Woman’s Day declined to feature the work of the Cincinnati Committee, as they had already

featured in their September 1948 issue a lengthy article on comic books by CSA director Sidonie Matsner

Gruenberg. Good Housekeeping rejected Rev. Murrell’s proposal as well, saying that there was “no

possibility” of a story on the committee, while LIFE said in somewhat friendlier terms that while they

were considering a story on comic books in some form, they “had no definite plans for a story.”

The latter part of spring and summer were friendlier to Rev. Murrell and the committee, as they

were featured in a newspaper article in early April and held a short meeting on May 3 to discuss publisher

correspondence and updates to the criteria. The committee made another evaluation during this time, but

its records are missing from the evaluation collection. They did, however, keep a more detailed record of

which persons evaluated which comics for this evaluation. Reviewers worked in teams of two and were

responsible for three to five comic books each.

Their long-awaited, fortuitous break came on July 12, when Clara Savage Littledale, an editor at

Parents’ Magazine, wrote to Rev. Murrell and offered to run an article on the Committee’s work in one of

their upcoming issues, offering $50 for a completed article of 1,500 to 1,800 words and calling the

committee’s work “among the first that goes about an intelligent evaluation [of comic books].”124

123
Ibid.
124
Letter from Clara Savage Littledale to Jesse Murrell, July 12, 1949, Box 3, Folder 1: Correspondence prior to
1950. CECBC.
Littledale was impressed by the committee’s work, but extremely inquisitive about the formation and

makeup of the committee, as that information was wholly absent from the materials that Rev. Murrell sent

along with his letter. Littledale peppers her letter with questions about who led the charge to form the

committee (Was its formation spontaneous? Was it led by parents? Teachers? The universities?), and

who, exactly served in the body of reviewers and on the Executive Committee (Are there men as well as

women? What are their professions?).

Incidentally, something Mrs. Littledale says near the end of her letter has a fateful importance for

the Cincinnati Committee: “We should also like to stress in the article that Cincinnati’s example should

be followed and that other communities may well work out such committees.”125 Without the agency

afforded their message by Parents’ Magazine, as will be demonstrated further through this history, the

Cincinnati Committee would certainly not have enjoyed such wide success and admiration.

Rev. Murrell went to work writing the article for Parents, titling it “Cincinnati Does Something

About The Comic Books.” In his article, he relays the story of the founding of the committee because of

his sermon on comic books, tells of the wide array of organizations and interests represented on the

committee, describes the development of criteria and review process, and lays out for the first time their

policy of education rather than censorship advocacy. Throughout the documents and correspondence of

the Cincinnati Committee, Rev. Murrell and company’s concerns frequently drifted towards the

perception of their group as a censorship organization. While in a sociological sense they were practicing

a form of informal censorship, they saw their evaluations as educating parents as to which magazines

were appropriate to buy rather than personally agitating newsdealers into removing magazines from their

shelves.126

Mrs. Littledale wrote back in early October and told Rev. Murrell that Parents planned on

publishing “Cincinnati Does Something About The Comic Books” in their January 1950 issue, but

informed him that the evaluation list he sent initially of spring 1949 was, at that point, very out of date.

125
Ibid.
126
Facey citation
Mrs. Littledale, attaching a list of new comics, hoped that the Cincinnati Committee would be able to

accomplish a new evaluation and offered incentive by speaking of the potential payoffs of the article’s

appearance:

The publication of this article in PARENTS’ MAGAZINE, which has a circulation of more than 1,200,000
throughout the United States will, I am sure, bring the most favorable kind of attention to your Cincinnati group. It
will get Cincinnati talked about all over the nation as the one community that did something constructive and
intelligent about comic books. We think it will stimulate other communities to follow your example and therefore,
we are extremely anxious to hear from you that you will cooperate with us in evaluating promptly the supplementary
list of comic books that you missed in your first evaluation as well as those that have been launched since then.127

Following Mrs. Littledale’s reply, the committee redoubled its efforts and sent to Parents’ a

mostly complete (Murrell confessed to a few stragglers) re-evaluation on November 17, which reached

New York later that week. Mrs. Littledale was pleased with the quickness of the response and though the

article was delayed a month, Parents’ increased the committee’s payment to $100, and provided the

greatest intangible benefit of the Cincinnati Committee for the Evaluation of Comics’ short existence: in

under two years, they had gone from a small group of interested educational and ecclesiastical citizens to

a large, serious moral advocacy group with a nationwide audience. From the publication of their first

Parents’ article in February 1950 to the cessation of the partnership in April 1957 (the Committee had

stopped making yearly evaluations by then), the Cincinnati Committee and Parents’ enjoyed a thriving,

mutually beneficial partnership.

In addition to their Parents’ exposure, the Christian Century, a major liberal Protestant magazine,

featured the Cincinnati Committee and a similar group in St. Paul, Minnesota in an article regarding

comic book “cleanup" groups. The St. Paul group was of similar occupational membership: local

diocesians, educators, and news distributors, but it also employed fifty high school students in its

reviewing team. The article described the main difference between the two groups as a matter of criteria.

The St. Paul group took a more hardline approach to the content of the comics (foreshadowing a

127
Letter from Clara Savage Littledale to Jesse Murrell, October 6, 1949, Box 3, Folder 1: Correspondence prior to
1950. CECBC.
censorship scandal that engulfed the Twin Cities in late 1952), maintaining that comic books should

“emphasize the principles of democracy, show respect for the moral laws of God, and portray characters

who if imitated as heroes would contribute to wholesome personality development.”128

The article also noted that Cincinnati took into account the appearance (by means of art style and

printing) of the comic books, while St. Paul did not. In keeping with the early wishes of the Cincinnati

Committee, the Christian Century only reprinted the books listed as all right for children to read, but

interestingly noted that 22 of the St. Paul committee’s “best buys,” or comics that passed their evaluation,

were rated Objectionable by the Cincinnati Committee.

After the success of their 1949 evaluation’s publication in Parents’ Magazine, the committee was

relatively inactive for much of 1950, meeting only twice that year in May, and deciding to furnish their

yearly evaluation in early June. The executive committee went through some membership changes during

this time, losing Kemper McComb of the Council of Churches due to the committee’s meetings not

working with his schedule, and seeing Charles Dibowski of Covington’s juvenile court move to a

different city. Leo Streck, from the Covington diocese, was also assigned to different work in 1950 and

had to discontinue his affiliation with the committee.

128
The Christian Century. “What Comic Books Pass Muster? A Report on the St. Paul and Cincinnati
Investigations.” December 28, 1949, 1540-1541. 1949 evaluation.
For Minneapolis 1952 censorship scandal, see front-page articles by Leo Sonderegger on clandestine censorship in
December 23-25, 1952 editions of The Minneapolis Star. Cited in Paul Blanshard, The Right to Read: The Battle
Against Censorship.
Chapter 3: The Anti-Comics Movement Triumphant, 1954-1956

The Hartford Courant, which serves large areas of northeast Connecticut, lays claim to be the oldest

continuously published newspaper in the United States, in print since October 29, 1764. 189 years later,

on Valentine’s Day 1954, the Courant’s Sunday edition contained an unprecedented new change—a

superseding of the Courant’s logotype for a headline only slightly smaller than the logotype: “Depravity

for Children—10 Cents a Copy!” Supplemented with an image of piled comics that included EC Comics’

horror anthologies Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror as well as their satire comics Panic and Mad,

Comics Media’s Weird Terror, and other titles such as My Secret Marriage, Menace, and Strange

Fantasy, the article opened with a visceral lesson from writer Irving M. Kravsow:

Ten cents at your neighborhood drug store or newsstand will buy your child a short course in
murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, sex, sadism and worse. These are only a sample of
the types of crimes and practices explained in detail with pictures in a variety of comic books being
bought and read daily by countless children. 129

As evidence of the purported maleficent nature of comic books, Kravsow proffers a story from

the Ajax-Ferrell horror/suspense series Strange Fantasy named “Bloody Mary”, where a child strongly

implied to be under demonic possession murders her foster mother and psychiatrist, while framing her

father for the first murder and sending him to the gallows. Kravsow’s retelling of the story, as was

common in anecdotal references to comic stories, contained several deliberate inaccuracies to make the

story seem more violent than it was. First, Kravsow makes it seem as if the girl, “Sister”, was depicted

strangling her mother, when in reality the death happens off-page. Second, Kravsow says the comic

“[shows] a picture of the father hanging from the gallows,” but the comic shows him plunging beneath the

platform, not hanging dead. Lastly, Kravsow claims that the “child”, discovered to be a dwarf circus

performer, kills and burns the body of her psychiatrist. While the story depicts Sister in the act of stabbing

129
Irving M. Kravsow, “Depravity for Children—10 Cents a Copy!” Hartford Courant, February 14, 1954, 1.
the psychiatrist (the knife does not penetrate him, and no blood is shown), she burns his notes, not his

body.130

Foreshadowing comments from New York assemblyman James FitzPatrick at the comic book

hearings to occur later this year, Kravsow criticized the off-color rendition of “The Night Before

Christmas” in Panic #1, EC Comics’ in-house competitor to Mad, saying that it was “illustrated by gross

and obscene drawings.”131 Also like FitzPatrick, Kravsow made it appear that the comic was published by

Tiny Tot Comics, the company’s name from the days when Gaines’ father owned the company. Gaines,

like many publishers at the time, did not want to pay to register a new company name, so he simply kept

the old one, under which some issues of Frontline Combat, nearly all of Panic, and all of Shock

SuspenStories were published.

Tiny Tot Comics was the company’s indicia (legal) publisher name indeed, but all covers were

branded with the EC Comics seal. This misrepresentation was another deliberate misunderstanding—

publishers at this time identified with the brand on the cover, not the indicia publisher which was

typically crammed into a block of legal text on the first inner page of the comic book. No parent, by any

stretch of the imagination, could have mistaken books like Panic, Frontline Combat, or Shock

SuspenStories as comics for tiny tots. Kravsow also noted another EC indicia publisher, I.C. Publishing

Company as being full of violent deaths. In sum, Kravsow’s usage of indicia publishers served to give

false impressions of the number of comic book publishers publishing objectionable fare. Where Kravsow

130
“Bloody Mary”, in Strange Fantasy #10 (February-March 1954), ed. Ruth A. Roche and S.M. Iger. Artist and
writer unknown.

A story strikingly similar to “Bloody Mary” appeared in EC Comics’ Shock Suspenstories and was recounted by
United States Childrens’ Bureau staffer Richard Clenenden during the 1954 comic book hearings as a comic in
which persons died violently. In that story, “Orphan”, a little girl named Lucy narrates her recollection of how she
murdered her abusive father, blamed it on her mother and her mother’s lover, and sent the two of them to the electric
chair so that she could live with her aunt, whom she adored.
131
Kravsow, “Depravity for Children”, 18.
would have it seem that there were nine separate publishers in his article, there were actually five: Farrell,

EC, Atlas, Charlton, and Comic Media.132

132
Tiny Tot Comics and I.C. Publishing were indicia of EC, while Male Publishing Corp was an indicia of Atlas
(later Marvel). Allen Hardy Associates was an indicia of Comic Media and Superior Comic was a Canadian
company that reprinted American comics.