I read Banned Books (Comic Book Edition)

Tomorrow is the beginning of the annual American Library Association event Banned Books Week. This year, the ALA is focusing on comic books and graphic novels. Their reason is ' "despite their serious literary merit and popularity as a genre, they are often subject to censorship,” said Judith Platt, chair of the Banned Books Week National Committee.'

  All week, I'll be reading and reviewing selections from my favorite banned comics of all-time; the EC Comics. Considered gory, brutal, and undeserving of any merit, these comics have stood more than the test of time- the withstood perhaps one o the greatest witch hunts of the 20th Century- the comic book scare of the 1950s.

   EC Comics were the primary target of the Juvenile Delinquency Senate hearings of 1954. A quack psychologist named Fredric Wertham in his book "Seduction of the Innocent" blamed comic books on just about anything wrong with kids and teens in the 1950s. His accusations were based on doctored data and led to a majority of publishers, writers, and artists of the comic book genre to lose their jobs and their passion- as many of these workers never worked in comics again.

 
   I'll be controversial to suggest that the fact that Wertham was German and the majority of the comic book working class was Jewish at the time, is not lost on me. the pandemonium that surrounded the comics scare is eerily similar to 1940s Nazi Germany. Community groups inspired by Wertham 'encouraged' children to collect their comics (and those of their buddies) and held mass burnings. My wife's uncles recall having to participate in these community improvement projects.

   The comic book industry might have failed completely if it wasn't for the few surviving publishers to team-up and create a self-governing committee that would insure standards and practices in the comic book industry. That group was the Comics Code Authority. Though the CCA is no longer used to determined if a comic is 'child friendly', it's place in pop culture history makes it still a vital and important tool in the comics industry. Like the music industry, comic book publishers now self-regulate their own ratings systems for their comics.

   Another important resource is the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. This fund, which I actively donate my spare coins to at comic book shops nationwide, was established to provide legal representation to publishers, authors, and writers who find themselves targets of the next community action to ban comic books.

 
  I hope this week, you'll participate in Banned Books (and Comics) week. But don't just read them for fun. Try to also reflect on the freedoms of speech and assembly we as Americans have the privilege to experience. This week is also time to reflect on the potential dangers of censorship. As the Jewish German writer Heinrich Hesse once wrote "Where books are burned in the end, people will be burned."