The other day, I posted a review of a comics history book that wouldn't have given a reader much accurate information about comics. There's still a lot more to say about its misconceptions and inaccuracies, but I was already to the point of having written at such great length as to bore the average reader. But now, one little item is gnawing at my brain, insisting I should have included it anyway because it's just so darned egregious. I'm going to scratch that itch now.

The chapter on Fredric Wertham, who wrote Seduction of the Innocent, a book advocating comic book censorship, was, like much else, askew. The author put a lot of verbiage into taking some of Wertham's more famous assertions, like Batman and Robin living in a homosexual dream world, almost seriously — interviewing creators, assessing the charges, discussing it at great length, etc. It's one of several ways the book is padded out, making it a lot longer than it should have been.

Most of the chapter could have been skipped, because everyone knows the place to attack Wertham is at the roots, which can be done very concisely. Even in 1962 or '63, when I read his book, in my mid-teens, I could see the big flaw in his methodology — he didn't use any controls, which, as a supposed man of science, he knew very well is essential to any scientific study. His "findings" were worthless because he had nothing to compare them with. He covered deviant children, juvenile delinquents they used to be called, found they all read comic books, and concluded the comics must be causing the deviance. He didn't even mention the fact that they were read by nearly all children at the time, and therefore it could be argued, equally validly, they caused normalcy.

That's it in a nutshell. Wertham isn't taken seriously by social scientists because he tailored his "inquiry" to produce the results he wanted, i.e., the ones that would sell a lot of books. A quick glance through his other books reveals this is typical. All his "studies" reflect the same shallow values he started out looking for. He never found anything but what he already thought he knew.

He was very successful, selling books to the general public. But now that he's been dead a couple of decades, we can examine his lifetime impact on psychology, and there doesn't seem to be any. The comics industry suffered from his attention, but we were just in his way, collateral damage in a career of demagoguery.

But this isn't about Wertham and what made his lifetime work scientifically worthless. It's about the worthlessness as history, of another book entirely. The two topics intersect, however, so we can spend the final few paragraphs here considering both at once. The intersection point is Wonder Woman.

Wertham said Wonder Woman was a lesbian. Of course he said she was a lesbian. If Batman and Robin are so clearly, to him, gay, then what else would she be? He called her a frightening image for boys and a horrible role model for girls. It was noted in the "history" book under scrutiny that after Wertham's attack, DC Comics took steps to de-superize Wonder Woman, to make her a more ordinary hero without a costume, entirely different from what she'd been, and able to deflect all such criticism.

"After." Yeah, right. Fourteen years after. Wertham's book came out in 1954, and the Wonder Woman change (which didn't last very long, by the way) occurred in '68. The author of this history implies that DC's management took Wertham so seriously, they quickly acted to counter the accusation. In truth, the two events occurred so far apart, conventional wisdom of the time suggested the entire readership of comic books had been fully replaced with a new generation, twice, and was well on its way to a third.

No, the fact is, nobody took Wertham seriously as a purveyor of facts. He was a threat, sure, and taken very seriously on that level — or more accurately, it was the movement he'd leapt in front of that threatened the comics industry. But as for the factual content of his accusations, nobody really saw anything in them to act on. The proof of that is, they waited 14 years before doing anything that could even remotely have been interpreted as a response to them. To suggest otherwise is yet another reason to ignore the book that made the claim.

Not that Wonder Woman was above criticism by those who actually knew her, which Wertham obviously didn't. (If he had, he'd really have written a sizzler.) But I've already filled several inches here, so I'll get to that another time.

— DDM