We’re likely to find the outrage and alarm over comic books psychologically simplistic and politically opportunistic. But this is winner’s bias. Other people’s culture wars always look ridiculous. That’s partly because we frame cultural controversies as battles between the old and the new, and, given that the old is someone else’s status quo and we have no stake in it, we naturally favor the new. So one way to look at the comic-book inquisition is to see it as an effort to repress an edgy, provocative, satirical popular form and to dictate to people what books they should and should not read. In this view, a big, powerful, established social entity is squashing a bunch of little, powerless entities.
But the psychiatrists and the officials almost certainly perceived things the other way around. For youth culture is commercial culture. If an industry is moving a hundred million units a week, then someone is making money. The comic book creators were no doubt interesting, complicated, talented people who believed in what they did, but they were businessmen manufacturing entertainment for children.
An argument can be made that comic books were dying anyway ... At the beginning of 1950, there were four million television sets in the United States; three years later, there were more than twenty-five million. Fifty per cent of American homes had one. There was a new place for children to be seduced.
Television was the Cold War intellectuals’ nightmare, a machine for bringing kitsch and commercialism directly into the home. But by exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically. We read the horror comics today and smile complacently at the sheer over-the-top campiness of the effects. In fact, that is the only way we can read them. We have lost our innocence.
