Seduction of the Innocent w/ BIBLIOGRAPHY! RARE 1954

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SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT Rinehart & Co. Inc, NY : 1953,1954 (400 Pages) (Hardback $4.00) (Written by Fredric Wertham, M.D.) 1st Version/Print with Original Dust jacket & Bibliographical note INTACT (pages 399 & 400). ( Several copies got out before the comic publishers forced the removal of this page ) Nice solid clean copy. The original dust cover has some wear/tape repairs visible in pic. A copy of this book sold on Ebay recently for $895 on a Bin. This one is listed with NO RESERVE! is your chance to snag a copy of a truly tough item which rarely comes up for sale. A brief history from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : Seduction of the Innocent is a book by Dr. Frederic Wertham , published in 1954 , that warned that comic books were a bad form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency . The book was a minor bestseller that created alarm in parents and galvanized them to campaign for censorship. At the same time, a U.S. Congressional inquiry was launched into the comic book industry. Subsequent to the publication of Seduction of the Innocent , the Comics Code Authority was voluntarily established by publishers to self-censor their titles. Seduction of the Innocent cited overt or covert depictions of violence, sex, drug use, and other adult fare within "crime comics"âe"a term Wertham used to describe not only the popular gangster/murder-oriented titles of the time, but superhero and horror comics as well. The book asserted, largely based on undocumented anecdotes, that reading this material encouraged similar behavior in children.Comics, especially the crime/horror titles pioneered by EC , were not lacking in gruesome images; Wertham reproduced these extensively, pointing out what he saw as recurring morbid themes such as "injury to the eye". Many of his other conjectures, particularly about hidden sexual themes (e.g. images of female nudity concealed in drawings of muscles and tree bark, or Batman and Robin as gay partners), were met with derision within the comics industry. (Wertham's claim that Wonder Woman had a bondage subtext was somewhat better documented, as her creator William Moulton Marston had admitted as much; however, Wertham also claimed Wonder Woman's strength and independence made her a lesbian .[1] Wertham critiqued the commercial environment of comic book publishing and retailing, objecting to air rifles and knives advertised alongside violent stories. Wertham sympathized with retailers who didn't want to sell horror comics, yet were compelled to by their distributors table d'hÃ´te product line policies.The splash made by this book, and Wertham's previous credentials as an expert witness, made it inevitable that he would appear before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency led by anti-crime crusader Estes Kefauver . In extensive testimony before the committee, Wertham restated arguments from his book and pointed to comics as a major cause of juvenile crime. The committee's questioning of their next witness, EC publisher William Gaines , focused on violent scenes of the type Wertham had decried. Though the committee's final report did not blame comics for crime, it recommended that the comics industry tone down its content voluntarily. Possibly taking this as a veiled threat of potential censorship, publishers developed the Comics Code Authority to censor their own content. The code not only banned violent images, but entire words and concepts (e.g. "terror" and "zombies"), and dictated that criminals must always be punished. This destroyed most EC-style titles, leaving a sanitized subset of superhero comics as the chief remaining genre. Wertham nevertheless considered the Comics Code inadequate to protect youth.Wertham's book was profusely illustrated with comic-book panels (reprinted from EC and other publishers' titles) that allegedly offered evidence for his claims . The initial printing of the book contained a bibliography that listed publishers cited in ... read more

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