User:Etzedek24/Timeline of the American anti-comics movement

This is a timeline of the American anti-comics movement of approximately 1940 until 1956. Comic books, which debuted in the mid-1930s, were extremely popular during the Second World War both overseas and at home as a low-cost, accessible form of entertainment. Beginning in the late 1940s, after the superhero genre fell out of favor following World War II, comic book publishers began shifting creative emphases to domestic subjects such as crime, love, and westerns. The new and suddenly darker comic books caused moral outrage in two stages. First, from approximately 1948 to 1950, comic books were accused of ruining children's eyesight and vocabularies, and making them less likely to read established works of literature. The second wave of criticism, which began to rise in the early 1950s thanks to Bill Gaines and his "New Trend" EC Comics, considered the first horror comics, peaked in 1954. Critics now accused comic books of fostering juvenile delinquency and functioning as coded communist propaganda to destroy the nation's youths through the subversion of their morals. Urged on by the publication of Fredric Wertham's treatise Seduction of the Innocent, which accused comics of turning children into criminals, the United States Senate convened its Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in order to investigate the claims of Wertham and others. As a result of these hearings, the comics industry formed the Comics Code Authority, which oversaw a stringent code of self-censorship. By the end of the 1950s, many smaller comics publishers went out of business as a result of both the Code and a 1956 New York law known as the FitzPatrick Act, which banned publication of certain words (like "horror" and "terror") from comic book covers. This timeline charts both anti-comics events, as well as voices from pro-comics organizations that did not let moralizers dominate the debate.

1940

• May 8: Children's author Sterling North publishes "A National Disgrace," a vicious invective against comic books, in the Chicago Daily News. Calling them "sex-horror serials," "graphic insanity," and "poisonous mushroom growths," North castigated both parents and teachers and charged them with "breaking the comic book." North's was the first widely-cited attack against comic books rather than comic strips, which faced their own amount of criticism in the 1910s. Reprinted in the October 1940 issue of Childhood Education.
• September: "Children's Interests in Comic Strips," by George E. Hill and M. Estelle Trent appears in The Journal of Educational Research.

1941

• March/April: Parents Magazine, followed by All-American Publications become the first companies to form an editorial board for their comics in response to negative publicity generated by North's article. Individuals that served on the initial board of All-American included children's reading expert Josette Frank, child psychiatrist Lauretta Bender, and Columbia University psychologist Robert L. Thorndike. Parents' editorial and youth boards boasted individuals like Shirley Temple and George Gallup.
• July: Lauretta Bender and Reginald S. Lourie publish "The Effect of Comic Books on the Ideology of Children" in the July 1941 edition of The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. The first serious peer-reviewed study of comic books, Bender and Lourie argued in the article that comics constituted modern folklore and that demonstrating causality between comics and developmental maladjustment was nearly impossible.

1942

May: The Elementary English Review publishes a debate over comics between teachers Franklyn Branley and Frank Cutright, Jr. Branley takes the anti-comics position in his article "The Plague of the Comic Books," arguing that they were a "disease...that [left] behind horrible desolation, grief and putrefaction." Cutright, on the other side, believed in the pedagogical potential of comic books, calling for their use in teaching tolerance, and adding that he never saw improper morals in a comic book.