“It is not scientifically sound to narrow down the problem to whether the influence of comics is just ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ That cannot be a sound starting point. The question is, do they have a discernible influence, and if they have how does it work, how intense and lasting is it, and in what fields and regions of the child’s mind does it manifest itself. This is exactly how I started.”

“Flooding the market with love-cofession comics was so successful in diverting attention from crime comic books that it had been entirely overlooked that many of them really are crime comic books, with a seasoning of love added. Unless the love comics are sprinkled with some crime they do not sell. Apparently love does not pay.”

“Jungle, horror, and interplanetary comics are also crime comics of a special kind. Jungle comics specialize in torture, bloodshed, and lust in an exotic setting. Daggers, claws, guns, wild animals, ell or over developed girls in bassieres and as a little else as possible, dark ‘natives,’ fires, stakes, posts, chains, ropes, big chested and heavily muscled Nordic he-men dominate the stage. They contain such details as one girl squirting fiery ‘radium dust’ on the protruding breasts of another girl (“I think I’ve discovered your Achilles’ heel, chum!”); white men banging natives around; a close up vie of the branded breast of a girl; a girl about to be blinded.”

“At the end of 1948 th 60 million comic books a month were split up between over 400 comic book titles of assorted types. All through 1948 the trend of the industry was toard crime comics. Ecperts of the industry were busy explaining to credulous parents that the industry was only giving to children what they needed and wanted, the scenes of crime and sadism were necessary for them, even good for them, and that they industry was only supplying a demand. But in the meantime my advice to parents had begun to take at least some old. They had begun to look into crime comic books, and different groups and local authorities started to contemplate, announce, attempt – and even to take – steps.”

Here is a random quote from Frederic Wertham’s infamous Seduction of the Innocent. It’s from chapter one, titled: “Such Trivia as Comic Books”.

“As our work went on we established the basic ingredients of the most numerous and widely read comics books: violence; sadism; and cruelty; the superman philosophy, an offshoot of Nietzsche’s superman who said, ‘When you go to women, don’t forget the whip.’ We also found that what seemed at first a problem in child psychology had much wider implications. Why does our civilization give to the child not its best but its worst in, in paper, in language, in art, in ideas? What is the social meaning of these supermen, superwomen, super-lovers, superboys, supergirls, super-ducks, super-mice, super-magicians, super-safecrackers? How did Nietzsche get into the nursery?”