The Four Color Media Monitor

I made a most fascinating discovery of a little something the pretentious Bleeding Cool brought up over 6 years ago, when word of Fredric Wertham's fakings were first reported by professor Carol Tilley from Illinois. It was posted on February 11, 2013, and the headline read as, "Dr Fredric Wertham Lied And Lied And Lied About Comics". Let's highlight the following paragraph, written by Rich Johnston:

The Illinois News Bureau reports, (with the most condescending and predictable headline you can imagine, even for Bleeding Cool) that Dr Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction Of The Innocent, the book that inspired government hearings about the content of comic books, saw sales plummet from the bad publicity, and eventually leading to the establishment of the Comics Code – was made up. Or at least large chunks of his supporting data was. [...]

That's what Johnston said back at the time. But that's exactly why his subsequent support of approving censorship in the industry doesn't sit well. He and his staff did this just 2 years after citing the Tilley report, using, for instance, women as an excuse, without even considering that in every day and age, there is an audience and a market for plenty of different groups, and specific products are aimed at specific audiences, including those with sex-positive viewpoints. He apparently forgot it was a woman who revealed Wertham lied in his research, as he said. Nor does he take into consideration that early writers like Siegel and Shuster, among others, were aiming primarily at a boys' audience, and that any sex in comics like Superman was more or less accepted over the years, or that most creators usually knew what kind of audience and markets they wanted and were promoting it to the same. And lest we forget, he never considered Stan Lee's own opposition to censorship. I'd say that tells quite a bit right there.

And above all, if Johnston doesn't really believe what he said, even long after Axel Alonso lost his job at Marvel for toeing a social justice line at the expense of their products, what's the use of reporting on Tilley's discoveries at all, if he really does agree even remotely with Wertham's botched claims? Seriously, I don't think Johnston should've bothered if he really thought it even remotely acceptable to turn to what otherwise amounted to censorship, under the laughable defense women's entry into comicdom - something they'd already done decades before - inherently justified all this lunacy.

Let's also highlight the following taken from Tilley's own report:

Her research turned up a few other surprises: about 30 letters written to Wertham and another 200 or so sent to the Senate subcommittee by children trying to save their access to comic books. Other researchers have mentioned the missives sent to the subcommittee, but Tilley decided the young writers’ arguments deserved more attention. “Some of them talked about fairy tales and folk tales, Poe and Shakespeare, and said this stuff has murder and sex and traumatic events too, but you call that good literature,” Tilley said. She is in the process of locating as many of these letter-writers as she can find, for her research on how kids related to comics over time. “For most of them, my contact is the first acknowledgement they’ve had in 60 years that anybody read their letter.”

Let's take the talk of sex as our primary example here. There's as many women as there are men who've read Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare, along with novelists like Sidney Sheldon, and if they had no problem with sex in itself, why should they have one in comicdom or any other medium? Mileage varies equally among women and men alike, one more reason you can't just say sex is a problem, and definitely not if you're going to give violence a pass.

So my point here is - if Johnston decided to just up and serve as apologist for modern censorship, to say nothing of what we lately call social justice, then I just don't see why he, or anybody else of his ilk, should bother talking at all about the revelation a figure as controversial as Wertham lied or just plain screwed up his alleged research. And if they really don't support Wertham, well then, don't go miles out of your way to apologize for selfish, entitled clowns doing whatever they can to mangle famous creations to resemble their own laughable ideas of what entertainment should be like. Better still, they'd do well to retire from the comics coverage business, since they're not doing it any good with their political correctness obsessions.

Labels: censorship issues, msm propaganda, politics, violence