Debating with Wertham's ghost: comic books, culture wars, and populist moral panics

ABSTRACT

Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, contended that comic books could harm youth; it is popularly understood as the impetus for the creation of the Comics Code Authority that limited what could appear in comics. Wertham subsequently became a ‘bogey man’ within the comics community, leveraged to do various kinds of political work. In this paper, we examine social media posts from reactionary fan movement Comicsgate to explore how Wertham is rhetorically deployed and (mis)remembered, arguing these reactionaries have more in common with the bogey man of comics culture than they realize: Both engage in moral panics about comics and queerness. Contemporary fans’ aggressive attempts to distance themselves from Wertham and to paint their ideological opponents as his contemporary analogues represent an attempt to disguise their reactionary impulse by painting themselves as victims of censorious power at the same time as they leverage toxic masculinity to attack legitimately vulnerable people.

KEYWORDS:

• Comics
• queerness
• Fredric Wertham
• moral panics
• culture wars

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For discussions of Seduction of the Innocent's public reception, see Wertham (1954b), Hajdu (2008).

2 Though, as David Park (2002, p. 280) argues, Wertham was against allowing self-regulation by the comic book industry, and was ‘surprised that his findings could be used in a manner so contrary to what he would have preferred, a law that would have prohibited selling any comic book to children below the age of thirteen’.

3 Doxing is the posting of private information online for the purpose of harassment. On Comicsgate's tactics, see Elbein (2018) and Pitts (2018).

4 A subreddit is an online community on the website Reddit where likeminded people gather to discuss a particular topic. Subreddits are created and governed by volunteer users called moderators, who set the rules for participation and can delete posts or even ban users from the community for violating those rules.

5 Python Reddit API Wrapper Development, ‘Python Reddit API Wrapper’, accessed December 17, 2019, https://github.com/praw-dev/praw.

6 The earliest extracted comment is from four days after the subreddit's creation on 17 March 2015. It is not clear whether this is because the subreddit sat empty for a few days after creation, or earlier posts have been deleted, or the API did not return earlier posts due to reaching the cap on permissible data extraction. However, given that there are so few days missing, the data is a very close approximation of complete.

7 As their disproportionate representation in three of these four flashpoints already begins to suggest, in the aggregate, Marvel generates much more discussion from Comicsgaters than DC, with 1026 mentions in our subreddit data compared to 338 for DC (just 32 percent as many).

8 All post spellings and abbreviations are reproduced as-is, with emendations in brackets as needed for clarity. We acknowledge that our direct quotation means the text of the posts can be found by search engine, but by not directly naming users or linking posts, we are adding a level of protection to avoid exposing individual posters to scrutiny they may not have anticipated.

9 Gamergate began in the summer of 2014 when Eron Gjoni wrote a long, scathing blog post about his ex-girlfriend, indie game developer Zoë Quinn, in which he accused her of ‘trading sexual favors with journalists for positive reviews of her game’ (Gray et al. 2017, p. 2). Gjoni seeded the post on multiple gaming-related forums including Something Awful and Penny Arcade (Mortensen 2018, p. 789), seemingly Quinn's reputation within the gaming community. Soon after, actor Adam Baldwin named the nascent movement #Gamergate in a tweet where he shared a video detailing some of the accusations against Quinn (Mortensen 2018, p. 791). These allegedly corruptly obtained positive reviews didn't actually exist (Totilo 2014), but this didn't prevent Quinn from becoming ‘the target of anonymous threats through Twitter and other social media outlets’ (Gray et al. 2017, p. 2). Quinn was also doxed and ultimately forced to flee her home for her own safety. Other well-known targets of Gamergate included game designer Brianna Wu and feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, who had a talk at the University of Utah canceled following ‘anonymous emails and letters threaten[ing] to harm both Sarkeesian and attendees of her presentation’ including one promising that her talk would be ‘the deadliest school shooting in American history’ if it proceeded (Gray et al. 2017, p. 2). In light of these threats, Gray et al. (2017, p. 2) point out that movements like Gamergate – such as Comicsgate – serve ‘as an example of how symbolic violence can transcend the boundaries of … games into “reality” and has the potential to become “real,” physical violence’. Supporters of Gamergate often defended their movement by arguing that it was about ‘ethics in games journalism’, pointing to the supposed ill-gotten positive reviews of Quinn's game as well as a series of conspiracy theories about collusion between journalists and academics in the wake of a series of articles questioning the relevance of the ‘gamer’ identity (Mortensen 2018) and a discussion of feminism in games at a conference (Chess and Shaw 2015), respectively. However, as an investigation by Newsweek demonstrated, the vast majority of Gamergate's vitriol targeted women game developers and media makers, not journalists or media outlets (Wofford 2014).

10 As bell hooks (2006, p. 373) explains, cultural appropriation is a form of ‘consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other's history through a process of decontextualization’.

11 A snowclone is a ‘phrase that has a standard pattern in which some of the words can be freely replaced’; examples include ‘X is the new Y’ (Snowclone 2020).

12 Interestingly, this post's implicit argument that comics have no social importance is at odds with comments elsewhere in the subreddit that comics creators should be able to do what they want because comics are an (implicitly important) art form, e.g. ‘Today, social justice has only further infiltrated and destroyed the comics industry, with its proponents not realizing the inherent paradox of building censorship directly into art itself’. This contradiction is of course not apparent to Comicsgaters.

13 For more on Wertham's complicated engagement with queerness in Seduction of the Innocent, see Medhurst (1991), Scott and Fawaz (2018), and Tilley (2018a, 2018b).

14 This is a fascinating moment of handing over evidentiary authority to a ‘deviant’ to legitimate the interpretation. Indeed, according to Bart Beaty, Wertham's willingness to let homosexuals speak for themselves was something of a risk, causing him to be ‘denounced as an alarmist’ in many circles ‘for even reporting the existence of these fantasies. In that way, Wertham's critical analysis is dismissed not because of its inherent homophobia – a common position in an era when homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness – but because it is not homophobic enough’ (Beaty 2005, p. 201). Though this person may have been ventriloquized rather than literal, and Wertham seems to have asked some awfully leading questions, it gestures to the ways that he is less conservative than his reputation, which we’ll discuss later in the article.

15 This may be because, since the 1950s, an identity/‘born this way’ model of gayness has taken over from the behaviour model that was more common in Wertham's day. The idea that people can be ‘turned gay’ by environmental factors is no longer as widely accepted.

16 Although Wertham purportedly focuses on crime comics, his definition is so broad it encompasses superhero and horror titles alongside books like Crime Detective and True Gang Life ‘on the grounds that all of them, in his view, portrayed some violation of legal, moral, or religious codes’ (Hajdu 2008, pp. 59, 234).

17 This repetitive equation of sexuality to violence is reminiscent of a similar hearing three decades later, when the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, popularly known as the Meese Commission, borrowed the specter of violence against women from anti-pornography feminists and insisted that the most extreme images were typical of all pornography, which therefore encouraged violence against women and children. See Vance (1997).

18 For a recent account of the argument that rape is about power rather than sexuality, see Filipovic (2013). For the classic elucidation, see Brownmiller (1975).

19 In this case, Wertham was right about sexual subtext: William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, actually did explicitly use the character to showcase his own psychological projects with regard to gender and sexualty, including the theory that ‘the principal vehicle for sexual, social, and political freedom was the binary category of dominance-submission’ (Bunn 1997, p. 93). Indeed, Marston wrote that ‘the truly great contribution of [the comic book] to moral education of the young’ was its capacity to ‘teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound – enjoy submission to kind authority’ (Marston 1943).

20 See Warner (2017).

21 For an overview of Great Replacement theory, see Bowles (2019).

22 On whiteness in media fandom generally, see Young (2014), Woo (2017), Stanfill (2018). On racism in fandom, see: TWC Editor (2009), Pande (2016, 2018), Johnson (2019).

23 See also Citron (2016) and Jeong (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan Condis

Megan Condis is an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at Texas Tech University. Her book, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2018.

Mel Stanfill

Mel Stanfill is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Texts and Technology Program and the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. Stanfill's work examines social media, whiteness, interfaces, media industries, fan studies, and queer theory, and has appeared in New Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cinema Journal, Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans (Iowa, 2019) and A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy (with Anastasia Salter, Mississippi, 2020).