On the side of argument,
Nyberg reads Wertham's Seduction
of the Innocent (1954) within the context of his
entire career,
and argues that he has been widely misinterpreted, in two respects:
one,
Wertham did not hold a monocausal view of juvenile delinquincy (i.e.,
that
comics = sole cause of delinquincy), a point which he often insisted on
yet which was often ignored; two, Wertham's vision of a "social
psychiatry"
did not rest, as has often been claimed, on a naive "media effects"
methodology,
but in fact on a vision of radical social reform, flying in the face of
the individualistic focus of mainstream psychiatrists.
The Wertham that emerges
from Chapter 4 is
complicated, a portrait synthesized
both from a reading of many of Wertham's other works and from
latter-day
revisionists (e.g., James Reibman, a notable Wertham apologist of
late).
Yet the catalytic source here is clearly James Gilbert's portrait of
Wertham
in A Cycle of Outrage (1986), a book which should
definitely be
read alongside this one for a rich sense of 1950s cultural context.
Nyberg
extends Gilbert's sympathetic yet critical take on Wertham; where she
excels
is in defining his project of a "social psychiatry," an idea that
emerges
more clearly here than in Gilbert. (Wertham's "clinical method" of
social
argument, as Nyberg points out, anticipates current ethnographic
methodologies
in cultural studies.)
Also on the side of
argument, Nyberg rejects (Ch.
5) the comics fan
folklore which insists that the adoption of the Code was the single
blow
which crippled the industry in the mid '50s. Citing James Baughman's
work
as support, Nyberg points to TV's marginalization of other media as one
other cause; more importantly, she briefly describes the distribution
crisis
of '55, in which the demise of American News Company left many comics
publishers
w/o national distribution.
On the side of detail,
Chap. 1 gathers a wealth of
information about
early criticisms of comics (popular and academic), prior to the
anti-comics
movement of the early '50s. Nyberg succeeds in highlighting the
writings
of key figures in this early, mostly pre-Wertham discourse, such as
Sterling
North and (in the pro-comics minority) Harvey Zorbaugh, editor of the Journal
of Educational Sociology. Names like Josette Frank and
Lauretta
Bender
(all but forgotten now) stand out. There is a wealth of detail here,
but
Nyberg organizes it into a series of concerns, trends, and contrastive
positions; the result is, if not a narrative of early comics criticism,
then at least a clear exposition of dominant trends.
Some of this early
material was familiar to me
from an unpublished bibliography
& interpretive essay by media scholar Matt McAllister, which
really
ought to be published. For ex., McAllister's essay got me to seek out
Zorbaugh-edited
issues of JoES from 1944 and 1949. Nyberg's
analysis of
dominant
trends replays to some extent what I learned from McAllister, but
McAllister
was not her source: there's much evidence here of excellent historical
spadework, well organized into readable form.
Also on the side of
detail, censorship activities
(both legal and volunteer
efforts) are described minutely, with precision, suggesting a ton of
primary
research; in addition, the ins and outs of legislative committee
hearings,
and meetings of the Comics Magazine Association of America, are fully
described.
(The use of the CMAA's archives marks one important novelty of this
study.)
There's a lot of circumstantial detail about how the Code Authority
office
was run, by whom, and how the traffic was managed, and what it cost.
The detail alone
justifies spending time w/ this
book; such details
often suggest how contingent, and how complicated, the history of
comics
publishing has been (never a settled, business-as-usual industry, fan
assumptions
to the contrary notwithstanding).
A number of nagging
questions are raised by the
book. For one, Nyberg
implicitly upholds the superhero genre's preeminence in comics: "Except
for a brief time in postwar America, the superhero genre has dominated
comic book publishing" (16). Yet her own writing seems to contradict
this,
pointing several times to the waning of the superhero's popularity and
the predominance of other popular genres. Also, the text does not
consider
the degree to which the superhero revival of the 1950s-60s was, not
simply
a matter of publishers searching for novelty, but a byproduct of the
Code's
strict moralism.
Also, Wertham is held to
be a fellow traveler of
the Frankfurt school
of mass culture criticism (86-87), a view partly inherited from Gilbert
which seems to make intuitive sense but which begs for further
documentation
and debate.
The book's one
shortcoming, if I may say so, is
the lack of attention
to the way the content of non-Code comic books (esp. in the underground
comix era) commented on and flouted the conventions of the Code. In
many
ways, today's comics culture, via the undergrounds, is a result of
aggravated
response to (resistance to) the Code and everything it represents. Many
underground comix referenced the Code, and mocked it, using the Code
Seal
insignia and Code precepts in a satiric way. From this rebellion
springs
the civil libertarian POV of today's alternative comics scene, a
movement
insufficiently dealt with here as Nyberg concentrates on the
internecine
frictions within the CMAA. (To the extent that her focus is on the
CMAA,
her POV vis-a-vis superheroes begins to make sense.) To not deal with
these
cultural/content repercussions of the Code, even in a study explicitly
marked as historicist in a traditional sense, is to leave a frustrating
gap in the Code's cultural history.
More broadly, Nyberg's
cursory treatment of
undergrounds (prerequisite
to the direct market, which she highlights at some length in Ch. 6)
leaves
a gap in the history of the cultural pressures which led to relaxations
of the Code in 1971 and 1989. For the uninitiated, the crucial link
between
undergrounds and the later direct market would seem unclear. It is on
these
issues, which enlarge comics culture beyond the NY-based CMAA
establishment,
that Nyberg most needs to be complemented by other, counter-valent
studies.
Some will take issue with
the book's claim that
self-censorship was
a justifiable course of action in the mid-50s; we all should ponder the
book's conclusion, which argues that some sort of Code remains a
necessity
unless and until "the comic book is able to recreate itself as a
legitimate
art form" (163). I would argue that the Code has become more pernicious
as it has become more liberal (hence less meaningful); it is now worse
than useless as a guide for parents, etc.
But on the whole Seal
of Approval
represents a welcome break
from the Code-phobic and highly distorted fan histories which have had
to serve up to this point. Nyberg by no means acts as apologist for the
Code, but is able to approach the subject with clarity, attention to
detail,
and a refreshing lack of cant. Recommended for anyone and everyone w/
abiding
interests in US comic book publishing and comics censorship both in the
US and abraod.
Check out the extensive
bibliography, a distinct
bonus.