"Some years ago," says the dust flap, "a boy of seventeen from one of New York's crowded tenement sections killed his mother. The crime made a sensational story for a few days, and then was forgotten -- except by the men in charge of the state asylum to which the boy was committed, and by the psychiatrist who had first examined him."
Dr. Wertham delves into the boy's fantasies and motives, and draws lots and lots of parallels to Hamlet, an entertainment with a lot of murders in it.
(My copy is a Gollancz from 1947. It's tiny, and on newsprint between hard covers.)
Not enough? Here's another:
Dark Legend, you'll note, is pre-Seduction of the Innocent. The Circle of Guilt appeared two years after Seduction. From the flap: "Dr. Wertham has had many years' experience with disturbed and delinquent youngsters. His newest book exposes...hidden causes behind one of America's most shocking murders -- the true story of Frank Santana, the so-called 'hoodlum' who killed the so-called 'model boy', Billy Blankenship, in a New York street fight."
It's very definitely the story of a tragedy. Dr. Wertham interviews the seventeen-year-old responsible for the crime. Can you guess what Dr. Wertham feels is a contributing factor?
Go on, guess.
Anyone? Anyone?
Dr. Wertham devotes a chapter called "Creeps" (Santana's name for the horror "funny books" he reads). Excerpt from the interview, and chapter:
"What was the largest number you had at one time?"
"Two hundred or three hundred."
This may sound incredible to those who have not studied the children-comic book problem. But I have seen many children like that. And only recently in Indiana when a group of public-spirited people offered every child a real book for ten comic books, one boy appeared with 490! So they had to make the rule that one hundred comic books was the maximum allowed each child...
Santana told me he read about five creeps every day...I asked him to tell me all the titles that he could remember. This seemed hard for him to do. After some thought, he gave me, slowly, this list:
The Vault Creep
The Vault of Fear
Crime Book
Crime Does Not Pay
Superman
Bat Man
Cowboys
Mysteries"
Dr. Wertham ends the chapter with:
"What, I asked myself, was the effect of his comics reading on the crime? I felt that it was one piece in a larger mosaic."
Given that the above three illustrations are among a total of seven in the book, and that the chapter is one out of nine, I'm guessing that "larger mosaic" has maybe four tiles in it.
(My copy of this one is British also, oddly. They must've needed these books to help stoke their own anti-comics hysteria over there, which you can read about in A Haunt of Fears, the Strange Case of the British Horror Comics Campaign, by Martin Barker. If you're American and you know your comics history, the book will make you feel like you've stepped into a parallel universe.)
Dr. Wertham wrote: "We do to these children exactly the opposite of what Maxim Gorky advised in his writings on children's literature: 'We should create in children contempt and aversion for crime, not excitement and anxiety about it.'"
While I certainly can and do sympathize with -- ooh, "Making a Murderer" is on Netflix!
