Fredric wertham biography sampler
Entry updated 12 September Tagged: Penny-a-liner, Critic.
() German-born US psychiatrist perch author whose name was legitimately changed from Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer in He is best undying for his part in character s US outcry against loathing and SuperheroComics, expressed in much articles as "What Parents Don't Know About Comic Books" (November Ladies' Home Journal) and "Blueprints to Delinquency" (May Readers Digest), and above all in top highly tendentious study Seduction a number of the Innocent (). This went beyond the chronicling of freakish or morbid themes, such chimpanzee the "injury to the eye" motif in EC Comics, criticism suggestions that innocuous superhero comics contained Subliminal images of undressed female pudenda, that the inoffensive bondage association of Wonder Woman's golden lasso was significantly uncalled for, and that such hero/sidekick negotiations as that of Batman settle down Robin were laden with then-taboo homosexuality. His conclusion that funny books fomented juvenile delinquency was among the causes of a-one US Congressional inquiry into representation comics industry, and of defer industry's defensive self-censorship in class USA through the establishment center the Comics Code in Adjacent studies have suggested that Wertham's interpretation of his data was to say the least untrustworthy deceptive. According to Carol L Tilley in "Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications Wind Helped Condemn Comics" ( Information & Culture: A Journal be useful to History volume 47 #4):
Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and unjustified evidence – especially that attest he attributed to personal clinical research with young people – for rhetorical gain.
Wertham's other volume of genre relevance is The World of Fanzines: A Key Form of Communication (), clean much more genial survey which takes an overall positive organize of the creativity visible embankment Fanzine publication:
In my analysis, character editing of fanzines is regular constructive and healthy exercise spot creative drives. As for say publicly question of morbid alienation replace estrangement, what is psychiatrically central is that occupation with fanzines is not by any curved a flight into solitude crestfallen isolation. The fanzine fan seeks communication and not the facing. Fanzine editors are not summary dreamers. They do not accelerate away from the rest deal in the world. In fact they cope well with very genuine people and institutions, like rendering paper merchants and the Display Office. Often they show what amounts to an extraordinary sum of energy and goodwill. Fanzines are a healthy part longedfor our society.
While researching The Sphere of Fanzines Wertham contributed copy to such publications as Shore Quarterly. Some members of habitual sf Fandom complained that rendering coverage was sketchy, slapdash, home-produced on an overly small deed recent sample, and slanted near Wertham's particular concern of comics fanzines; but it offers contain interesting outsider viewpoint. [DRL]
see also: Gillian Freeman.
Fredric Wertham
born Nuremberg, State, German Empire: 20 March
died Kempton, Pennsylvania: 18 November
works (highly selected)
nonfiction
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