If psychiatrist Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent is the most famous book attacking American comics, the good doctor was not alone in doing so. English humanities professor Geoffrey Wagner’s Parade of Pleasure: A Study of Popular Iconography in the U.S.A. came out a year after Wertham’s book. And both men were preceded by cultural critic Gershon Legman’s Love and Death: A Study in Censorship. Wertham and Legman were on the broad political Left. Wagner was decidedly not.
Wagner argues in Parade of Pleasure that war and superhero comics were giving the capitalist West a false sense of superiority over the Reds. Wagner complains that in “the new war comics ... an unrealistic and histrionic picture of modern warfare, fundamentally detrimental to the U.S. Army, is presented.” He wishes that “for the sake of the future, that the red soldier be shown herein as a little less inept than he probably is,” (emphasis in the original) all the better to prepare readers for the inevitability of combat with the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of Great Britain, looking everywhere for allies in their fight against “American-style” comics, tried to appropriate Wagner for the Left. Shelia Lynd wrote in the Daily Worker that Wagner wrote, “with the bitterness of an ex-soldier who knows what war really is,” as though Wagner was a war weary pacifist.
Wertham and Legman may have played with their cards close to their chests, but another leftist, Albert E. Kahn did not. In Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America by David Hadju, the author adjudges Kahn “a specialist in political sensationalism." That’s only scratching the surface. Kahn joined the Communist Party in 1938 and if he ever quit, he was surely cheating them out of dues, so faithfully did he follow the party line.
The books he wrote did likewise. Sabotage: The Secret War Against America and The Plot Against the Peace: A Warning to the Nation, both co-written with Micheal Sayers, were Popular Front exposés of American fascism. The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia, introduced by Florida Senator Claude “Red” Pepper, was a defense of the Moscow Trials. In 1953, Kahn’s A Game of Death: Effects of the Cold War On Our Children, was released. The book never gained the fame or infamy of Seduction of the Innocent. Nevertheless, it is cited in the ever-controversial How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, one of the premier works of Marxist comics criticism. Relevant to the authors is chapter five, on "the violence, war, crime, and fantasy content of children’s comic books, TV programs, and film production."
In his first chapter, Kahn lays out his view of mass media. As an observer at a conference on child psychology and child welfare, he asks for the floor to argue “that motion pictures, television programs, radio shows and comic books are already doing an extremely thorough job” of “inuring children on a mass scale to violence, bloodshed, brutality and murder." This schematic viewpoint, combined with the assumption that most comic fans were children, is the default for comic critics of the 1940s and '50s. Readers are invited to flip to chapter five in order to see Kahn expound on these views and apply his reasoning to comics and film.
Since A Game of Death devotes only one chapter to popular culture, titled “Niagra of Horror,” comparing the book to Seduction of the Innocent isn’t quite accurate. Yet that chapter shares the viewpoint of Wertham’s book and even quotes him as an expert, so there is grounds for comparison. Wertham gives this warning: “If you want a generation of half storm troopers and half cannon fodder, with a dash of illiteracy, comic books are good, in fact they are perfect.” Kahn follows the basic argument that by depicting crime, horror, and war, comic creators and publishers are endorsing the same. Furthermore, that showing acts of murder and other crimes conditions young readers to emulate them. Kahn: “The Niagara of horror and sudden death with which young Americans are being inundated day and night through motion pictures, TV, radio and comic books is not only training them to regard acts of brutality, violence and homicide as a natural, every-day part of life. It is also conditioning them to commit such acts.”
The opening salvo of “Niagra of Horror” is trained on Mickey Spillane, the writer of the violent, sexy, and virulently anti-Communist Mike Hammer detective novels. Kahn surmises that Spillane “served an ideal apprenticeship for developing his literary formula of ‘sex and sadism’” during his time writing com
ic books. Despite Kahn’s attempts to link him with those titles, Spillane was not writing the sorts of of crime and horror comics that were so outraging to contemporary moral guardians. His career began earlier, writing for Timely (now Marvel) superhero characters like the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and Captain America in the early '40s.
Those characters do not escape criticism either in A Game of Death. Kahn cites early comics critic Sterling North, who called the industry “A National Disgrace,” in a widely reprinted Chicago Daily News article, accusing superheroes of promoting “hooded justice.” Like Wertham, Kahn identifies superheroes with fascism, citing their supposedly “storm trooper-like uniforms” and penchant for “lynch-justice heroics.” Of course, the creators of many superheroes, including Superman and Captain America, (specifically named as bad influences by Kahn) were Jewish. No pro-fascist message was intended by Siegel and Schuster or Simon and Kirby. Quite the opposite. It’s particularly galling to see Kahn make this claim if you know that when Captain America debuted the Communist Party was still defending the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact and urging the U.S. to stay out of the war against fascism.
The author is on sturdier ground when he discusses the racist and jingoistic aspects of '50s war comics. He cites the example of War Front, which had a cover showing “an American GI plunging his bayonet into the stomach of a North Korean soldier with the comment, "It was either him or me! I lunged forward and felt his belly collapse before the cold steel!’" Harvey Kurtzman, creative force behind E.C. Comics’ war stories castigated his competition for “feeding this crap to the children that soldiers spend their time merrily killing little buck-toothed yellow men with the butt of a rifle.” In A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign, the late critic Martin Barker made the case that war comics, not crime or horror comics, were the real “cause for concern” in the 1950s.
What Kahn did not know, or chose not to know, was how many early comics creators had ties to the Communist Party. These included Dick Briefer, Maurice Del Buorgo, and the aforementioned Kurtzman. This group provided illustrations and the comics Little Lefty and Panky Rankin for party publications like the Daily Worker and the New Masses. Phil Bard, the artist for characters like Blue Beetle and Captain Marvel Jr., was both a party member and a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade. Bernard Krigstein, the pioneer behind the first attempt to unionize the comics industry, had a father-in-law and brother-in-law in the party. His brother-in-law, like Bard, was a Lincoln Brigade veteran. During his time as a fellow-traveler Kahn may have participated in marches with, or donated to the same fundraisers as, many of these men.
There are a few instances of “friendly fire” in Kahn’s campaign against comics. He mocks comic publisher Lev Gleason for suggesting that the Soviets be “showered” with comics in a goodwill gesture designed to reduce Cold War tensions. In addition to publishing Crime Does Not Pay via Lev Gleason Publications, Gleason was a longtime leftist who worked with the American Labor Party and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Council, among others. He was hauled before HUAC but managed to escape a prison sentence. Kahn’s attack was preceded by a similar one in the National Guardian (no relation to the U.K. newspaper). Referring to Gleason’s proposal that comics could promote Soviet-American friendship, Arthur P. Wallon wrote that American comics were “pseudo-scientific” and “instigators of juvenile crime in America.” It’s a historical irony that one of the publishers of Kahn’s Sabotage was Lev Gleason Publications.
Kahn gives a few examples of comics deemed acceptable. He mentions comics based on Bible stories and funny animal stories, although the latter are scored for being “replete with instances of sadism and violence.” The comic Chug-Chug published at the behest of the left-wing trade union the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers is praised by name. Kahn says the comic explains in child-friendly language “the benefits brought through trade unionism to individual families as well as to the community at large.” The title sounds interesting, but its difficult to imagine a child picking it up when choices like Crime Does Not Pay or Shock SuspenStories were around.
Films made by Hollywood leftists are also reproached by Kahn. He writes when “it comes to acknowledging the gruesome and sadistic aspects of their productions, the motion picture companies cannot be accused of false modesty. They enthusiastically publicize these qualities as major box-office attractions.” Two of the films he lists are the film noirs Brute Force and the Prowler (Not to be confused with the 1981 slasher film of the same name). Brute Force was directed by Jules Dasssin, after 1950 a Hollywood blacklistee. The Prowler was written Dalton Trumbo, already blacklisted, under the pseudonym Hugo Butler. The politics of both films, like their creators, lean left.
In Brute Force, the struggle between the downtrodden proletariat and exploiting capitalists is reflected through the lens of the prison film. The prisoners are the workers; the guards and wardens are the bosses. Reviewer Michael Atkinson points out, “Dassin made the first prison film not really about criminal justice at all but about social power.” The Prowler’s antagonist is a corrupt cop, motivated solely by greed. His highest ambition is to “make money while he sleeps.” Trumbo certainly took pleasure in mocking official authority in the form of a uniformed policeman, an avatar of the same authority that had nearly ended his career. Kahn gives no evidence of even seeing these films. His opposition is seemingly based entirely on lurid descriptions in the trade press. “Tough, bloody, sadistic drama of stir-crazy convicts and prison break. An orgy of unrelieved brutality from beginning to end, grimly, realistically produced,” reads the one for Brute Force. The one for the Prowler goes: “Grim, sordid, swift-moving melodrama about a crooked cop, an adulterous wife, murder and retribution.” This was enough for Kahn to indict and convict them.
The broad left around the Communist Party provided publicity and praise for A Game of Death. The National Guardian prominently advertised the book as a giveaway with renewed subscriptions. In Political Affairs, the Communist Party theoretical journal, Doxey Wilkerson reviewed the book. Wilkerson agreed that comics were part of “a vast and profitable industry for the perversion of children.” Wilkerson found that “the distinctive features of [the industry’s] output are violence, murder sex, and moral degeneracy.” So far, so Wertham. But Wilkerson adds that the primary themes of this perverse industry were “anti-Communism and war.” Wertham never went that far out on a limb. Communist publication Fighting Talk, from far off South Africa also had kind words for Kahn’s book. “No Mickey Spillane best seller,” wrote the anonymous reviewer, “ever told such a horrifying story of terror and brutality as Albert Kahn outlines in this book.”
Other U.S publications were just as effusive. Jewish Currents hoped that “this splendid book can be the signal for forming a large new organization, cutting across all political, economic, and social barriers — in defense of our children.” Our children apparently needed to be defended against comic books because “with a comic book on his lap and a television screen before his eyes, [children are] further pumped up with terror, violence and brutality.” New World Review, organ of the Friends of the Soviet Union, concurred in their review. Elizabeth Moos fretted over “the spate of brutality, cruelty and prejudice loosened upon our young through the ‘comics’ the TV radio and movies” each “part of the planned indoctrination” teaching children how to kill.
What about the Daily Worker, one-time employer of Briefer, Bourgo, and Kurtzman? It followed the established party line. One article reported on the book’s overseas success. The article noted positive reception of A Game of Death by the World Federation of Teachers Unions, the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee, and the Central Council of Trade Unions of the U.S.S.R. A letter writer opined A Game of Death was “one of the most strongly written and most powerfully worded anti-fascist, pro-peace books” they had ever read. A 1956 Daily Worker article detailed an address Kahn gave to the Labor Youth League, the Young Communist League under another name. A Game of Death is described as “a study of the contributing effects of-comic books to delinquency,” even though only one chapter of the book is dedicated to the topic. “His disclosure that the sale of comic books overwhelmingly dealing with blood, sex, and murder was 50 million a week,” the article continues, “shocked the conference.” It shocks me too. Imagine the industry today moving 50 million books a week. In the Worker, the edition of the Daily Worker published in Detroit, Claudia Jones lauded Kahn’s exposure of the “incessant plumping for war and the glorification of slaughter witnessed by our children in movies, radio, books, comics.”
In other English-speaking nations, the local Communist parties went further than simply publishing articles on the dangers of comics. The late Martin Barker exposed how central the Communist Party of Great Britain was to the anti-comics movement in his book A Haunt of Fears. In Australia, the Party pamphlet “Education in Crisis” stated that comics had a “demoralizing influence” on the young, and moreover that “debased comic books … stimulate anti-social eroticism and crime amongst children and youth.” The Australian Communists used their influence in trade unions to swing those groups against comics, using the argument that imported American comics would cost Australian jobs. The Labor Progressive Party, the legal arm of the Canadian Communist Party, promised to protect the Canadian proletariat from “from the pestilent crime comics and other harmful reading matter to be found on our newsstands today.”
If the American Communist Party didn’t go as far its sister parties, it’s not due to softness towards comics. Throughout the '40s and '50s, the Daily Worker ran articles like “Comic Book Art: School for Sadism” and “100 Million War ‘Comic Books’ Yearly Feed War Propaganda to Children.” The fact that the Communist Party did not prosecute the anti-comics crusade with as much zeal as the parties of other nations is probably due to the assaults on the Communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joe McCarthy. The Communist Party simply had bigger things on its plate.
As mentioned, media analysis composes only one chapter in A Game of Death. In one chapter, Kahn penned a strong attack on segregation. He argued that for Black children, regardless of the “slogans of freedom and democracy under which the U.S. Government was prosecuting the Cold War, the country of their birth remained a forbidding and hostile place in which from infancy they were subjected to savage discrimination and barbarous persecution.” Jet magazine named it a book of the week for the chapter “Infamy of the Nation,” in which those words appeared. The excerpt that ran in the National Guardian didn’t have anything to do with comics. Rather it detailed the harassment of actual and suspected Communists by the FBI and its effect on children.
In his conclusion, Kahn wonders “how can we guard our children against the brutalizing impact of comic books, motion pictures, TV and radio? how can we prevent our children from coming to regard war as inevitable, hatred as natural and killing as a game?” The method came in the form of yet another inquisitorial Congressional hearing, quite similar to the HUAC investigations that had ruined so many careers in film, television, and radio. When E.C. publisher Bill Gaines published his classic advertisement “Are You A Red Dupe?” he jokingly lumped anti-comics foes in with the Communist Party. Yet as A Game of Death’s thesis and reception demonstrate, in the end, it wasn’t that much of a joke at all.
The post <i>Game of Death:</i> A Communist rendition of <i>Seduction of the Innocent</i> appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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