Comic Book Geek

When I posted the entry earlier this week on news articles touting the respectability of comic books, I must have been brain dead to forget my personal involvement in just such an endeavor.
In 1987, at the tender age of 18, I had my first-ever published article. It was a piece on comic book censorship, and it ran in the local daily in Kenai, Alaska, along with an article called “The Evolution of Comic Books.” I was the featured “expert” in the “Evolution” article, which was accompanied by a picture that to this day I’m embarrassed to see.
Re-reading my article, I’m pleasantly surprised at the quality (and by this I mean it doesn’t suck). Was I really only 18? Then I re-read the article in which I’m interviewed and come across this:

“Superman has been pretty much redone. He not as powerful, no romance with Lois… He’s more of a yuppie than he used to be,” Gerhard said.

Groan… And this proved comics were becoming more respectable? Well, it was the 80s and I was just a boy.
For the amusement of all, I’m posting both articles here.

An Evolution in Comic Books
by Dirk Miller
Peninsula Clarion
January 16, 1987
Picture this: The Batmobile has been mothballed for several years. The batcave is dark and empty, the batcape is growing moldy. Batman has been out of action for 10 years. His alter ego has been abandoned while millionaire Bruce Wayne lives the life of the social elite.
Batman’s territory, Gotham City, was depicted in the 1940s and ’50s as a place where the underworld thrived. Now, sometime in the future, it has become much more grim. A street gang called the “Mutants” rules the city, and retiring police commissioner Jim Gordon can do little against the growing number of punks who delight in senseless murder and violence. There’s only one hope for civilization.
Batman.
In Frank Miller’s series The Dark Knight that debuted in 1986, an aging caped crusader swoops back into the crime scene. Driven by motives that are depicted as somewhat sinister, millionaire Bruce Wayne puts on the bat hood as a challenge against crime, and ultimately nuclear war.
It’s certainly not the Batman of old. Though many of the old characters, Catwoman, The Joker, Harvey Dent, Alfred the butler, and Robin, are included, the series takes Batman into a whole different world. The caped crusader strides into a world that isn’t as naively and crudely constructed as the older comic books depicted.
Comic books, like Batman, have grown up. Many are printed on a fine, glossy paper. Artwork has improved as have the writers and the stories they produce.
Writer Frank Miller spins a Batman tale as captivating as the best of science fiction. This piece is from the first installment of “The Dark Knight” when Batman dons his suit once again. Something sinister, something both evil and good, is calling Bruce Wayne to become the Batman:

The time has come.
You know it in your soul.
For I am your soul…
You cannot escape me…
You are puny, you are small…
You are nothing – A hollow shell. A rusty trap that cannot hold me…
Smoldering, I burn you… Burning you, I flare hot and bright and fierce and beautiful…
You cannot stop me… Not with wine or vows or the weight of age…
You cannot stop me but still you try… Still you run…
You try to drown me out… But your voice is weak…

Michael Gerhard, 18, of Kenai is a comic-book collector. Frank Miller is one of his favorite writers, and The Dark Knight series one of his most treasured collections.
Gerhard was introduced to comic books at an early age. The son of a National Park Service ranger, Gerhard spent much of his youth in areas without television, such as Denali National Park. While his friends at Healy, a small community just outside the park, were watching television on long winter nights, Gerhard turned to books and comics for his entertainment.
“My mom hated it when I started reading comics. She thought it would rot my brain, ” he said. The comic books, though had an opposite effect. They boosted a young Gerhard into reading.
“Those parents who burn comic books, that’s no way to encourage reading, ” he said.
It took him several years before he began collecting comics in earnest, though. In about three years, he has collected 2,500 comics, Gerhard estimates. A troop of cardboard boxes holds his prizes.
Inside the corrugated cardboard flaps, taped securely in plastic bags for protection, are modern-day copies of Batman, Superman, Elektra: Assassin, Nam, the Shadow and Watchman. There aren’t many old, antique comic books in there.
Gerhard has a healthy attitude toward his collection. Unlike those who would collect gold, silver, coins or stamps, he doesn’t buy his comics just to add to his collection. He buys them to read.
He also doesn’t buy them at the corner grocery store. He goes to specialty stores. Grocery stores and other convenience stores usually carry comics aimed not at collectors but at the mass audience: teenagers.
The specialty stores also carry magazines and other periodicals aimed at the serious collector, such as Comics Interview, Comics Buyer’s Guide, and Comics Journal. When the shops sell a comic, the purchase goes into a plastic covering bag that helps protect it from aging.
Gerhard started his serious collecting about the time that comics were undergoing a facelift. Before the transformation, routine comics like Superman didn’t interest him. But now, the Man of Steel is regular reading material.
“Superman has been pretty much redone. He not as powerful, no romance with Lois…. He’s more of a yuppie than he used to be,” Gerhard said.
DC Comics has rolled the Superman strip back to the beginning, to reshape the legend a bit.
As Superman writer John Byrne wrote in a recent essay, going back to the Man of Steel’s roots allows writers “to try and pare away some of the barnacles that have attached themselves to the company’s flagship. To try to make Superman of today as exciting in his own right as was that primal Superman of yesterday. To try to recreate Superman as a character more in tune with the needs of the modern comic-book audience. A much smaller audience than when I was 10 years old. But a much more demanding one.”
That’s the kind of philosophy that has secured comic books a new audience in the 1980s. Before the transformations began, comic book sales were lagging. Now, they’ve received a vital injection of life, and the customers are buying the thin paper books with a fresh zeal.
Turn over some of the pages of Frank Miller’s Elektra series about a female assassin. It is another of Gerhard’s favorites, as is British writer Alan Moore’s Watchman series.
In Elektra, Miller starts off one issue with compelling style:

First they remove my spine. Then my organs, one by one. They roll my liver around their waldoes, like it’s something that grew by accident in the refrigerator—then fractionate it. Telling me I was working on a case of psorosis.
What they replace it with looks like a bunch of cigarette butts stuck in a wad of chewing gum.
They get their biggest kick from rewiring my nervous system and checking my pain centers.
Finally they pop the fake arms into the fake shoulders and snap the fake legs onto the fake hips and staple the whole mess together and I’m as close to human as I’ll ever be again. All the while I think about Elektra.

Gerhard’s father reads some of the comics, his son said, but his mother doesn’t. His roommate at college also spurns the colorful books.
“He’s never read them like other people in the dorm read them,” Gerhard said. College students area big audience for the improved comics. As are folks who read science fiction.
Gerhard supports his habit with money he might normally spend on a car he doesn’t have or video games he doesn’t frequent. He also gets cat-off comics from other fans on the peninsula.
Though comics are gaining a measure of respectability, with the specialty shops, periodicals and other improvements, “Usually,” said Gerhard, “it’s hard to find people who read comics.
“Lots of people still think it’s really corny.”
Comic Book Censorship
By Michael Gerhard
A typical article on comic books might start out with something like “Pow, Bam, Biff, Argh” or “Holy Bigbucks Batman!” But this is not a typical comics article. It’s not written about how comics are becoming more interesting and appealing to older readers. This article is different than most because it covers a topic not many people associate with comics. Censorship.
As America entered the second half of the 20th century, the comics industry was selling about a billion comics a year. In an industry that had traditionally been aimed at younger readers, companies like EC (Entertaining Comics) were producing new and more sophisticated stories in comic books. These new comics appealed to an older audience that had not existed before. Unlike the super-hero comics that dominate the market today, many popular comics in the early 1950s were crime or horror stories.
It was inevitable that sooner or later someone would wonder what effect these comics were having on the children who still made up the large majority of comic book readers. In 1954, someone finally spoke up and the result was a large controversy over the content of comic books.
The catalyst of the comic book controversy was a book by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham titled Seduction of the Innocent, which was released in 1954. Based on studies conducted by Dr. Wertham himself, Seduction of the Innocent presented comic books as the perpetrators of juvenile delinquency. His book caused many parent groups throughout the country to take action against comics. Organizations such as The American Legion, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the National Organization for Decent Literature began calling for legislative action.
Wertham’s book successfully motivated others to act against comics, but most people were so caught up in the frenzy of the moment that they failed to take a close look at how Wertham conducted his research. As Don Thompson, now editor of the “Comics Buyer’s Guide” wrote in The Comic-Book Book, a collection of essays, “Instead of setting up control groups of children who read comics and children who did not and comparing how they turned out, Wertham found juvenile delinquents and asked them if they read comic books. Since nearly every kid read comics in those days… the answer was almost always affirmative… juvenile delinquents read comic books, therefore comic books cause juvenile delinquency. What could be plainer?”
Even members of Wertham’s own profession attacked him for twisting scientific research in order to arrive at a desired conclusion. Some of his conclusions about comic books in Seduction of the Innocent are so outrageous that it’s hard to believe that people who read the book took him seriously. He determined that Batman and Robin, on the basis that they lived together, were homosexuals and that Wonder Woman was a lesbian sadist because some of the villains she slugged were men. He said stories with mostly male characters and situations created homosexual atmospheres, while stories dealing mostly with females created lesbian attitudes. In stories where sexes were portrayed equally, the charge of inducing pre-adolescent sexuality was leveled. Wertham was basically saying that comics led the children who read them to rebel against society and to commit violent crimes. These outlandish conclusions were made based upon lots of personal opinion and no documented proof. Upon hearing these accusations, parents became infuriated and launched themselves into action without doing much research of their own. It seems that most people who were involved in the various boycotts, comic book burnings, and other protests never even bothered to read the shaky findings in Wertham’s book.
As a result of the furor caused by Wertham’s book, the U.S. Senate set up the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, which then looked into the matter. Hearings and studies were held but, in the end, the government took no action against the comics industry, presumably because it felt that comics were just as entitled to First Amendment rights as any other kind of publication.
The real power in this controversy lay in the hands of the nation’s mothers, who had the power of the purse. Parents began picketing supermarkets and drugstores in attempts to have comics removed from the businesses. In order to save itself, the industry, made up of about 27 comic publishers, decided to impose self-regulation. The result was the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). This organization then formed the Comics Code Authority, through which comics would have to be approved. Only 24 of the 27 comics publishers joined the CMAA; the other three preferred to stand on their own rather than participate in the censorship of their own books. When comics were approved by the Comics Code Authority, they received a white seal of approval on their covers.
This gave parents something that would show them which comics were “suitable” for their children. Comics without the code were still produced, but none of them lasted long because most parents refused to buy comics that were not approved by the Comics Code.
The Code insured that stories could not be written unless they were either unrealistic or devoid of thought-provoking material. Some of the rules which made up the code were:

• In every instance good shall triumph over evil.
• Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited.
• Scenes dealing with….vampires, vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism and werewolfism are prohibited.
• Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.
• Divorce shall not be treated humorously nor represented as desirable.
• Respect for parents…shall be fostered.
• Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions.

Actually, all that the code did was disguise the reality of actions and situations. Murder didn’t seem as bad when there was no blood. Even Dr. Wertham came out and said that comics were more harmful with the code than without, but by that time it was too late. With the code, the reading material in comics became less interesting, but comics without the code could not survive, and so the creative element of the comic book industry died under the axe of its own self-imposed censorship.
For approximately the next 15 years, the Comics Code Authority kept the industry within its own moral codes. But in 1971, Stan Lee, the publisher and a writer at Marvel Comics, decided to do a Spiderman story about the dangers of drugs. When Marvel submitted the story to the Code, it was rejected.
In a landmark decision, Marvel went ahead and published it without the Code and issues of the story sold as usual. The screaming mothers, it seemed, had long since forgotten the significance of the little white square on the covers of comics. Then shortly thereafter, the Comics Code Authority made its first policy change, allowing stories to present drugs only as a “vicious habit.” After this, policy changes came about one after the other, each lightening the restrictions comic writers were required to follow. It seemed that the Code had finally lost the power to influence what writers could write about.
Today not many people even notice the seal on the cover of comics. In fact, a large number of comics do not even carry the seal. Comics have been publishing very sophisticated stories dealing with topics and themes that would never have been found in comic books of the past. These new stories, directed at a more mature audience, have attracted the attention of more and more people. While most of these people are ones who have found a new source of reading material, there are those who dislike the content of some of the new comic books.
In the February 1984 issue of Psychology Today, an article by Benjamin DeMott describes comic books oriented more at adults as filled with “defeat, cynicism and despair.” In the article, DeMott gives his personal views and theories about comic books, much in the way Wertham gave his back in 1954. He condemns the adult, comic-book reading audience as illiterate and goes on to make guesses about who comic book readers actually are. “My guess… is that dropouts and community college students, uncertain of their direction, constitute the bulk of the readership,” DeMott says. This is a very bold statement considering that his sources were listening to customers talk in a comic store and “scrutiny of the letters columns of a score of magazines.”
More recently, comics such as Elektra: Assassin, an eight-issue mini-series written by Frank Miller, have been attacked by parents and fundamental evangelists who were surprised to see comics containing graphic violence and mature themes. On a Washington D.C. news program that did two short segments on the subject of comics, a mother proclaimed that she had believed that comics were “still safe” until she read an issue of Elektra: Assassin that her 11-year-old son had brought home.
To prevent the possibility of censorship, comic companies must work hard to educate the public; teaching them that not all comics are meant for younger readers. Inevitably, there will always be those who can see comics as nothing other than illiterate junk. But it is hoped more people will discover that comics can be much more than that. This will only happen if people take an open-minded approach to comics and not condemn them with little or no knowledge of what they can really be like.
As Frank Miller said in a recent guest editorial in the Comic Buyers Guide, “Censorship does not breed stories of pride, honor and courage; it prohibits them. Creative work never flourishes under such a system. The rest of the world has begun to notice [how comics have changed for the better], and our field may be on the verge of a genuine and permanent breakthrough; comics may soon be recognized by the public as a genuine and valid story form.”
There are many of us who hope this will happen soon, but it all depends on how willing the public is to change their conception of comics as junk literature. Hopefully, people today are more open minded than they were in the days of McCarty and Wertham.
MICHAEL GERHARD lives in Kenai and is a student at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.