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Historically significant Golden Age/Pre-Code/SOTI comic discovered!

55 posts in this topic

nightingale_stansbury_letter.jpg

 

I find it fascinating that Wertham's focus at the end of the letter is not that comics are turning kids into criminals but that they are brain-washing them into becoming heartless storm troopers!

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Since Wertham was German-born Jew who only moved to the U.S. in the 1920s, I suspect that he was pretty concerned about stormtroopers (a reference to Nazi's not Star Wars) and wars of aggression. I can't quite read the corrections he made, but is that a reference at the end to kids becoming "concentration camp guards"?

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Since Wertham was German-born Jew who only moved to the U.S. in the 1920s, I suspect that he was pretty concerned about stormtroopers (a reference to Nazi's not Star Wars) and wars of aggression. I can't quite read the corrections he made, but is that a reference at the end to kids becoming "concentration camp guards"?

 

While I am sure what you say plays at least a small part in his psyche, to me, the fact that he equates storm troopers, commandos, and paratroopers indicates an antimilitarist streak that I have not seen in any of his other writings.

Does he self-censor and concentrate on crime and sex because he thinks they will have a more popular impact than criticizing the miitary?

 

Does anyone have any idea whose pen markups are on the document? I assume that Wertham added the penciled writing at the end but it seems weird to me that he would have "graded" his letter. I say "graded" because it looks like the kind of short-hand notes my old English teacher would have put on a paper of mine, "Should have used parentheses here. Awkward phrasing.", and so on.

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The notations on the letter are consistent with editing a draft. I assume that the letter was a work-in-progress draft, not the final letter, as it is unsigned and has corrections. Accordingly, I think those notations were all made by Wertham as part of the drafting process.

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What happened to the interior scans?

 

I like how both the publisher and the media covering this book seem to be completely unaware that Classics Illustrated existed. Wertham knew, but of course he viewed them as little better than crime comics themselves, citing several issues in SOTI.

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