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Fredric Wertham died today in 1981
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13 posts in this topic

For those not familiar with him ..... let me save you the google search:

Fredric_Wertham

Cliff notes:

a German-educated American psychiatrist and crusading author who protested the purportedly harmful effects of violent imagery in mass media and comic books on the development of children. His best-known book was Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which claimed that comic books were dangerous to children.

Edited by 01TheDude
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What a fun thing to speculate about....my first off the cuff guess is the silver age would have happened later, if at all, as the genres that were defanged by the code woud not have lost steam, at least not when they did, and not so suddenly. (Except maybe westerns, but even they had an audience into the early 70's.)

I guess I'm wondering whether a superhero revival would have occurred if publishers hadn't found themselves in need of something new.

Then again, we see many a Marvel hero prototype in the post-code pre-hero Atlas brooks, so how would those ideas have instead evolved? Early heroes in the SA revival might have looked very different.

And then there's the handful of contiguous DC characters that made it through the 50's....would Batman have been a bloody crime comic, Wonder Woman fending off ghastly people-mauling supernatural creatures, etc?

So many possibilities.....

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1 hour ago, Robot Man said:

A few more years of awesome ECs...:cloud9:

Although I’m a huge EC fan, some of the books, especially the horror and crime stories, were quite formulaic, and those maybe would’ve become a bit tiresome and repetitive after a couple more years.

That said, the New Trend was still going strong, pre-Code, and I do wish there’d been more.

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I really don't think he had that much of an impact anyway. Does anyone think kids cared at all what happened to comics after the code? I don't think so. Really the only actual impact that I can think of were the few kids that it did p-i-s-s off that loved EC's and horror comics and some of those kids became cartoonists and carried that into adulthood and are the ones that started the whole undergound comics thing in the late 60s. It's pretty possible that the whole undergound comics thing might have never happened or the way it did if not for Wertham and the code killing off EC's and horror comics. Other than that I don't think it made much of an impact at all at the time, the real impact was years later and collectors looking back on it and making it a big deal. Kids at the time didn't care.

Edited by catman76
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wow, almost 40 years ago.  1981 hm..... 

that means he lived through the marvel revolution of the 60's and saw at least a part of the independent craze too

Edited by Senormac
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On 11/18/2017 at 11:19 PM, catman76 said:

I really don't think he had that much of an impact anyway. Does anyone think kids cared at all what happened to comics after the code? I don't think so. Really the only actual impact that I can think of were the few kids that it did p-i-s-s off that loved EC's and horror comics and some of those kids became cartoonists and carried that into adulthood and are the ones that started the whole undergound comics thing in the late 60s. It's pretty possible that the whole undergound comics thing might have never happened or the way it did if not for Wertham and the code killing off EC's and horror comics. Other than that I don't think it made much of an impact at all at the time, the real impact was years later and collectors looking back on it and making it a big deal. Kids at the time didn't care.

:screwy:

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5 minutes ago, Lazyboy said:
On ‎11‎/‎18‎/‎2017 at 9:19 PM, catman76 said:

I really don't think he had that much of an impact anyway. Does anyone think kids cared at all what happened to comics after the code? I don't think so. Really the only actual impact that I can think of were the few kids that it did p-i-s-s off that loved EC's and horror comics and some of those kids became cartoonists and carried that into adulthood and are the ones that started the whole undergound comics thing in the late 60s. It's pretty possible that the whole undergound comics thing might have never happened or the way it did if not for Wertham and the code killing off EC's and horror comics. Other than that I don't think it made much of an impact at all at the time, the real impact was years later and collectors looking back on it and making it a big deal. Kids at the time didn't care.

:screwy:

lol

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