COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Captain Marvel Adventures 101 Universal
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Grade:
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6.5
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Page Quality:
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OFF-WHITE TO WHITE
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Certification #:
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3777931001
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Owner:
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GAM
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
Captain Marvel Adventures #101 is referenced in Fredric Wertham’s “Seduction of the Innocent” (SOTI) in the text on pages 87-88.
Beginning on page 87, Wertham recounts his experience with a boy that was brought to him as a patient and how comics influenced his thinking and behavior “In one of my later sessions this boy told me that younger children should not read comic books. ‘If I had a younger brother’, he explained, ‘I wouldn’t want him to read the horror comic books, like Weird Science, because he might get scared. I don’t think they should read Captain Marvel. Look at this one with all the pictures of the man without his head!’”.
Carol L. Tilley, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, extensively researched Wertham’s archives stored at the Library of Congress to produce her paper “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics”. Her research identified Captain Marvel Adventures #101 as the source comic for the headless man story reference.
Pulling from Wertham’s archives, Tilley describes the background for the SOTI passage on pages 87-88 as follows, “Richard, an eleven-year-old Caucasian boy, was brought to Lafargue by his mother, who claimed the boy had ‘wild imaginations’ and engaged in rough play with neighborhood children. In Seduction, Wertham painted a picture, colored with copious quotations from the boy, of a life debased by comics: he delighted in depictions of bondage, mock-threatened playmates with eye gouging and hanging, and scratched a child in the face. All of these actions, Wertham proposed, could not be explained adequately in existing books on child psychiatry or guidance; instead, comics were ‘a new kind of bacillus’ for which psychiatrists could provide a prophylaxis. In the case notes, Richard himself supported the idea that comics promote problematic behaviors: ‘I think something else about story and adventure comics. I think they shouldn’t have them on the stands, it is bad for children. When they buy the comic books they start thinking all sorts of things, playing games. I played such games because I got them from comic books. That’s why I think children shouldn’t have them.’ That Richard engaged in the activities that Wertham described or even that he spoke many of the words Wertham attributed to him is not in dispute, but a careful comparison of his case as presented in the Seduction of the Innocent with the archival notes demonstrates how Wertham manipulated evidence to persuade readers of the ill effects of comic book reading on children’s behavior. For instance, in the book Richard says, ‘If I had a younger brother… I wouldn’t want him to read the horror comic books like Weird Science, because he might get scared. I don’t think they should read Captain Marvel. Look at this one with all the pictures of the man without his head!’ In the case notes, however, Richard referred not to ‘horror comic books’ but to ‘fiction comic books,’ and Captain Marvel is not mentioned until a later session. Although Richard did remark about a headless man, he indicated only a page in Captain Marvel #101 (October 1949); the case notes include Wertham’s comments that ‘there are 5 pictures like this on one page.’ Readers of Seduction are free to use their own ‘wild imaginations’ in visualizing what could be a potentially gory decapitated man. In reality, though, it is simply Captain Marvel himself; he has been splashed in the face with an invisibility potion.”
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