Heer again on The Ten-Cent Plague
On Slate, Canadian comic-book commentator Jeet Heer writes about David Hajdu’s new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Specifically, Heer focuses on Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who stoked anti-comic flames with his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent. Heer notes that while Hajdu and novelist Michael Chabon – who wrote about the early days of comic books in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – seem to hold Wertham in low regard, Canadian academic Bart Beaty has argued that in fact Wertham raised valid and reasonable points.
Adopting the tone of a referee, Heer concludes with his own sum-up: “Wertham shouldn’t be mocked as a simpleton or censor, but he was rather prissy and uptight…. If he had paid more attention to comic books, Wertham would have realized that he was following down the path of villains like Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom, who start off with good intentions only to become prisoners of their own blind arrogance.”
Of course, Doctor Doom was not even a gleam in Stan Lee’s eye in 1954, but that’s neither here nor there. What struck Quillblog about all this was how eerily familiar it sounded. Oh, right – Heer reviewed Hajdu’s book just a couple weeks back in The Globe and Mail (here but subscriber-only, alas), discussing Wertham in that forum. Then, in the following week’s Globe books section, Heer debated the subject further with the aforementioned Bart Beaty (here but, again, subscriber-only).
Having been granted the last word in that last Globe exchange, Heer apparently still felt the need to, um, get the last last word, which may invite its own comparison to some comic-book character or other. (The Double-Dipper, perhaps?) But give him this: although he’s recycled the debate for Slate, he’s managed to do it without recycling any of his actual prose – not a bad trick.
Note also that at the end of the Slate piece, Chabon himself weighs in with an overreaction er, response.
“Of course, Doctor Doom was not even a gleam in Stan Lee’s eye in 1954,”
cough*geek*cough
;)
The debate has also continued at Heer’s blog:
http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/wertham-progressive-scholar-or-repressive-bluenose/
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