Word: wertham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fredric Wertham, in Seduction of the Innocent...
Despite the success of the TV series, which is still being syndicated to this day, Superman had some bad times during the '50s and '60s. For all his superpowers, he proved quite helpless against the onslaughts of Dr. Fredric Wertham, onetime senior psychiatrist for New York City's department of hospitals and author of a widely read anticomics diatribe, Seduction of the Innocent (1953). Though much of Wertham's crusade was a commendable attack on the sadism in crime and horror comics, he denounced Superman before legislative committees on rather dubious political grounds. He attached weighty significance to the derivation...
DEATH REVEALED. Fredric Wertham, 86, author and psychiatrist who crusaded against violence in comic books, movies and television; on Nov. 18; in Kempton, Pa. Wertham, a Munich-born authority on criminal psychology, argued that violence is a product of cultural influences. In his books Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and A Sign for Cain (1966), he contended that violence in the mass media was in part responsible for juvenile delinquency. He called television "a school for violence," and commenting on movies, he wrote, "If I should meet an unruly youngster in a dark alley. I prefer...