[HN Gopher] Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency (1955)
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Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency (1955)
Author : uniqueid
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-07-12 06:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thecomicbooks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thecomicbooks.com)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Didn't read the report, but it's always the same cycle:
|
| New tech creates a new medium for expression. Young people get
| obsessed about it, as they do. Older people get offended and
| think it's threatening the foundations of society, as we do.
|
| 2-3 decades later, what was new and dangerous is the now _the_
| established sophisticated art, and the former youth is aghast at
| what current youth is doing.
| JackFr wrote:
| Maybe you should read the report.
|
| > 2-3 decades later, what was new and dangerous is the now the
| established sophisticated art,
|
| The report is almost exclusively devoted to violent
| representations in horror and crime comics, which, rather than
| becoming high art, have largely disappeared.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| I know there was heavy censorship of comics for a long time I
| remember when I was a kid in the 90's a lot of the comics put
| in anti censorship ads for awareness of it, I wonder if that
| censorship contributed to this genre mostly disappearing.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It depends. Superhero comics are not on a path to becoming high
| culture, and I agree with that. Electronic music clubs are on a
| path to becoming high culture (recent law change in Germany),
| and I also agree with that.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I suppose it depends on how you define "high culture," but
| when Disney is making Marvel Cinematic Universe movies
| grossing past $2.7 billion, I think it's fair to say
| superhero comics have become something.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I'd wager a very small percentage of the moviegoers have
| ever even seen a comic featuring their favorite movie
| superheroes, much less picked one up and read it.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| And I would wager that only a very small percentage of
| Broadway audiences have ever picked up a play in paper
| form either.
| domador wrote:
| What was the recent law change in Germany?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| In city planning, clubs will be classified in the same
| group as theaters and operas. They were previously in the
| same group as brothels and gambling joints.
|
| https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/gesellschaft/clu
| b...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Actual comic books peaked in the 90s maybe.
|
| They never fully broke into mainstream culture, but in their
| niche they were big and certainly accepted.
|
| Now those characters and stories live on in "comic book
| movies". Less employed people than me can debate to what
| extent that is the same thing :)
| throwaway9561 wrote:
| Maybe comic books didn't lead to delinquency but they sure led to
| something far worse. A non-stop stream of terrible Marvel movies
| and TV shows that seem to be mandatory viewing for everyone if
| you wanna be able to have a conversation with people nowadays
| teekert wrote:
| You have the wrong friends ;)
| gambiting wrote:
| >>A non-stop stream of terrible Marvel movies and TV shows
|
| I'm always surprised when people have such a visceral reaction
| to _anything_. There 's what, 20? 30? Proper big marvel movies
| now - are they all terrible? I literally can't believe that -
| yes, they are not high cinema, but there is enough variety
| there that surely you can't describe all of them as terrible.
| Unless I don't know, you just hate marvel and all their
| characters?
| javier10e6 wrote:
| Granted, not all the Marvel movies are terrible. Yet They
| have gone from a freshly squeezed orange drink to a canned
| energy drink.
| jimbokun wrote:
| WandaVision was brilliant and innovative and unique.
|
| So I don't think they are at the point yet of just cranking
| out derivative shows and movies based on the same template.
| bitwize wrote:
| Disney has ESG obligations to meet. Classic hero stories
| will reflect badly on their commitment to diversity.
| JackFr wrote:
| I look at the Marvel movies and TV shows and think about a
| Westerns in the 50's. They were hugely popular, there were a
| ton of them and some actually were quite good. in the fifties
| the three networks produced 90 different Western series. But
| now theres not a single one, and you could count the number of
| of Hollywood westerns on one hand, and people wonder about the
| awful taste which must have supported this environment.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| Naw, the "mandatory viewing" is pretty much all prestige
| television and blockbuster movies. Marvel is just the brand
| _you_ are particularly irritated with. It makes sense because
| most other forms of entertainment have become too fragmented to
| have a meaningfully shared experience with anyone. Music,
| games, sports, arts are so niche and idiosyncratic now that a
| water cooler conversation is hard. New blockbuster TV and
| movies are still mainstream and accessible enough to break the
| ice with someone.
| the_doctah wrote:
| They aren't all terrible. Black Widow is. Loki isn't.
| handrous wrote:
| Haven't seen Black Widow yet (I'm getting "wait 'till it's
| free" vibes), but opinions of Loki are... not universally
| good. I, for one, was skeptical about the other two shows and
| ended up loving both except for the last episodes (which was
| still OK for Wandavision, but outright bad in F&WS), while
| Loki was the one I was most interested in, but I've spent
| almost the whole time furrow-browed thinking " _how_ is this
| _so_ bad? _How_? Why did they make that choice? Why is this
| scene _still_ going on? "
|
| What's best and what's worst in Marvel tends to draw opinions
| that are all over the place, excepting that rarely does
| anyone rank the two Guardians movies near the bottom. Like
| Star Wars, I guess. You can get rankings that are wildly
| different, except for a few things (almost no-one is going to
| rank Empire very low, and almost no-one is going to rank AOTC
| higher than the middle, for instance).
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| That's because events such as these (and subsequently the
| comics code authority) made it legally and financially
| nonviable to do anything but spandex comics for kids. Before
| that, the contents of comics was as varied as the films and
| pulp fiction of the time. Imagine if during the time of the
| Hays Code people were burning celluloid in the streets (look up
| public comic book burnings) and as a reaction studios made
| nothing but Laurel and Hardy and Ma and Pa Kettle films and it
| wasn't until the 80s that any kind of adult film-making re-
| emerged in the mainstream in any substantial way.
| damontal wrote:
| The comic Planetary (DC) is a pretty good send up of this
| phenomenon. It indirectly pays homage to the old varied
| styles of comics while showing how the popularity of super
| hero comics, namely The Fantastic Four, destroyed those other
| genres.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| It's escapism. When people's lives turn to shit they want to
| escape in to fantasy and wish-fulfillment.
| uniqueid wrote:
| Maybe comic books didn't lead to delinquency
|
| I find it more interesting to entertain the possibility that
| they _did_. It 's probably wrong (even if there were/is a
| correlation, the cause would likely be deeper -- maybe the
| World Wars?) but it's fun to be contrarian and seriously
| entertain the theory.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| If any medium can be accused of destroying the "West", it
| would be the novel[1].
|
| Terror of media has been an almost constant train of thought
| since at least the era of Plato. But most particularly it
| seems that Protestant Christianity is haunted by an
| existential terror of the imaginary.[2] At the very core of
| Christian teaching is the unease around Jesus' use of
| parables (constructs of fiction designed to reveal truth, a
| contradiction which has resulted in the use of much ink
| dedicated to the explication of how the former is not really
| involved at all). It could be argued to hearken back
| (conceptually) even to the "Tree of Knowledge", where
| original sin is no longer sex but knowledge itself (which
| would include knowledge of sex).
|
| [1] The Novel-Reading Panic in 18th Century in England: An
| Outline of an Early Moral Media Panic ---
| https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Novel-Reading-
| Pani...
|
| [2] ON DANGEROUS READING: A Warning Against The Reading of
| Novels, Fiction, and Other Poisonous Literature (1849) --- ht
| tp://www.truecovenanter.com/against_the_world/dabney_on_da...
| et1337 wrote:
| Tolkien and CS Lewis would like a word with you... Edit:
| Tolkien was Catholic and CS Lewis was Anglican, but their
| works seem popular enough with Protestants.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| I doubt hauntings are distributed uniformly or that their
| manifestations are identical, which for me recalls the
| quote from _A River Runs Through It_ : "They were
| Methodists, a denomination my father referred to as
| Baptists who could read." And of course I have been in
| many Baptist churches that avow from their pulpits that
| Catholics are cultists and non-Christian.
|
| Catholicism has always been far more comfortable with the
| story and the image than its offshoots. So we can get
| persons like Chesterton who could posit Christianity as
| distinct in that it is the only religion in which God
| himself becomes at atheist. And Tolkien could place
| fiction and fact into oroborosian configurations: "Of
| course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a
| fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do
| tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller
| would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his
| nature: by a moving story. But since the author of it is
| the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality, this one
| was also made to Be, to be true."
|
| Comparatively, between him and Lewis, it might be notable
| that in their major works only Lewis (the non-Catholic)
| needed to explicitly bring Christianity to the fore.
|
| Popularity I don't know about. As someone who grew up in
| a household where Tolkien and Lewis were okay but
| Dungeons and Dragons was Satanic, I think for many it's
| more about what they assume the contents to be, rather
| than their actual properties. It's a spectrum. As one
| reviewer of a Christian horror series modeled after
| _Goosebumps_ put it: "I am not sure how I feel about
| Christian horror books".
|
| Such things tends to occupy that interstitial world of
| alternative Christian culture that recreates rock music
| and movies and book series, as if to have no active
| acknowledgement of God (or perhaps such Christian culture
| in general) for even the briefest moment is
| indistinguishable from disbelief. It is the same mindset
| that compels the production of textbooks that are
| required to invoke a Bible verse to go along with every
| math problem and to warn children that doing yoga will
| allow you to be possessed by demons (my 5th grade health
| book).
|
| But, as I say, I doubt everything is haunted the same
| way. There are plenty of Protestants who have no problem
| playing D&D on a Saturday night. But, too, people aren't
| often consistent. There are many who would defend violent
| video games, but would then turn around and deploy
| exactly those arguments against other types of media, as
| if they too could somehow 'infect'.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| There's no shortage of moral panics about all sorts of
| things, from rock and roll to dancing to drugs to games to
| political movements to demographic changes and social
| mobility, etc, etc, etc.
|
| Anything that is seen to potentially threaten the status
| quo is liable to upset the people who benefit from it (who
| also tend to hold the most power in society). Combine such
| concerns with overactive imaginations and a media which
| thrives on sensationalism and you get the perfect storm of
| a moral panic.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| I don't doubt the commonplace nature of moral panic. I
| do, however, wonder to what degree it is culturally
| hidebound. It might, perhaps, be a general human
| characteristic, but the cultural leeway any desire or
| compulsion is granted is a determiner in to what it
| effects are (and the way in which it manifests).
|
| For instance, Japan experienced a similar type of moral
| panic (through a combination of government and media)
| around anime and manga at roughly the same time (or a
| little after) the crusades against comic books (and
| broader efforts against such works as _Lady Chatterley 's
| Lover_) were ongoing in the U.S. and the U.K. However, in
| regards to Japan, the results broke in the opposite
| direction. Unlike in the U.S., a translation of _Lady
| Chatterley 's Lover_ was found to be obscene, but manga
| escaped, seemingly, relatively unscathed, and so it
| continued to develop as a medium in general and thus,
| now, in various incarnations, caters to a multiplicity of
| audiences, men and women, children to elderly, students
| to business professionals to housewives.
| candiodari wrote:
| It's funny how people never learn. There are 2000+ year old texts
| complaining about how youth's "inability" to obey their parents,
| and wearing Toga's "halfway" (whatever that means), will destroy
| the future of everyone.
| the-dude wrote:
| Could you please list your sources? Because the Plato one is
| apocryphal ( and actually from last century ) :
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
| bitwize wrote:
| Ah, the 300 BC equivalent of rebuckling your knickerbockers
| BELOW the knee. Scandalous!
| m_myers wrote:
| Is he starting to memorize jokes from Centurion Vilhelmus's
| Whiz Bang?
| neonnoodle wrote:
| Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
| Words...like... edema
| ardit33 wrote:
| Yes... and pants were banned in Rome for a while, because it
| was mostly Germanic people wearing them at the time, and it was
| a mark of the fall of the civilization.
|
| It is like banning sneakers because there is a certain group
| that is wearing them.... and then retroactively find the excuse
| to why sneakers are not classy, etc... yet some of them cost a
| lot, and proper tennis shows look great.
| technothrasher wrote:
| "Standards for such products, whether in the form of a code
| of[sic] by the policies of individual producers, should not be
| aimed to eliminate only that which can be proved beyond doubt to
| demoralize youth. Rather the aim should be to eliminate all
| materials that potentially exert detrimental effects."
|
| Sounds like a job for the records department at the Ministry of
| Truth.
| aj7 wrote:
| Remarkable creativity. As a kid, I found Wertham's book in a used
| bookstore. A plate in the book showed a grizzly baseball game.
| The catcher used a dismembered, decapitated torso as a chest
| protector.
| awinter-py wrote:
| 'misuse of mailing lists' section feels surprisingly modern
| blakesterz wrote:
| Really interesting stuff from other places on what's a pretty
| darn interesting topic...
|
| There's a nicer site from The U.S. Capitol Visitor Center:
|
| https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/exhibitions/congress-investi...
|
| A wikipedia page:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Subcommit...
|
| And a longer read from The New Yorker with some interesting
| details:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/31/the-horror
|
| And entire series from Comic Book Legal Defense Fund an comics
| censorship:
|
| http://cbldf.org/resources/history-of-comics-censorship/hist...
| uniqueid wrote:
| There's also an interesting essay about the Canadian 'Fulton
| Bill' here (via the last site you linked): 'Crime Comics Still
| Illegal in Canada' http://cbldf.org/2016/05/crime-comics-still-
| illegal-in-canad...
| anm89 wrote:
| Serious people doing serious stuff.
|
| There's a lot of them these days as well.
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