Comics, culture and influence for good or ill

Louis Menand has an article, The Horror, in the March 31, 2008 edition of The New Yorker, covering the 1954 Senate Judiciary Committee's investigation of the Comic Book industry. Quite interesting. As a Mad Magazine aficionado of the seventies, I had not realized that it's editor, William Gaines, had had such a significant role in these cultural First Amendment battles. Poorly argued as it was, you've got to love the humor of this exchange at the subcommittee hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee, conducting a public assault on the first amendment over Gaines' admittedly graphic horror comics.

"Let me get the limits as far as what you put into your magazine," the committee's junior counsel, Herbert Beaser, asked him. "Is the sole test of what you would put into your magazine whether it sells? Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?"

GAINES: No, I wouldn't say that there is any limit for the reason you outlined. My only limits are bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.
BEASER: Then you think a child cannot in any way, in any way, shape, or manner, be hurt by anything that a child reads or sees?
GAINES: I don't believe so.
BEASER: There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?
GAINES: Only within the bounds of good taste.
BEASER: Your own good taste and saleability?
GAINES: Yes.

Kefauver spoke up. He pointed to one of the covers, from an issue of "Crime SuspenStories," on display in the hearing room.

KEFAUVER: Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
GAINES: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it, and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.
KEFAUVER: You have blood coming out of her mouth.
GAINES: A little.

There is a very telling observation in the article for "liberals" as Menand puts it or for fans of the First Amendment as I would characterize it.

Gaines was not a stupid man, but, as Hajdu points out, he was in the position many liberals find themselves in when they set out to defend the freedom of artistic expression: he claimed that comic books that treated social issues in a progressive spirit were good for children, and that comic books that were filled with pictures of torture and murder had no effect on them. If art can be seriously good for you, though, it follows that it can be seriously bad for you, and that is the point at which censorship enters the picture.

Too right and the argument has to be answered. I believe children's books to be a wonderful and potentially enormously positive influence on children. How then to address the potentially very legitimate concerns of parents wanting to shield their children from "bad" books? A subject for a separate post, but I do think there is an answer that squares the circle.

UPDATE: The original link now redirects incorrectly within the New Yorker. This is a new link to the book review, The Horror by Louis Menand