Fredric is the author of the book Seduction of the Innocent whose main premise was the harmful effects of the comic book industry on its young readers. Many of the points in his book include the gay undertones between Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman's bondage subtext and possible lesbian tendencies and most famously, the un-American and fascist nature of Superman. To learn more about Fredric Wertham, visit his wikipedia page.
This is a documentary film about the most hated man in comics history: psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Beginning in the late 1940s, Wertham began publishing articles linking comic books to juvenile delinquency. This work culminated in his now-infamous 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent. Burnings of comics were reported across the United States, and Congress held hearings into the matter, which helped spur the creation of the self-censoring body the Comics Code Authority (only just recently dropped by DC and Archie Comics).
Wertham was himself a contradiction. Although forever linked with artistic repression, he was a social crusader whose writings on the damaging effects of segregation were used as evidence in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Although forever linked to the Comics Code, he claimed to be against censorship. Wertham developed his theories about comics while caring for juvenile delinquents, which biased his analysis by ignoring healthy juveniles who read comics — a fact that has caused his case to be often used as a negative example in statistical analysis. But his theories about comics, highlighting Wonder Woman's themes of lesbianism and bondage, claims of Batman and Robin's homosexuality, and the excesses of the era's crime comics, had a lasting impact on the medium.
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