The crusade against #comics was led by Fredric Wertham, a German-born psychiatrist whose manipulated and fabricated data led to an industry-crippling censorship campaign 70 years ago https://daily.jstor.org/fredric-wertham-cartoon-villain/ #censorship #art

Wertham "was after more than notoriety even as he achieved infamy" in his crusade against the #comics publishers of the postwar years https://www.dominicumile.com/blog/fredric-wertham-comics-village-voice

Indeed, "For comic-book fans, Fredric Wertham is the biggest villain of all time" https://slate.com/culture/2008/04/the-campaign-against-comic-books.html

Awash in publicity, the hearings and resulting Comics Code established exactly 70 years ago effectively crippled then-thriving studios. Publishers killed titles deemed disagreeable and sent their staff home. Suddenly hundreds of #comics professionals in the late 1950s would never work in the medium again — My 2017 @hyperallergic piece on the day's banned #horror and crime comics: https://hyperallergic.com/366028/banned-horror-comics-back-from-the-dead/ #art #comicshistory #ECComics

You can't deny how good these things still look today — Johnny Craig's cover art for The Vault of Horror, No. 18 (1951). A "slow craftsman" says The Paris Review: “I was supposed to do three stories a month. I was lucky if I did one" https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/29/how-horror-transformed-comics/ #horror #ECComics #comics #books