Did comic books really cause juvenile delinquency, and what did the Comics Code do?

The famous case that they did turned out to be far weaker than it looked. In 1954 the German-born American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, warning that comic books were a harmful form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. It alarmed American parents. But the US Senate subcommittee that looked into it did not blame comics for crime in its final report, and a 2012 study by Carol L. Tilley concluded that Wertham "manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence". What the scare really produced was the Comics Code.

Comics had become a target because they had become huge. Superman debuted in Action Comics #1 in 1938, an event many cite as the start of the Golden Age of Comic Books, and his popularity made comics a major arm of publishing. As early as 1940 the children's author Sterling North called them "graphic insanity" in a newspaper column.

Wertham went further. He appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, in a hearing broadcast on television, and that summer 15 publishers went out of business. The subcommittee only recommended that the industry tone down its content voluntarily, so publishers formed the Comics Code Authority in 1954, a voluntary body that became a de facto censor for most of the US comic book industry. No law stood behind it, but most distributors refused to carry comics without its seal, and the code even banned the words "horror" and "terror" from titles.

Tilley's study points to the weak spot: Wertham's main sample was New York adolescents from troubled backgrounds who already showed behaviour disorders. The story is a warning about how a persuasive voice, a worried public and thin data can combine to reshape an art form.