Welcome back to Multiversity’s history column, where you can learn about miscellaneous firsts, finals, and notables from throughout the various eras of the comic book industry. Today’s column is themed around the month of May, starting with the general public opinion of comic books in 1954.
After spending years riling up anti-comic sentiment, Frederic Wertham finally peaked. He timed the publication of his scathing critique, “Seduction of the Innocent,” with his appearance at the first round of hearings for the Senate Subcommittee investigating connections between comic books and juvenile delinquents. An excerpt of his book was seen by about 11 million people when it appeared in “The Ladies Home Journal,” and the book itself was a best seller.
Shortly after release, Wertham’s claims were widely taken at face value. He was a credentialed psychologist with an excellent reputation, and he was also saying something many people wanted to hear: If your kids are misbehaving, it’s not your fault – take away their comic books, and they’ll never be tempted to sin again. With one scapegoat, he absolved parents of responsibility while offering them an easy solution.
Most book critics took “Seduction of the Innocent” seriously and praised it. It didn’t matter Wertham’s methods and conclusions were unchanged from the ones that had been soundly taken down a few years earlier. Maybe they lacked the critical thinking processes needed to identify the problems with his assumptions. Maybe they lacked the fortitude to say he was wrong because doing so would place the responsibility back on parents – aka their readers. Or, maybe the reviewers really believed him. The result was a wave of investigations into comic books by newspapers. On May 10, the “Buffalo Evening News” began a five-part series on comic books and crime. Later in May, the “Cleveland Press” launched a four-part series. The results were essentially that comics did indeed contain some questionable material, and kids were indeed reading them.
There was a dissenting voice trying to be heard. In the May 3 issue of the progressive magazine “New Republic,” Revel Denney detailed the gaps in Wertham’s logic. Many of the points made were repetitions of the problems from Wertham’s detractors in the late 1940s. Unfortunately, Denney was too alone and too quiet to be persuasive. Public opinion remained sour, and publishers responded later in the year with the formation of the Comics Code Authority.
In 1973, Uruguay became a dictatorship. Lots of things changed in the country when that happened, but we’re going to focus on the crackdown on subversive speech. Specifically, the imprisonment of liberal cartoonist Francisco Laurenzo Pons. He was officially jailed for being a communist, but the real problem was his political cartoons.
Pons was still in prison seven years later, and he was not doing well. Amnesty International was aware of his troubles, and they contacted famed American cartoonist Jules Feiffer. Feiffer, in turn, contacted Jerry Robinson, former president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Through the association, Robinson arranged for Pons to be co-recipient of the 1981 Foreign Distinguished Cartoonist Award. The award was announced in the May 21, 1981 “New York Times”, repeated in other outlets, and details were shared with the Uruguayan ambassador to the United States so Pons could receive the award in person.
The whole thing was a ruse, of course. The award had been invented to be given to Pons, whose situation was well known and the source of many protests. Uruguay saw right through it, but diplomatically allowed Pons’ family to travel to the US and accept the award in his stead. Pons was not released for another two years, but the added attention of the award prompted them to stop torturing him. The award was not given out a second time. The political situation in Uruguay has since improved drastically.
The X-Men franchise was undergoing a fresh start in 2001, and a lot of the promotion for it centered on the big name creators working on the titles. Meanwhile, writer Howard Mackie had become disenchanted with the way the contemporary trade press hailed some creators as rockstar talent before they had earned it (in Mackie’s opinion)(but not his opinion of the new X-writers, of course). He wanted to see a book succeed on its own merits instead of the laurels of its creators, so he proposed a new X-book be solicited without identifying the writer. The theme of the comic, “The Brotherhood,” fit with the anonymous identity because it was about the mutant group’s message and recruiting, not the messengers.Continued below
Editorial liked the idea, and in May 2001, the first issue of “The Brotherhood” was released with a credit to “Writer X.” It was a sales success, ranking #10 on the sales chart with estimated orders around 72,000 copies, with the caveat that 2001 was the nadir of the industry slump. Speculation on the writer’s identity was varied, with early guesses centering on Neil Gaiman and other British writers based on the nationality of the other writers recently brought into the franchise. Once readers had a sample for comparison, the two popular choices were Devin Grayson and Howard Mackie.
Sales on the third issue fell to around 59,000, which isn’t unusual as retailers expect attrition from buyers of the first issue. When the fifth issue hit in September, sales had fallen further to 42,000. While still respectable numbers, the September 11 attacks changed the writer’s mind about the appropriateness of a comic book with terrorists as the protagonists, if not necessarily the heroes. According to Mackie, it was his decision to end the series, and editorial agreed. It was likely an easy decision. as the ninth and final issue shipped in January 2002 with orders down to 29,000 copies. By that time, “The Brotherhood” was the lowest-selling in-continuity X-Book, coming in just above the third issue of the TV tie-in “X-Men Evolutions.”
Despite the experiment being over, the identity of Writer X remained a secret until Mackie revealed himself in 2018.
