Farliga och förbjudna serietidningar: 50-talets seriekritiker och deras efterföljare

År 1948 hade de första serietidningarna nätt och jämt kommit ut här i Norden - men tidningarna kunde redan rapportera om kampanjerna mot styggelsen därborta i Amerikat.

https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/sa...2403909?page=3 (Kotka Nyheter 13.11.1948)

Serieautodafé

"USA:s främsta lektyr", som de allt dominerande serierna kallats, brändes häromdagen högtidligt på bål av 600 skolbarn i Spencer, vilka samtidigt lika högtidligt lovade att de aldrig skulle komma att ens glutta på en serieteckning.

Att Stålmannen, Karl Alfred, Blondie et Co på detta medeltida sätt gick sin död till mötes vid en autodafé, vid vilken sammanlagt 2 000 serier och serietidningar brändes, beror dock inte så mycket på barnen själva. Den drivande kraften var nämligen ett lärar- och föräldramöte som anordnats i staden för att få slut på "landsplågan".

Flera "autodaféer" av den här typen ordnades i USA redan under sent 40-tal, men just episoden i Spencer verkar ha varit den första som blev allmänt känd, även utomlands.

Mad Social Scientists
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2008/0...al-scientists/

In the fall of 1948, in the remote coal mining town of Spencer, West Virginia, an eighth grader named David Mace led a book burning behind his school. “We are met here today to take a step which we believe will benefit ourselves, our community, and our country,” Mace explained to a crowd of more than six hundred students and adults, in a speech that his teacher had helped him write. He drew a matchbook from the pocket of his best pants and set the pile ablaze. Flames leapt twenty-five feet in the crisp autumn air. The crowd watched the immolation for more than an hour; some of the children began to cry.

The books Mace was burning weren’t communist tracts or evolution textbooks. They were comic books. Urged on by a teacher, Mace had spent almost a month leading students in a door-to-door campaign, collecting more than two thousand comics, which they then piled six feet high and reduced to smoldering ash. Though this wasn’t the first time there had been a comic-book burning in the United States, it was the first to gain national attention. Soon, comic-book burnings had become commonplace, mostly in small towns like Spencer. As David Hajdu puts it in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, the “panic over comic books fell somewhere between the Red Scare and the frenzy over UFOs in the pathologies of postwar America.”

The Great Comic Book Conflagration
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/rou...-conflagration

In October 1948, the students of Spencer Graded School in Roane County, West Virginia, gained national attention when thirteen-year-old David Mace led his classmates in “burial rites” for their comic books. Newspapers cast Mace, costumed in black slacks and a white shirt, as a grave and sober preacher figure. Mace solemnly reminded the school’s six hundred students that they were meeting “here today to take a step which we believe will benefit ourselves, our community and our country.” Comic books, he said, “are mentally, physically, and morally injurious to boys and girls, [and] we propose to burn those in our possession.”

The “cremation” represented the culmination of a month-long campaign in which Mace, an eighth grader recruited to the cause by his reading teacher, Mabel Riddel, who devoted one class each week to Bible study, had led more than 250 students in a door-to-door collection drive that netted two thousand comic books.
/---/
The first reported comic-book burning took place in November of 1945 in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, a town of eleven thousand located about a hundred miles north of Madison. The children of Saints Peter and Paul School torched 1,567 comic books accumulated during a school-sponsored collection drive, all titles which a Catholic censor had classified as “condemned” (Batman, The Green Hornet, Wonder Woman) or “questionable” (Dick Tracy, Orphan Annie, L’il Abner). Two years later, students at Chicago’s St. Gall’s School burned three thousand comics after a collection drive organized at the impetus of a ten-year-old student.

These incidents at first received little national attention. The fervor for destroying comic books only caught fire when Frederic Wertham brought the issue to the fore in the spring of 1948.