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Article: William Marston's secret identity: The strange private life of wonder woman's creator. (Cultures & Reviews).(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Reason
- Article date:
- May 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Reason Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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From their inception, comic books, like other forms of mass entertainment, have had detractors. None is more famous--or more fondly remembered--than Fredric Wertham, the child psychiatrist and author of Seduction of the Innocent, Who charged that comic books turned their readers into juvenile delinquents and sexual deviants. If Wertham, who died in 1981, hadn't existed, he would have surely been invented by a clever satirist looking for a sex-obsessed, puritanical foil.
A true arch-enemy of the form, Wertham's critique of comics went beyond criminological concerns: Comics didn't just pervert children, you see, but ruined their ability to appreciate fine ...