After spending years working primarily with juvenile offenders in New York City, Wertham penned the bombshell book, Seduction of the Innocent. Leading the crusade against the “ten-cent plague” was psychiatrist Dr. The “comic book menace” was front and center at the hearings. In 1954, a Senate sub-committee was convened on the topic of juvenile delinquency. Unsurprisingly, America’s parents hated these comics, and thanks in part to fears about rising juvenile delinquency levels, pressure mounted for the government to take action. EC Comics became the flagship company for such sicko entertainment, with their Tales from the Crypt series being the most well-known example. These titles excelled at excessive violence and gore, and often times they barely fictionalized real crimes. Kids loved the superhero stuff, of course, but they also dug the horror and crime comics that dominated drug store shelves all across the U.S. However, unlike the pulps, the comics were primarily meant for children, hence the garish colors, outlandish plotlines, and reliance on images rather than prose. Beginning in the late 1940s, the so-called '“funny books” replaced the pulps as the go-to reading material for America’s working class. When the pulp era ended, the comic book era arrived.
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