This chapter focuses on a specific comics genre, crime fiction, and the multiple relationships between the two spheres of comics and graphic novels. It takes as its starting point the Crime Does Not Pay magazine (1942), while also presenting a detailed overview and critical analysis of the history of crime comics, which in the beginning often purported to be based on true crime stories. The chapter further analyzes the policy of EC Comics, which entered the crime fiction trend in 1948 before transitioning to horror and science fiction. The chapter then examines the appearance of a new orientation within the EC stories, aiming at effecting progressive social change, in sharp contrast to the severe criticism voiced by psychologist Fredric Wertham, whose anti-comics crusade resulted in the Comics Code (1954). After its implementation, crime fiction disappeared from mainstream comics, but reappeared in the independent comics boom, where creators continued to mine the subversive potential of the genre for political commentary. A close reading of Ed Brubaker’s oeuvre illustrates the new forms of the crime comics tradition today.

Floyd Abrams’ Foreword sets forth the premise of the book: that America has faced recurring episodes of censorship and that censors may be admired in their time, but that freedom of speech, as protected by the First Amendment, has flourished. For that reason, censors try to avoid being called censors.

Chapter 5 chronicles the national panic against comic books that raged between 1948 and 1955.Led by prominent intellectuals, like Dr. Fredric Wertham and his book Seduction of the Innocent, the movement was marked by comic book burnings across the country, and resulted in congressional hearings designed to put pressure on the comic book industry. The movement did not lead to a change in the law, however, as First Amendment doctrine had progressed to the point that local ordinances were struck down when cases came before courts. Nevertheless, the political pressure led the industry to adopt a “voluntary” code enforced by the Comics Magazine Association of America that, for a time, devastated the comic book industry. Wertham’s scholarship eventually was discredited, and the comic book made a comeback as both an art form and a cultural influence.

The essay provides an overview of Wright’s engagement with psychoanalysis. It traces Wright’s literary adaptations of psychoanalysis from his first completed novel Lawd Today! to his later writings and surveys his collaborations with the German-American social psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Wertham’s studies of matricide provided Wright with the material for his novel Savage Holiday (1954), which has long been recognized as his most explicitly psychoanalytic fiction. Wertham developed his theory of matricide partly through a critique of Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of Hamlet and he repudiated Freud’s claim of the universality of the Oedipus complex. In contrast to the critical consensus that reads Savage Holiday as an orthodox depiction of an Oedipus complex, the essay traces the novel’s indebtedness to Wertham’s work and its relation to Wright’s anti-colonial nonfiction. Within these contexts, Savage Holiday appears as a critique, rather than an orthodox representation of Freudian psychoanalysis. Through this rereading of the novel, the social history of matriarchy emerges as an important theme of Wright’s writings of the 1950s.