(Mis)Reading the Room: When the United States Government Investigated Comic Books as a Gateway to Juvenile Delinquency

Abstract The comic book industry in the United States of America, a juggernaut for two decades since its inception, found itself crumbling in the latter half of the 1950s. Comics historian David Hajdu notes that between 1954 and 1956, more than half the comic books on the newsstands disappeared and the number of titles published dropped from 650 to 250. What happened in the intervening period? A Congressional committee hearing on the relationship between entertainment and horror comics and juvenile delinquency. The transcript of the 1954 US Congressional Committee hearings consists of testimonials from child psychiatrists, newspaper editors, newspaper vendors, comic book publishers and distributors, and even a Member of Parliament from Canada; a repository of relevant editorials and news articles about comic books and their impact on children and teens from the preceding years; studies and comics surveys commissioned by various civic groups. My paper performs a close reading of the 1954 transcript as an archive of contemporary attitudes towards the comic book as a cultural object during a particularly fractious decade. My analysis of the transcript shows how the comic book almost became a Rorschach test for differing vested interests and came to reflect fears and anxieties associated with intersecting strands of emergent phenomena: McCarthyism and cultural censorship; the post-war economic boom; the appearance of teenagers as a distinct demographic category with an attendant teen culture, massive technological advancement within mass media; and accompanying debates around the suitability, advantages, and dangers of said media. The desire for near-absolute control over the content and circulation of comic books, I argue, arose not from a cultural affinity for censorship but out of pervasive paternalistic attitudes towards children’s literature. The hearings exemplify one of the most decisive and influential acts of governmental intervention vis-à-vis national reading habits, setting the context within which comic books are discussed to this day.