Back in the 80s and early 90s I was hooked on comic books. I spent hours flicking through racks of comic books of the local comic book store, silently ignoring the other geeks stood close-by doing the same thing. Hoping to grab that precious new addition to my collection before those losers spotted it before me. Filling in the gaps in collections, waiting for the latest edition to come out, buying multiple copies of the same comic. (The newsstand edition, the special edition cover, the other special edition cover, and one to actually read!!!) Then rushing home to carefully bag and board your ‘precious’ in specially acquired acid free protective shells, never to be opened, never to be read, hardly ever to be brought out into the light of day. I ended up with hundreds, if not thousands of comics over those heady days of manic collecting. Gradually I realized that the collection was taking up too much room, and that there was a lot of money wrapped up in those sealed-up plastic bags. I began to off-load them, selling them on to other collectors, part funding my eventual 9 months of travelling around South-East Asia in the mid-2000s. I did keep back a few very precious items that I just couldn’t bring myself to sell. I still have my original copies of 8-Ball, by Daniel Clowes, that have the serialization of Ghost World in them. Among a few other random comics, that I still can’t work out why I specifically decided to keep, but all the same I have moved-on from being a comic book geek. Or have I?

Now my love of comic books is expressed through digital acquisition of the rare and the weird. Now I can get my hands on comic books I probably never dreamed I would in their physical form. Wonderfully strange pre-code items, rare propaganda pieces, and knee-jerk reactionary public information releases only printed in small runs. I was digging through the Weird Retro archives, and realized I still have a lot of comic books. Even if they are in digital form now, they are just as precious as the bagged and boarded ones I kept under the stairs. Most of which have yet to see the digital light of day on Weird Retro, as I’m not always sure others share my obsessive love of these ephemeral things. However back in the early days of Weird Retro on facebook I did post a whole bunch of examples related to the theme of drug use, and the fears around the youth of America being sucked into this dark world. I was originally going to do a ‘From The Archives’ piece on the Captain’s Blog, but there were so many it became an article. 

Users Are Losers: A History Of Drugs In Comic Books - From the Weird Retro archive, a list of some of the best and worst of comic books about the dangers of drugs on the youth of America.

Those artists that didn't go to the extremes of Bogan, would often allude to sexual practices through the metaphors of animals and food. Bo Carter, once described as the "master of the single entendre", recorded songs using thinly veiled food metaphors such as Please Warm My Weiner (1930) ,Banana In Your Fruit Basket (1931), and Let Me Roll Your Lemon (1935). Carter is regarded as one the earliest proponents of the style that is now referred to as dirty blues.  When it came to animals, dogs, roosters and "pussy" cats where often employed. Not exactly Blues, more rag-time jazz, but British musician Harry Roy & His Orchestra's song My Girl's Pussy (1931) is hysterical.

These songs weren't all just throw-away comic fluff, they often challenged social taboos speaking directly to their audience in a language they understood. Many of the sings were banned from being played on the radio, and were only available to many of their listeners on jukeboxes. Even some of the most popular artists of the period recorded such songs. Dinah Washington, regarded as one of the most popular female black singers of the 1950s, recorded a couple of very risqué songs. In 1949 she recorded Long John Blues, which contained the lyrics "He took out his trusty drill. Told me to open wide. He said he wouldn't hurt me, but he filled my whole inside." The song was supposedly about a visit to her dentist! She also recorded a song called Big Long Slidin' Thing (1954), supposedly in reference to a trombonist.

As far back as 1945, there had been a suggestion of the sidicious nature of comic books, in a Time magazine article entitled "Are Comic Books Fascist?" The moral panic over comic books really started to take a grip in 1948, when ABC Radio ran a debate called "What's Wrong with the Comics?" In the debate John Mason Brown, critic for the Saturday Review of Literature described comic books as, "the marijuana of the nursery; the bane of the bassinet; the horror of the house; the curse of the kids; and a threat to the future." At the same time, Wertham was regularly giving talks about the dangers of comic books, which eventually lead to the writing and publication of Seduction Of The Innocent. In he'd taken part in a symposium called "The Psychopathology of Comic Books", from which Time magazine later published an article of the same name. The panic grew over the next few years, with comic book burning and the establishment of committees to investigate the influence of comic books on society and the young.

The publication of the book and its subsequent fame made Wertham a cause celebre, giving expert testimony at a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. The CCA voluntary code remained in place right up until the 2000s, until publishers started to break away from its restrictions, as many comic books and graphic novels became a accepted and recognised element of adult literature. 

Weird Retro Fact: In 1935 Wertham testified for the defense in the trial of the infamous serial killer and cannibal Albert Fish, declaring him insane. (It's claimed the the character of Hannibal Lecter from Silence Of The Lambs is loosely based on Fish.)

On the Weird Retro facebook page, there is an album of images named after Seduction Of The Innocent.