Joel Christian Gill

Getting rid of comics would help black children in Harlem.

Yeah, getting rid of comics, right?

That's what's going to help the children, right?

So he writes this book called Seduction of the Innocent where he basically uses his faulty research to say that comics were creating juvenile delinquency.

There's an amazing video of one of the senators who was involved in this.

He's like smoking a cigarette and he's like talking and he's like, comics are destroying America.

And then it goes away, and it shows these little boys, and they're all reading these crime, these comics, and it's like this kid, he's reading a crime comic, and he puts the crime comic, he pulls out a knife, and he starts stabbing a tree.

It is wild.

And you said a senator.

Yeah, this was a senator.

True.

And so with that, the new moral panic was comics, right?

And so the Comic Code Authority was created by John Goldwater.

And a number of other people in the comics industry because they were trying to get ahead of censorship.

And so they did things like, you can't have vampires in comics.

You can't have horror.

You can't even use the word horror.

There's no sex, no drugs, no rock and roll, which, fun fact, leads directly to the underground comics, which are all sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Yeah, and it directly creates Mad Magazine.

Another fun fact, Mad Magazine is called Mad Magazine because they did not want to be connected to comics.