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The Doctor versus the Dagger: Comics Reading and Cultural Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Christopher Pizzino
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Abstract

While the graphic novel has gained a measure of respectability in the United States, the medium of which it is a part has not. Even in the claim that comics are “not just for kids anymore,” adult comics readers are still stereotyped as immature. his paradoxical situation calls for a new assessment of the midcentury moment when comics were attacked and threatened with censorship and of the igure of Fredric Wertham, a famous anticomics crusader who is still hated in comics culture today. Far from being symptoms of immaturity, as they are sometimes described, attacks on Wertham are evidence of the longterm efects of illegitimacy on the experiences of comics readers and creators. Subject even now to regulatory discourses of maturity, contemporary comics are best understood not as a literature reaching adulthood but as the basis of a vital literacy still struggling with a long history of marginalization.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 3 , May 2015 , pp. 631 - 647
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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