Blaming Pop Culture Throughout History

Comic book movies are a booming business with films like Avengers: Endgame (2019) raising about a billion dollars world-

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wide in five days. While millions enjoy this entertainment, some use comic books, as well as video games and other mediums, as scapegoats to explain away the evils of our age. There was a time when comic book burnings were common after the medium was allegedly linked to juvenile delinquency. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has even been accused of luring players into occultism. Millions of people watch YouTubers play video games and join in themselves, yet the President has repeatedly blamed mass shootings on video games. In this article, I discuss the problematic history of blaming pop culture for modern problems, and what we can learn and do by analyzing the past.

Comic Books and the Seduction of the Innocent

Dr. Frederic Wertham (1885-1981) was a psychiatrist best known for his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which claimed there was a link between comic books and juvenile delinquency. Today, people may scoff at the claims made in this book, but at the time it was a best-seller that caused many parents—and fairly quickly the government—to take action. The comic book industry faced a U.S. Congressional inquiry. To avoid governmental regulation publishers created the Comics Code Authority (CCA) in 1954 so they could regulate their own content. To appease worried parents, in the 21^st century, it continued to regulate comics, issuing the CC insignia.

In 1990 writer John Fulce updated Wertham’s book, calling it Seduction of the Innocent Revisited. There was no credit given to Dr. Wertham. Fulce, the founder of Entertainment Media Awareness, was a comic book collector for 30 years and owned his own comic shop. He split comics into the good and bad ones, spending 200 pages warning against particular comics that show obscene imagery, including occult symbols, nudity, sex, etc. His book puts heavy emphasis on religion and how “When you read a comic book or watch a television show, you are either moving closer to God and to what you should be as a human being, or you are moving further away” (John Fulce, Seduction of the Innocent Revisited, 187). His message in the book warned parents to be more selective about what their children read. Today this book, along with Wertham’s book, is widely panned.

As noted above, criticism of comics continues into the modern-day. Early this year, Bill Maher piggybacked off of legendary Marvel creator Stan Lee’s death to say that comic book fans need to “grow up.” He continued his tirade against comic books during

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Real Time with Bill Maher (2003-) on HBO. He mentioned his “dismay at people who think comic books are literature and superhero movies are great cinema and who in general are stuck in an everlasting childhood,” even though a quick search can lead the reader to 100s of stories about the value of comic books, especially in getting children to read. Some readers even claim comics saved their lives. There are articles making detailed arguments about how comic books can improve mental health.

Like with any medium, parents should be monitoring what their children are consuming, but as Bill Maher pointed out, not just children are consuming it. Superhero movies/comics, which he points a finger at in particular, can explore mental illness and other modern-day issues, teaching us lessons about the world we may ignore in other contexts. There are superheroes with anxiety, PTSD, depression, the list goes on and on. While not every interpretation is 100% accurate, there’s an opportunity for some real character growth for the readers as they observe the development of comic heroes and say to themselves, “Hey, this is me, I can relate to and grow with this character.”

The importance of comic books and heroes go way beyond the enormous amounts of money generated. While some in academia may disdain comic books and consider them just for kids, the medium covers a broad spectrum of topics that make it important to analyze psychologically. More and more literature classes are including comics in their required reading because comic books can reach an audience that would otherwise be lost. For example, Art Spiegelman brought the Holocaust to young readers through his Maus (serialized from 1980-91).

Dungeon & Dragon, Suicide, and Occultism

Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy role-playing game, has received considerable negative press since emerging in the 1980s. With the 1979 disappearance of 16-year-old James Dallas Egbert III, parents became much more concerned about the impact of such comics. Egbert attempted suicide in the utility tunnels under Michigan State University and afterward, hid at his friend’s home for a month. His parents hired private investigator William Dear to find him. Dear knew nothing about D&D but proceeded to suggest that James probably got lost in the tunnels because he was playing a D&D game. The press reported it as fact and parents ran with the idea that D&D was going to put their children at risk.

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Unfortunately, James did eventually commit suicide. Dear later confirmed in his book, The Dungeon Master (1984), that James’ death was not caused by D&D but rather by clinical depressions and stress, which he partly blamed on James’ mother. But the damage had already been done and was compounded when, in 1981, Rona Jaffe published Mazes and Monsters, a dramatic fictionalization of James’ initial disappearance that put the blame solely on the role-playing game Mazes and Monsters (clearly the author’s version of D&D). This was made into a TV movie starring Tom Hanks in 1982, which increased the growing fear of the “demonic” role-playing game. Parents began to worry D&D was manipulating their children into Satanism and other demonic practices.

In 1982, anti-occultist campaigner Patricia Pulling founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD) after her son committed suicide. BADD’s purpose was to ban games such as D&D. She filed a legal claim against the publisher for putting a curse on her child, but it was thrown out of court, in part because game designer and science-fiction writer Michael A. Stackpole provided evidence that people who played games committed suicide less than people who did not (Game Hysteria and the Truth, 1989). Nevertheless, Pulling continued to promote that D&D was a proponent of immoral behaviors including Satanism, rape, and suicide.

The way comics and D&D have been treated is eerily similar to how people are currently treating video games and linking them to mass shootings. This brings us to a pop culture trend that has been scapegoated numerous times in reaction to mass shootings and violent acts in general.

Video Games and Mental Illness

The current major target for pop culture condemnation is video games. President Trump publicly blamed video games, in addition to violent movies and mental illness, as the cause for the mass shootings that have become a recurrent factor in America. The history of video games being blamed for mass shootings didn’t start with Trump. As video games started growing more violent in the 90s, so did the outcry about them. The 1999 Columbine High School shooting led to Jeff Sessions, then a Republican senator from Alabama and subsequently attorney general serving Trump, blaming video games for the shooting. The American Psychological Association (APA), based on early studies of video games, recommended restricting them. However, it later became clear that

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there were many biases in these early studies.

Today, there is still no concrete evidence that violent video games are connected with violent actions in real life. NBC News rattled off numerous studies that showed no link between the two (Jayne C. Timm, “Fact check: Trump suggests video games to blame for mass shootings”). Trump even created a school safety commission after the Parkland shootings in 2018; and despite the commission finding nothing on video games, the President continues to support the rhetoric that video games are a root cause for violence. Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University and a member who testified on Trump’s school safety commission, told NBC News that blaming video games “is only going to distract us from real causes of violence.”

Furthermore, video games could be a helpful component to an individual’s psychology. Family therapist Nickolas Jordan conducted a study, “World of Warcraft: A Family Therapist’s Journey into Scapegoated Culture,” which looked at the extremely successful online video game World of Warcraft (initially released in 2004). In his abstract, Nickolas concluded: “Video games like World of Warcraft may present supplemental opportunities for clients to practice healthy connection. Concerned parents should monitor their children’s online gaming relationships as they would any other. Future research in this area may benefit from an experimental design where video games like World of Warcraft are used in the treatment of PTSD and Social Anxiety Disorder” (2014). However, the follow-up research was lacking and the scapegoating continues.

Conclusion

Condemning pop culture is a never-ending cycle of finger-pointing. It allows people to look at something they don’t understand and don’t agree with, condemn it, and avoid the real problem because it’s linked to something they do understand and agree with. For concerned parents, comics and D&D allow them to blame their child’s behavior on something tangible and unrelated to them, rather than on what could be bad parenting or mental illness that needs to be addressed rather than ignored. For the gun lobbyists, they see taking away digital guns as a way for them to keep their physical ones.

Blaming pop culture such as video games stands in the way of facing the real issues of violence. Comics are normally a healthy

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outlet and condemning them distracts from the root causes of problems among the young. Of course, it’s important to analyze pop culture’s content; after all, billions of people are consuming this pop culture, and it’s best to be well-educated on what we’re consuming.

Sigmund Freud wrote that “the child is the father of the man.” Children, adolescents, and young adults who read comics or watch their adaptations do not forget that material when they grow older. Comic books are an important part of how they view the world, despite them sometimes being devalued by adults. It’s a different lens for readers to enjoy the world through and sometimes learn something new and invaluable.

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