Toxic Reading Material: Techniques Used by Society and Government to Control Comic Books

Abstract

From the end of the 1930s, children’s reading material suffered an intense social and institutional intimidation campaign, which evolved in practically the same way throughout the western world. Comics generated particular aversion. They constituted a new form of leisure that many social groups and public authorities considered harmful and their criticism was based on different arguments: their low cultural level (elitist criticism), their negative effect on education (pedagogical criticism), their attack of social values (moral criticism), their fostering of violence (public order criticism), their physical and psychological impact (therapeutic criticism), their negative representations of social groups (criticism of discrimination) and, finally, their promotion of certain political values (political criticism). The social and institutional campaigns against comics adopted a wide variety of forms in the different countries in which they were carried out. Sometimes these forms were covert and at others, on the contrary, they were extremely direct, ranging from the creation of lists of harmful comics to their public burning or the tightening of the criminal legislation (creating specific criminal acts) and the formation of censoring bodies. All of this led to one of the worst restrictions that the freedom of expression can suffer: self-censorship.