SCOTT SHAW! SATURDAYS… By SCOTT SHAW! I graduated from San Diego’s Will C. Crawford High School in June 1968. On July 16, 1968, DC’s Brother Power, the Geek #1 hit the spinner rack at the Mayfair Market, where I usually bought my comics. I knew that Joe Simon co-created Captain America and, thanks to Harvey Comics’ reprints a few years earlier, Fighting American, but other than issues of Marvel’s Fantasy Masterpieces that featured Golden Age Cap, I’d never seen much of Joe’s work in comics. So I eagerly slapped down 12 cents in the Mayfair and headed straight home to get a-readin’. I was shocked. At the time, I was very straight, never drinking, never smoking, never hanging out with hippies in my high school – because we didn’t have any… yet — although I saw quite a few of them when my parents and I had a vacation in San Francisco in 1967. In fact, our motel was close to Haight-Ashbury, so I saw and even interacted with a few actual hippies at a nearby theater while watching Ray Harryhausen’s One Million Years B.C. So, when I saw the blurb on the first issue of Brother Power, the Geek, “HERE is the REAL-LIFE SCENE of the DANGERS in HIPPIE-LAND,” I was shocked that Cap’s co-creator felt that hippies were somehow evil fiends. (Later, I realized that Joe was hoping to attract potential readers with the fabricated luridness of hippies.) I was also slightly repelled by the comic’s art, which to me, had an unpleasant vibe. However, when the second (and final) issue of Brother Power, the Geek hit the stands on September 9, 1968, I wasn’t shocked. I was angry! Why? Because over the summer of ’68, I had not only become a hippie, I started reading underground comix as well as the mainstream comics. I still rejected alcohol, but I was doing everything else that hippies were doing, illegal and otherwise. And I’ve gotta tell you: Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comix made Joe Simon’s Brother Power, the Geek seem like a joke… and not the funny kind. Although I bought both issues, I was kinda relieved there weren’t more, because it felt better to spend whatever money I had on Feds ‘n’ Heads, Tales of Toad, and Zap Comix, among other early underground books. These...
SCOTT SHAW! SATURDAYS… By SCOTT SHAW! It’s hard to believe now, but once upon a time, comic books were considered to be garbage… or worse. As early as 1940, Sterling North’s editorial in the Chicago Daily News, “A National Disgrace,” scorned comic books. Time magazine in 1945 ran an article titled “Are Comic Books Fascist?” Even worse, mass comic book burnings were held around the country. When crime-themed comic books became popular – the first was Charles Biro’s Crime Does Not Pay (Lev Gleason Publications, 1942) – there was discussion about Congress taking some sort of action against the comic book industry. The public was worried that these comics were influencing youngsters and teenagers to become criminals. However, due to a 1948 Supreme Court ruling that a decades-old New York law that criminalized salacious works of art was unconstitutional, the attitude regarding crime comics temporarily abated. But soon, anti-comic book hysteria returned. By the early ’50s it had reached its zenith — thanks to a psychiatrist who wrote a best-selling non-fiction book that was mostly fiction. Published in 1954, psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, brought back the public’s demonizing of “funnybooks,” and then some. His supposed exposé claimed that comics were responsible for influencing children to take up juvenile delinquency, gambling addiction, violence, and sexual deviancy. (Decades later, it was determined that Wertham’s “research” was mostly fabricated, relying heavily on unsourced anecdotes, cherry-picked examples, and pure speculation.) Unfortunately, parents believed his book’s message, and soon, they were gathering again to burn their kids’ favorite reading material, whether or not their themes were about killer criminals or comedic critters. Later in 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency agreed to let Wertham present his fecal “findings.” He provided examples of grisly comic book artwork that he claimed were a concerted effort to corrupt the youth of America with violent and sexual imagery. He even told committee chair Sen. Estes Kefauver that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comics industry.” Unfortunately, William “Bill” Gaines, the owner of Entertaining Comics, aka EC, had published horror comics series – The Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, and Tales from the Crypt – all so well-written, well-drawn, and well-selling that other publisher were imitating their material, but lacking EC’s excellence. Most of them were poorly written, amateurishly drawn, and oozing...
SCOTT SHAW! SATURDAYS…
SCOTT SHAW! SATURDAYS…
SCOTT SHAW! SATURDAYS…
