"Entertaining reading has never harmed anyone. Men of good will, free men should be very grateful for one sentence in the statement made by Federal Judge John M. Woolsey when he lifted the ban on ‘’Ulysses’’. Judge Woolsey said, 'It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned.' May I repeat, he said, "It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned." Our American children are for the most part normal children. They are bright children, but those who want to prohibit comic magazines seem to see dirty, sneaky, perverted monsters who use the comics as a blueprint for action. Perverted little monsters are few and far between. They don't read comics. The chances are most of them are in schools for retarded children. What are we afraid of? Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens, too, and entitled to select what to read or do? Do we think our children are so evil, so simple minded, that it takes a story of murder to set them to murder, a story of robbery to set them to robbery? Jimmy Walker once remarked that he never knew a girl to be ruined by a book. Nobody has ever been ruined by a comic." As has already been pointed out by previous testimony, a little healthy, normal child has never been made worse for reading comic magazines. The basic personality of a child is established before he reaches the age of comic-book reading. I don’t believe anything that has ever been written can make a child overaggressive or delinquent. The roots of such characteristics are much deeper. The truth is that delinquency is the product of real environment, in which the child lives and not of the fiction he reads. There are many problems that reach our children today. They are tied up with insecurity. No pill can cure them. No law will legislate them out of being. The problems are economic and social and they are complex. Our people need understanding; they need to have affection, decent homes, decent food. Do the comics encourage delinquency? Dr. David Abrahamsen has written: “Comic books do not lead into crime, although they have been widely blamed for it. I find comic books many times helpful for children in that through them they can get rid of many of their agressions and harmful fantasies. I can never remember having seen one boy or girl who has committed a crime or who became neurotic or psychotic because he or she read comic books.”

I was the first comic in world history, so they told me, to pick fights with children.

WE BELIEVE: Your editors sincerely believe that the claim of these crusaders . . . that comics are bad for children...is nonsense. If we, in the slightest way, thought that horror comics, crime comics, or any other kind of comics were harmful to our readers, we would cease publishing them and direct our efforts toward something else! And we're not alone in our belief. For example: Dr. David Abrahamsen, eminent criminologist, in his book, "Who Are The Guilty?" says, "Comic books do not lead to crime, although they have been widely blamed for it . . . In my experience as a psychiatrist, I cannot remember having seen one boy or girl who has committed a crime, or who became neurotic or psychotic . . . because he or she read comic books." A group led by Dr. Freda Kehm, Mental Health Chairman of the Ill. Congress of the P.T.A., decided that living room violence has "a decided beneficial effect on young minds." Dr. Robert H. Feli, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said that horror comic do not originate criminal behavior in children . . . in a way, the horror comics may do some good . . . children use fantasy, as simulated by the "comics" as a means of working out natural feelings of aggressiveness. We also believe that a large portion of our total readership of horror and crime comics is made up of adults. We believe that those who oppose comics are a small minority. Yet this minority is causing the hysteria. The voice of the majority . . . you who but comics, read them, enjoy them, and are not harmed by them . . . has not been heard!

If children will read comics [...] isn't it advisable to give them some constructive comics to read? [...] The wish to be super strong is a healthy wish, a vital compelling, power-producing desire. The more the Superman-Wonder Woman picture stories build this innner compulsion by stimulating the child's natural longing to battle and overcome obstacles, particularly evil ones, the better the better chance your child has for self-advancement in the world. Certainly there can be no argument about the advisability of strengthening the fundamental human desire, too often buried beneath stultifying divertisments and disguises, to see good overcome evil.

The (Communist) "Daily Worker" of July 13, 1953 said that comics play the conscious role of: "...Brutalizing American youth, the better to prepare them for military service in implementing our government's aims of world domination, and to accept the atrocities now being perpetrated by American soldiers and airmen in Korea under the flag of the United Nations." This article also quotes Gershon Legman (who claims to be a ghost writer for Dr. Fredrick Wertham, the author of a recent bast against comics published in "The Ladies Home Journal"). This same G. Legman, in issue #3 of "Neurotica," published in autumn 1948, said: "The child's natural character...must be distorted to fit civilization . . . fantasy violence will paralyze his resistance, divert his aggression to unreal enemies and frustrations, and in this way prevent him from rebelling against parents and teachers . . . this will siphon off his resistance against society, and prevent revolution."

It's a dream come true! Every artist I know would love to make their own comics. Would love to get paid for making it, and to keep the control of it, about the stories, about the heart.

If I write a crappy comic book, it doesn't cost the budget of an emergent Third World nation. When you've got these kinds of sums involved in creating another two hours of entertainment for Western teenagers, I feel it crosses the line from being merely distasteful to being wrong. To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate — unlike most films.

When you're old enough to write a book for children, by then you'll have become a grown up and have lost all your jokeyness. Unless you're an undeveloped adult and still have an enormous amount of childishness in you.

I never intended it to be for young adults, children, whatever. But over the years I’ve had to change my opinion. When I first got an award from the New York Public Library for best young adult book, I was annoyed, because I thought, “Thirteen years to make a book for adults, and here it is getting a young adult award.” And I’ve had to modify my position over the years because I’ve now met many, many children who have studied it in school, who found it on their own, who were given it by their parents, and it actually is received with a degree of real wisdom in their reading, based on the people I’ve talked to, the young people. So, I give up. Comics are for whoever can understand them.

"As a child there were hardly any cartoons that were representative of my culture and I want to be part of changing that for the children growing up today,”

I want to see more children, not only reading books, but being able to turn the books into plays and writing their own books because I think children would enjoy reading books that are written by their own peers

Writing in the New Yorker, Calvin Tompkins once suggested that stories by Belloc and others are not appropriate for children and are really meant for the grown-ups. To test his hypothesis, I suggest reading one of these classics aloud to a seven-year-old. In my experience, the child very quickly understands that she’s being told a sophisticated joke, and the butt of the joke is the parent who is constantly urging her toward upright behavior. I want to suggest that Gothic nonsense should be a part of every child’s upbringing.

It seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can be born to draw comic strips, but I think I was. My ambition from earliest memory was to produce a daily comic strip.

Comic books, movies, radio programmes centered their entertainment around the fact of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Cavalry to Dachau.

European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.