Dr. Werthless

by Matt Peters

Content Advisory: Details of violence, violent psychosis, torture, homicide, cannibalism, and war crimes

In Dr. Werthless, writer Harold Schechter and writer/artist Eric Powell examine the life and legacy of the controversial psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham (1895-1981). Wertham’s long career as a psychiatrist included a broad range of accomplishments, but many of those accomplishments were overshadowed by his fervent accusations against the comic book industry. He was convinced that the content being produced by its various publishers was causing a crisis of juvenile delinquency.

Dr. Werthless is a work of graphic nonfiction, so it’s naturally sympathetic to the comic book industry that Wertham so reviled. However, in writing and illustrating the book, Schechter and Powell made it their goal to give credit and criticism where each was due, focusing on both the positive and negative influences that Wertham had on society. As the title implies, though, the net result is still an unflattering assessment of the psychiatrist. The source of the book’s title was a withering critique of Wertham that was published in a 1957 issue of MAD. The humor magazine ran a three-page illustrated parody of Wertham, which referred to him as “Frederick Werthless, M.D.,” and portrayed him as a peddler of zealotry and alarmism under the guise of science.

In narrating Wertham’s professional life, Schechter and Powell cover three major areas of his work. In roughly chronological order (with some overlap notwithstanding), those areas were his service to the criminal justice system as a forensic psychiatrist, his efforts to improve Black Americans’ access to high-quality mental health care, and his campaign against the allegedly vitiating influence of comic books. Those first two areas were largely laudable, save for Wertham’s tendency to be headstrong and abrasive toward anyone who wasn’t his patient. He was often unwilling to consider the ideas of his colleagues and envious of anyone whose professional successes eclipsed his own. It led to a series of short-lived clinical positions, each of which ended after he wore out his welcome among his peers and supervisors.

While those first two areas of work are unrelated to comic books, they planted the seeds for what was to come. In 1921, shortly after starting his career as a psychiatrist, Wertham worked at the Munich Institute in Germany, where he developed an early interest in the study of violent psychosis and the roots of interpersonal violence. Later, in the United States, he became a sought-after psychiatric examiner and expert witness for criminal trials, including the 1935 case of Albert Fish, a serial killer notorious for his obsessions with torture, mutilation, and cannibalism. Wertham performed an evaluation of Fish, during which Fish told him, “I like to collect newspaper and magazine clippings of murder cases that interested me” (page 54, panel 4).

Wertham inched closer to his concerns about comic books with the publication of his 1941 book Dark Legend: A Study in Murder. The book was Wertham’s detailed assessment of Anthony Cianci, a boy who experienced violent compulsions and murdered his mother. Wertham noted that Cianci had viewed a violent movie prior to the matricide and considered it a contributing factor to the boy’s violent compulsions.

Wertham’s writing soon attracted the attention of the celebrated novelist Richard Wright, the author of Native Son and other works. Wright reached out to Wertham, and the two of them met for a conversation, much of which focused on mental health care for Black Americans. “It’s fear that I want to talk to you about,” Wright told Wertham. “A Black person fears psychiatric treatment at a white hospital. They know the kind of treatment they’ll get. Locked away in some asylum” (page 104, panel 4).

Wertham, who was German by birth and Jewish by ancestry, had gained a reputation early in his career for being, sensitive to the social conditions that pervasive racism had imposed on Black Americans. He also welcomed Black Americans as patients—and shared Wright’s concerns about the care they received from other mental health clinicians. The conversation between Wright and Wertham quickly turned into a collaboration. They decided to establish a free psychotherapy clinic in Harlem that provided respectful and compassionate care to Black patients.

On March 8, 1946, the Lafargue Clinic opened in the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. Wertham led a staff of volunteer clinicians there, and he soon found it to be his most fulfilling work. In a letter to one of his early-career mentors, Wertham wrote, “I have successfully organized three mental hygiene clinics in New York, and I recently started another, for the people of Harlem, in my evenings. I assure you I shall continue the good fight for a decent and scientific psychiatry, even though the means to produce it are in other hands” (page 114, panel 1). The final phrase implied that his earlier interests in psychiatric research had been eclipsed by a reinvigorated interest in psychiatric practice—especially now that that practice was rooted in racial justice and health equity.

What seemed like Wertham’s ultimate calling, however, was soon sidelined by a child patient he saw at the clinic. “Your mother tells me you’ve had some problems at school,” Wertham noted upon meeting the boy (page 117, panel 1). “Tell me, what do you do in your spare time? What do you do for fun?” he continued (page 117, panel 1). The boy replied, “Well, I like comic books” (page 117, panel 2). Wertham’s concerns about the boy—and what the boy liked to read—grew as the conversation continued. The boy described the violent content in the comics he read—and how some of that content scared him and caused him to have a recent nightmare. Following the session with the boy, Wertham walked to a nearby newsstand and stopped to look at the comics. Powell depicts Wertham in front of a wall of pulpy material, most of it bearing crime-themed titles and cover art. Wertham picked out some comics to buy so that he could take a closer look at them in his office.

Wertham’s concerns about the comic book industry only grew from there. From the late 1940s onward, Wertham zealously blamed comic books for the unhealthy emotional and intellectual development of children, which he saw as the root cause of rampant juvenile delinquency. His distaste for the industry was prompted in large part by the growing popularity of horror and crime comics. However, Wertham didn’t spare other genres from his criticism. Schechter and Powell recount multiple examples of Wertham’s wide-reaching condemnations of the popular medium. In one example, Wertham joined a radio program in 1948 to debate Al Capp, the writer and artist behind the Li’l Abner comic strip and the iconic Shmoo character, a bulbous, armless, button-eyed creature known for its lighthearted and affectionate disposition and its willingness to please humans—even in self-sacrificing ways. Describing the Shmoo in the radio program, Capp explained, “All I can say is that a Shmoo is soft and cuddlesome. It lays eggs, has bright little eyes that make excellent suspender buttons and its whiskers make the finest toothpicks” (page 135, panel 3).

Wertham responded to Capp’s description by implying that the Shmoo was a veiled reference to the systematic dehumanization and mass murder of Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Nazi atrocities led to accounts (some verified and others not) of lampshades and other goods that were made from desecrated corpses—something Wertham saw reflected in the Shmoo’s ability to turn its eyes into garment fasteners.

Wertham’s anti-comics crusade eventually led to Senate hearings, where Wertham was invited to testify. There again the psychiatrist spared no genre in his accusations. Rather, distinctions of genre didn’t seem to fully register with him. In one of the hearings, which took place in 1954, he lumped superhero comics together with crime fiction, despite the prominent science-fiction and fantasy themes throughout the superhero genre—and despite its emergence as a genre unto itself. “I would like to point out to you one other crime comic book which we have found to be particularly injurious to the ethical development of children—Superman,” Wertham testified. “They give children fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while they remain immune. We have called it the Superman complex” (page 156, panel 1).

The same year that Wertham made his case before the Senate, he also published a book on the supposed dangers of comics, Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham’s research for the book was as suspect as his understanding of comic book genres. In Schechter and Powell’s words, “One frequent criticism of Wertham’s methods was that he presented no control group evidence. He was only interviewing children with psychological problems. The fact that millions of children were reading comic books without descending into a life of crime seemed irrelevant to him” (page 150, panel 4).

Despite their academic shortcomings, Wertham’s arguments won in the court of public opinion. It helped that Wertham wasn’t alone in his crusade. Schechter and Powell note that, prior to Wertham, author Sterling North had also railed against comics, calling them “graphic insanity” and “sadistic drivel” (page 139, panel 3). The Catholic Church took a similar stance, publishing pamphlets about the supposed dangers of comics. The Church even went as far as organizing comic book burnings.

In the wake of Wertham’s Senate testimony, the comic book industry worked to regain the public’s trust by establishing the Comics Code Authority (CCA). The CCA was a regulatory authority tasked with reviewing content and rejecting anything that was deemed unsuitable for young readers. Comics that passed its screening would bear its now iconic seal, a stamp-like emblem containing the words “Approved by the Comics Code Authority.”

The CCA’s control over comic book publishing lasted for decades, from 1954 to the start of the new century. In 2001, Marvel became the first major comic book publisher to withdraw from participation in the CCA system. By 2011, the last three participating publishers had followed Marvel’s lead, finally rendering the CCA defunct.

Those decades of regulation—or censorship, as many fans and creators of comics viewed it—defined Wertham’s legacy. His career-consuming obsession with comic books short-changed his other work as a clinician and advocate for health equity. Wertham, however, seemed content to be immortalized in exactly that way, his adversarial stance on the comics industry filling the spotlight. In fact, he published a follow-up to Seduction of the Innocent in 1966, rehashing the same arguments he had made previously. Throughout the years, people wrote to him to express their disagreements with the conclusions he had reached in those two books and his various articles and interviews on the subject. Even until his last days, he would write back, insisting that comic books were exactly the menace he had made them out to be. Wertham died in 1981 at the age of 85, eighteen days after writing his last such letter.

In Dr. Werthless, Schechter and Powell have created a work of graphic nonfiction that brings the complex life of Fredric Wertham into vivid detail. It could be read as a cautionary tale about compassionate care gone awry. Wertham’s compassion was evident in his commitment to health equity, but it was also evident in his desire to see good in all of humankind by finding an external cause, a corrupting influence, to blame for the worst behavior of the patients he saw and the clinical cases he studied. He settled on comic books as the target of that blame. There is no doubt that in the age-old argument of nature versus nurture, nurture cannot be absolved of its role in shaping people who descend into antisocial behavior, from the pettiest of juvenile delinquency to the shocking violence of someone like Albert Fish. However, in singling out comic books, Wertham found a convenient scapegoat rather than a clear culprit; that is, partial correlation does not causation make.

Though Schechter and Powell didn’t cover it in their book, a look at violent video games—a more contemporary scapegoat for moral decay—provides a useful comparison. In 2015, a task force of the American Psychological Association published a report on the effects of violent video games—an immersive experience that involves simulated violence. The task force acknowledged that the activity was linked to “increased aggression,” but the researchers found no clear link to juvenile delinquency or violent crimes. The task force chair stated, “As with most areas of science, the picture presented by this research is more complex than is usually included in news coverage and other information prepared for the general public.”

An irony of Wertham’s legacy—also not covered by Schechter and Powell, but also worth mentioning here—is that while his zealotry kept the comic book industry from publishing its most lurid content, it also kept the industry from publishing some of its most edifying content. For decades, the CCA, the authority formed in direct response to Wertham’s criticisms, kept the comic book industry from portraying LGBTQIAP+ characters. Until discriminatory laws were overturned in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and other judicial and legislative measures, LGBTQIAP+ characters were effectively banned under the CCA’s restrictions against “[i]llicit sex relations.” Opportunities to provide visibility and validation to LGBTQIAP+ people were thus cut short, even when that support could have offered a thoughtful corrective to harmful stereotypes and marginalization.

Decades before it fully withdrew from the CCA system, Marvel famously defied the CCA when it published a story about the risks of drug abuse. In 1970, a staffer at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (the U.S. agency that later became Health and Human Services) wrote to writer and editor Stan Lee, suggesting that Marvel use its popular comics to “provide a vital public service to many young Americans by assisting in the dissemination of factual information on drug abuse.” Lee welcomed the idea and wrote a three-issue story arc for The Amazing Spider-Man (appearing in issues 96 through 98) in which the recurring character Harry Osborn turned to illicit drugs during a period of emotional turmoil. Before Lee could publish the story, he encountered a significant barrier: The CCA prohibited depictions of drug abuse, regardless of the context. Marvel thus made the unusual decision to publish those three issues without CCA approval, even though many distributors and retailers were reluctant to carry comics that flouted the CCA system, fearing the complaints and controversy that could ensue.

Despite all the challenges that Wertham created for the comic book industry, Schechter and Powell took care to portray the obstinate psychiatrist with nuance and balance. Had Wertham taken the same level of care in his portrayal of the comic book industry, he would surely be remembered more fondly today.

Matt Peters is a program manager at Health Sciences Design, an interdisciplinary health innovation program at the University of Arizona Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. He is also a longtime comic book reader and collector who can be found from time to time at his local comic book shops. Views expressed are his own.