Seduction of the Innocent (25 page)

Lyla Lamont quit comics and became a fashion illustrator, though she, too, was discovered by later generations of comic-book fans, celebrated as one of the handful of great female cartoonists, who had managed to make a mark in what was then a man’s world. And
Miss Fortune,
belatedly, achieved the status of a classic comic strip.

Perhaps you followed the popular column “Ask Dr. Sylvia,” which was in seven hundred papers at its peak. It ran thirty years, and for many decades I remained friends—and sometimes more—with the lovely psychologist.

Vince Sarola’s shotgunned body was found in the trunk of his car in Queens in 1955, and his distribution company, Independent Newsstand Services, like the Harlem clinic without its leader, soon went belly up. Whether my “Uncle” Frank had anything to do with that, I do not know, nor do I wish to. But in its absence, rival Newsstand Distribution, of which Calabria had a piece, flourished.

Distribution problems conspired with the Comics Code to make titles like
Fighting Crime
and
Crime Fighter
untenable, and Bert Levinson closed up shop in ’56. Charley Bard-well, always a clever guy, became a graphics artist for NBC, working there till 1972, when he died of a heart attack. I don’t know what became of his monkey.

Well, not the actual monkey. The fate of Bardwell’s other sidekick, I followed in the papers, and not in the funny pages.

After the hearing, papers dropped the
Crime Fighter
strip by the score, and Starr folded it. After Levinson stopped publishing comic books, Pete Pine’s boozing got so out of hand that even his longtime buddy Bardwell dropped him. Nobody in the now much smaller comic-book market wanted Pine’s stuff, though he did scrounge out an existence drawing sleazy sex gag cartoons for low-end men’s magazines.

He did, however, have a girlfriend with a job with a top advertising agency. They both drank heavily, and argued a lot, mostly about why Pine refused to marry her (seems he’d been married twice before and it hadn’t worked out). In September 1958, they went on a binge together in the girlfriend’s apartment in a Gramercy Park residential hotel. They drank for days on end, and fought violently. Pine hit her with an iron, among other things, before pushing her out the fourteenth floor window.

The papers made a lot of it—“Editor of
Fighting Crime
Comic Murders Ad Woman in Hotel Tryst”—but the story would have gotten more play a few years earlier, at the peak of the anti-comics movement. Particularly if Pine had been the guy who drew the falling-woman cover that had got Kefauver so riled up at the Foley Square hearing.

What a hell of an irony, if that cover had been one Pine drew for Bardwell. But it wasn’t. Instead it was a
Suspense Crime Stories
from Bob Price and Entertaining Funnies. And Price probably didn’t even pick up on the resonance when he read the Pine story in the papers. He was too busy making a mint, sticking a grinning idiot on the covers of
Craze.

As for Pine, he did a modest three years in Sing Sing before getting out and finding no work as an artist. He became a short-order cook at a diner, where two old prison “pals” picked him up one night, seeking repayment for loans; when Pine couldn’t make good, they shot him in the head and dumped him off the New Jersey turnpike.

That was 1961, the year Marvel Comics made a splash with
Fantastic Four
and
Spider-Man,
revitalizing the comicbook industry, just in time for Pete Pine to miss it.

This novel, despite some obvious parallels to events in the history of the comics medium, is fiction. It employs characters with real-life counterparts as well as composites and wholly fictional ones.

Unlike other historical novels of mine—the Nathan Heller “memoirs,” the Eliot Ness series, the “disaster” mysteries, and the
Road to Perdition
saga—I have chosen not to use real names and/or to hew religiously to actual events. This is a mystery in the Rex Stout or Ellery Queen tradition, with a dollop of Mickey Spillane, and real-life conflicts have been heightened and exaggerated while others are wholly fabricated. Characters reminiscent of real people, in particular professionals in the comic-book field, are portrayed unflatteringly at times, because they are, after all, suspects in a murder mystery.

While I invite readers—particularly comics fans—to enjoy the
roman à clef
aspect of
Seduction of the Innocent,
I caution them not to view this as history but as the fanciful (if fact-inspired) novel it is.

This novel centers upon the comic-book controversy of the 1950s, and a number of characters here have obvious parallels to real people.

The murder victim, Dr. Werner Frederick, is a fictional character drawing heavily upon the very real Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose anti-comics crusade indeed earned him public death threats from comic-book artists, although none were carried out. Frederick is not intended to be the real Wertham, rather the
idea
of Wertham, among professionals and fans alike. It should be noted that Wertham made important contributions to the Civil Rights Movement that have been unfortunately if understandably overshadowed by his anti-comics zealotry.

Others in these pages have similarly obvious real-life counterparts—Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein are represented by Bob Price and Hal Feldman, Al Williamson by Will Allison, Charles Biro by Charles Bardwell, Bob Wood by Pete Pine, and so on. Despite any parallels, these are melodramatic caricatures not intended to represent the real people.

That said, Charles Biro was known by colleagues for frequent boozing and womanizing in the company of Bob Wood, the former working with a pet monkey on his shoulder, the latter with an alcohol monkey on his back. Wood did commit a murder similar to the one outlined in the final pages of this novel.

The lovely Tarpe Mills, creator of
Miss Fury,
posed for herself in the nude with no shyness about doing so in front of male colleagues—a fact confirmed to me some years ago by Golden Age comic-book writer Spillane. The character Lyla Lamont, however, does not represent Mills, and is instead a fanciful composite of
Miss Fury
’s creator and several other women who wrote and drew comic books in the 1940s and ’50s. An excellent collection of
Miss Fury
(2011) has been assembled by my friend Trina Robbins, herself a noted cartoonist and writer
(Great Women in Comics,
2001).

Garson Lehman has a vague basis in Dr. Wertham’s real-life associate, Gershon Legman, who was rumored to have ghosted Wertham’s famous anti-comics screed, not coincidentally also entitled
Seduction of the Innocent
(1954). Legman’s book
Love and Death
(1949) did precede Wertham’s more famous one in its criticism of comics. Legman was a collector of, and commentator upon, erotica, and his point (better than any Wertham came up with) was that mass culture wrongly censored sex while giving violence a pass. Just as Dr. Wertham was not a murder victim, Legman was not a murderer.

Dr. Sylvia Winters is minorly inspired by Dr. Lauretta Bender, who defended comic books as cathartic reading material for children. Harry Barray has a similar minor basis in radio/TV personality Barry Gray, who spoke out against comics, and in the mid-’5os had a talk show broadcast remotely from a Manhattan steak house. That talk show was once interrupted by a comic-book artist in the audience crying foul. Neither portrayal intends to depict the real people.

Frank Calabria, an off-stage presence in this novel (who appears in the first Jack and Maggie Starr mystery,
A Killing in Comics,
2007) is based on real-life gangster Frank Costello. Vince Sarola is a fictional character, as is Ennis Williams, although Dr. Frederic Wertham did run the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, as outlined in a March 1948
Collier’s
article, “Horror in the Nursery,” written by future famous film critic, Judith Crist. The article actually did reprehensibly substitute staged photos of upscale white children in the place of the doctor’s impoverished ghetto patients.

My longtime research associate, George Hagenauer, provided a huge pile of contemporary articles from magazines and newspapers, reflecting the hysteria of the anti-comicbook movement of the ‘50s. Countless small details about Greenwich Village and other Manhattan locations were culled from various Internet sources—for the record, the Village Gateway is suggested by the Village Gate, which hadn’t quite opened for business at the time of this novel.

Four books in particular were of great help in the writing of
Seduction of the Innocent,
and for anyone interested in the history of comic books—or, for that matter, popular culture in America in the 20th Century—I recommend all four highly.

David Hajdu’s
The Ten-Cent Plague
(2008) is the definitive work on the comic-book “witch hunt,” beautifully written and painstakingly well-researched (although I must be forgiven for pointing out that the
Dick Tracy
strip began in 1931, not 1929). Hajdu’s account of the Senate hearing at Foley Square provided the major reference for the chapter on that event in this novel. Much of what is said in that sequence reflects what really was said at the hearing. I have used the real names of the senators.

A broader look at the development of comic books in the 1940s and ’50s,
Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book
(2004) by Gerard Jones, was similarly helpful. Like Hajdu, Jones has written a definitive work —an entertaining, informative examination of the early days of comic books.

While homicidal cartoonist Bob Wood rates space in the above two books, my friend Denis Kitchen’s introduction to the collection
Crime Does Not Pay
(2001) tells the whole grisly story. Kitchen recounts the full, fascinating history of Lev Gleason’s comic book company, where Wood and Charles Biro created (with the help of other writers and artists) the lively, brutal crime comics anthologized in that volume.

A lavishly illustrated history of EC Comics,
Foul Play!
(2005) by Grant Geissman, provided much background for this novel as well as photographs that brought the people, their surroundings, and the times to life in a manner unbelievably helpful to a historical novelist. While I was only able to explore a handful of EC’s legendary creators here, Geissman brings their whole world to life.

As a writer of comic strips and books myself, I have had the privilege over the years of meeting many EC artists and writers, including Al Feldstein, Harvey Kurtzman, William Gaines, and my favorite comic-book writer/artist, Johnny Craig.

Other books on the history of comic books that I consulted included
The Horror! The Horror!
by Jim Trombetta (2010);
The Mad World of William M. Gaines
by Frank Jacobs (1972); and
Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code
by Amy Kiste Nyberg (1998). My thanks to these authors, as well.

As a child and later as a teenager, I read the Muscatine (Iowa) Public Library copy of Wertham’s
Seduction of the Innocent
any number of times. Like many Baby Boomer comic-book fans—long before I knew of the existence of other fans like me—I used Wertham’s book not as a guide to the comics I should be avoiding, but the ones I should be looking for. As indicated in this novel, the original
Seduction of the Innocent
is extensively illustrated with the most violent and/or sexual off-the-wall, out-of-context panels possible. I read it again, once or twice, over the years, and I frankly did not bother doing so in preparation for my own book of the same title. Wertham’s
Seduction
is quoted at length in Hajdu and Jones, which was sufficient for my purposes.

Again, I have leaned upon
New York: Confidential!
(1948) by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer for Manhattan color. Other New York background came from
No Cover Charge
(1956), Robert Sylvester;
New York Night: The Mystique and its History
(2005), Mark Caldwell; and
It Happened in Manhattan
(2001), Myrna Katz Frommer & Harvey Frommer. Helpful, too, was
Live Television: The Golden Age of 1946– 1958 in New York
(1990). I also made use of the article “The Village” by John Wilcock,
Rogue
magazine, July 1961.

The Jack and Maggie Starr mysteries were conceived as a trilogy. That’s not to say I might not return to the characters, should readers indicate a desire I do so, rather to indicate I initially had three topics in the history of comics that I wanted to explore. Those topics were the creation of
Superman
by two teenagers from Cleveland, who got screwed over in the process
(A Killing in Comics,
2007); the feud between two of my favorite syndicated-strip cartoonists,
Li’l Abner
creator Al Capp and
Joe Palooka
creator Ham Fisher, resulting in the latter’s suicide
(Strip for Murder,
2008); and the McCarthy-era comic-book witch hunt and its chief organizer, Dr. Frederic Wertham
(Seduction of the Innocent,
2012). But the previous publisher of the series opted not to continue after the first two, leaving the trilogy hanging. Editor Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime came to the rescue, allowing me to complete the third book in what was conceived as a left-handed history of comics and an affectionate tribute to Rex Stout, Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. Thank you, Charles.