Harold Schechter and Eric Powell’s Dr. Werthless

The collapse in recent years of a major comic distributor, leaving hundreds of thousands of comics of all kinds unsold, marks yet one more phase in the genre’s long boom-and-bust history. Frederic Wertham, long known as the bete noir of comics at the close of their historic heyday, has often seen as the witness for the prosecution in the death sentence. This heavily-researched graphic novel brings it all back.

In fact, the Manhattan court room that housed the notorious 1953 Congressional “investigation” of comic book wrongdoing happened to be the very court room where curiously similar Congressional investigations of the Communist Party activities had taken place a few years earlier. A close observer to both—had anyone noticed—would have noted that in both cases. the charges strongly hinted that “Jews” had been found threatening the morals of America’s young. 

Dr. Wertham, himself a Jewish immigrant, is rightly remembered as a chilling voice in the ever-evolving age of mass culture. Although he has been portrayed satirically dozens of times in comic art, Doctor Werthless offers the graphic novel delivering the industry’s own scholarship-based judgment. It is also, intriguingly, an aesthetic judgment, very dark indeed.

Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer, a German national going to medical school in Britain during wartime, found himself sent to work in an asylum on the Isle of Man. There, in the most insular circumstances imaginable, he eagerly read books about psychoanalysis. Traveling to Vienna to meet Freud himself in 1920, he unsuccessfully requested an essay on psychoanalysis for The New Republic, but perhaps gained the interest of a lifetime. Back in Germany in 1921, he became an intern at the Munich Institute, with a mentor regarded as the first not only to diagnose but also to treat schizophrenia.

By the time Werthimer talked his way into a position at the Phipps Psychiatric clinic at Johns Hopkins, in the US,  he  had Americanized his name and found a real mentor in Adolf Meyer, who sought to apply psychiatry to social issues. Meeting  legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow, Wertheimer added a social interest: understanding and helping African Americans.

By this time, readers will want to ask themselves why the artist Eric Powell, and co-writers Powell and Harold Schechter, have placed a particularly vicious murderer, back in Massachusetts of the 1870s, alongside the main narrative. Jesse Pomeroy, a “boy fiend” with half a dozen victims, turned out to be an avid reader of pulp novels, the “Yellow Backs” of earlier decades now become “dime novels” for obvious reasons. Anthony Comstock,  famous again for laws used even now in against abortion, had begun by the early 1880s to curse popular literature’s influence on the young. The creators of “Dr Werthless” want us to track the morbid judgment of the future essays with real life, especially grotesque murders in the US and Europe. Does this pairing work?

The publisher offers a precedent that is more than a precedent. The creators’ earlier book. Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?, reiterated in comic form the murder and mutilation, small town Wisconsin saga of “The Plainfield Ghoul” that has fascinated a grim or perverse public for generations, inspiring films and music. By coincidence, this reviewer met and chatted with Gein’s own former male nurse at the Mendota, Wisconsin, mental hospital. Gein, an avid Republican, made no excuses for his activity but saved his exasperation for the radicals of nearby Madison: surely a revealing detail.

The most intense art of “Dr. Werthless,” in assorted shades of grey, matches the portrait pages touched with a version of Cubism, as if character is split in many ways. Less intense, the gray wash seems intended on most other pages as an uncolored version of the horror comics that Wertheim denounced.

But the story is far more nuanced, and we learn to view Wertheim as an exceedingly complex and in some situations, admirable figure. He is also an avid believer in himself,  almost exhibitionistic in his pursuit of public status.

Through his position at the Phipps (and Johns Hopkins), Wertham soon gained US citizenship and an American wife, an artistic collaborator on his Significance of the physical Constitution in Mental Illness (1926). He also proved quarrelsome at his job, so much so that his reputation preceded him as he sought better positions. He returned to Germany in 1930 for a one year fellowship, finally receiving the offer for the position that changed his life: the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital, Manhattan.

There, Wertham found himself treating the perpetrators of grotesque murders, testifying in court to a variety of his own theories including “our failure as a society to protect our own children” (p.65). He wrote a series of books with real public appeal, including Dark Legend (1950 ), adapted to a play reviewed unfavorably but raising his profile, already established with The Show of Violence (1949), an anthology of crime cases with his psychiatric participation. Astonishingly, the famed Black novelist Richard Wright had sought him out a few years earlier, the beginning of a sustained relationship around understanding the causes of crime.

The Lafargue Institute (named for Paul Lafargue, Marx’s essayist son-in-law) opened in Harlem in 1946, a remarkable launching point for a wide range of public activities including anti-racist courtroom testimony on the ill effects of school segregation on Black children.  Leaping at the job opportunity, Wertham found more public status. Thus Wertham in court: “The child interprets segregation as punishment. And they do not know what they are being punished for,” (p.127), dramatic testimony undercut, somewhat, by his waving a comic book on the stand. Never mind: if the effects of school segregation in Baltimore disproved the earlier Supreme Court ruling that schools could be racially separate but equal, the ground had been set for Brown vs. the Board of Education and the formal end of public school segregation. Characteristically, Wertham would always be convinced that his own key role in the historic shift had been diminished for public consumption.

Some years earlier, with his background in the close study of violent crime and criminals, Wertham had already come upon the evidence that would make him famous and notorious: black youngsters who loved violent comic books. In the era when wartime action-comics were being replaced with the best-selling series Crime Does Not Pay, his dramatic 1948 public symposium, “The Psychopathology of Comic Books,” sought to make scientific claims further dramatized through a feature by a popular journalist in Colliers magazine, “Horror in the Nursery.”

Seduction of the Innocent (1949), a literary bombshell, gave the enemies of comics the argument they were looking for, and the distinguished figure who could lead the crusade supported otherwise by religious conservatives. Here, a dozen pages of “Dr. Werthless” painstakingly demonstrate that Wertham never bothered to prove the dangers of comics to children and did not need to: in the McCarthy Era, accusations would prove sufficient. The public hearings in Manhattan on the “Comic Book Menace” offered yellow journalists what they needed.

On the witness stand, Bill Gaines—the publisher of EC, that is, of horror comic but also progressive comics on social themes, realistic war comics and Mad Comics—did his best at counter-arguments. Juvenile delinquincy, fostered by the real environment, could not be created by a comic. “What are we afraid of?” (p.161). And then stumbled. He could not really explain away the most gory features.

A “Comics Code” was on its way, effectively banning non-participating publishers from newsstand sales. EC comics, foredoomed, had at least consolation: Mad Magazine, not a “comic” and therefore beyond punishment. The “Golden Age” of comic books, already threatened by the spread of television, had received an aesthetic as well as a financial blow that comic art would take generations to recover from. And yet Wertham, the great disapprover and public opinion-maker, himself escape any easy characterization. He struggled to assist Etehel Rosenberg, on trial  with her husband for her life, to be moved into a prison they could share. According to the testimony of their son Michael (a personal friend of the reviewer), Wertham also gave psychiatric assistance to her children, assuring authorities that their adoption by the Meeropol family was suitable. 

With the easing of McCarthyism, Wertham’s star began fading. Drifting out of the spotlight, Wertham turned to attack television’s Westerns and detective shows. He criticized Alfred Hitchcock in Redbook magazine, and Christopher Reeves as Superman! World of Fanzines (1973), with his praise for independent cultural creativity beyond the power of the market, met with indifference of readers who might logically conclude that he was seeking to absolve himself of the harm done to comic art. Too little and too late.

The creators of “Dr. Werthless” wish to credit Werthman with both good intentions and destructive results. Of the results, at least within popular culture, we have more documentation. The implications of his erroneous insistence that psychiatric-based measures could eliminate criminal violence and even criminal beliefs placed guilt upon some of the best of the comic artists. A large handful of EC artists in particular felt targeted and shamed. The depression-ridden genius Wally Wood put a bullet into his head. Wood had extracted a little revenge in advance with a Mad Magazine cartoon, labeling Wertham “Dr.Worthless.”

According to this reviewer, the book would have been better without the artistic vignettes of mass murderers, especially those with no direct bearing upon Wertham. This, and a visual text too consistently gray, amount to small criticisms for a comic of major significance.