10 Comic Book News Stories That Shocked The World‏

2. Comics Outsell Regular Books

If you think it's hard being a fanboy nowadays, just imagine what you had to suffer through as an avid comic book reader in the forties. A good decade before pop psychologist Fredric Wertham published his Seduction Of The Innocent, a tirade against the funny books which he claimed were a malevolent influence on both society and its children that way too many people believed (leading to the creation of the Comics Code), the American public were already raging against this new publishing trend. By burning as many comic books as they could get their God-fearing hands on. The original comic book moral panic began in 1946, as the Ayers Newspaper Directory (us neither) published a report which stated that these pulp curios had actually far surpassed sales of traditional books for the first time. Fearing for the literacy of their children and the nation as a whole, a loosely organised posse of parents, teachers and librarians ganged up to ensure these funnybooks wouldn't have the chance to make a serious dent in their culture. Again, by incinerating them. Which, as happened with the Beatles burnings in the sixties, definitely halted the popularity of comic books there and then. Like the Salem Witch Trials with less awesome cloaks and wood carvings, the 1946 comic book burnings took control of whole towns, as parents hauled out their kids' longboxes of treasured magazines and tossed them onto wood pyres and bonfires, purging their innocent minds of the evil spirits that lived within the newsprint. That was until they noticed how distraught their children were at them destroying their possessions in front of them, and perhaps recalled a similar practice that those Krauts had been enacting a few scant years prior.