From the creative team behind Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? and Dark Horse Publishers comes a new, in-depth study of one of comics biggest villains: Dr. Fredric Wertham. Taking its title from a Mad Magazine cartoon by Wally Wood, Dr. Werthless is part social history, part critical examination, and part biography. The graphic novel format allows the creators, Harold Schechter and Eric Powell, to tell a complex story that covers several decades in an easy-to-digest product that is far beyond the throwaway pamphlets that helped make Dr. Wertham a household name.
The book has been years in the making, and Dark Horse originally announced in January 2024 that the book would get a July 2024 release. Despite the delay, the creators and publisher have not waned in their excitement for the book. In an interview with the website Daily Dead, Powell expressed his interest in the idea from the very beginning, saying “I think we both knew immediately that [Dr. Werthless] would be the next project.” (1) Schechter had already completed some research into Dr. Wertham’s life for several of his other projects, but there is always more to learn, and the research aspect was key in making this book authentic.
Credit: Dark Horse Comics
Running at just under 200 pages, Dr. Werthless is a hardcover book that is just smaller than the average North American comic. It has a sleek dust cover, and the interior design work has a modern art feel to it, with each chapter page containing a cubist illustration of a character relevant to that chapter. The style of the product is important, even before we come to the contents of the story, and this is because this book wants to be taken seriously. A large portion of the narrative deals with the concepts of “high and low art,” contrasting this with behavioural psychology and the real diverging lifestyles of the characters. This is a biographical graphic novel and needs to portray the image of authenticity so that the reader can accept the truth of the events. This is aided by the way the story is told, but, like all books/comics, first impressions count, and books/comics are judged by their covers and their physicality. If this had been released in monthly instalments in the standard sized floppy, it would lose some of its gravitas and probably not even reach the hands of its intended audience.
The story opens with a prologue of brutality and juvenile crime, set in Boston 1874. 20+ years before Dr. Wertham was born, the prologue briefly lays out the case of Jesse Pomeroy, a cruel boy who kidnapped, tortured, and killed several younger children. It reads like a true crime comic, unearthing clues and secrets with the flick of a page and then examines the consequences, making reference to a newspaper article in the Boston Globe that put part of the blame for Pomeroy’s cruelty at the foot of the Dime Novels, which were popular amongst the youth at the time. This is obviously setting the scene for Dr. Wertham’s life story and his crusade against the evils of comic book reading. However, the life of Dr. Wertham isn’t as straightforward as people might think, and just because he has become a “villain” in comics fandom does not mean that he is a two-dimensional comic book character.
Credit: Dark Horse Comics
The script for Dr. Werthless is conversational in tone, which helps the shift from the historical essay captions to the characters’ speech. It also means that the character interactions feel less out of place amongst the critical writing. For the narrative, this similarity in tone helps the comic but it does, on occasion, start to undermine some of the biographical information. The conversational nature of the script sometimes borders on the realms of a fictional story rather than a historical one, which can often be the case with true life crime novels, comics, and podcasts. The narrator becomes unreliable the more they become engrossed in the compelling details, picking out the shocking and disturbing, and focusing not on the story but on the presentation of it. This is a method that Alan Moore uses, and abuses, in his semi-fictional work From Hell. He shifts the emphasis away from merely looking at the facts to focus on heightened emotional content generated from fear, terror, and arousal. Schechter and Powell do not go that far in Dr. Wertham, but there are elements of the unreliable narrator seeping through the text. This isn’t helped by the choice of typeface used for the narration. The lettering for the characters’ speech is very well handled, especially on pages where there is a lot of speech to fit in. All of the documents, letters and forms, etc, that are illustrated also have appropriate typefaces to distinguish these elements from other parts of the page and artwork. However, the narration has a very bold and stylistic look that separates it from the rest of the work, and is almost ostentatious in its presentation. It succeeds in separating the critical, biographical element from the classic comic book representations, but it works almost too well. There are several pages which have a large amount of text, and it is on these pages that the book becomes an illustrated essay instead of a biographical graphic novel. The format is lost beneath the overtly present lettering that dominates the page, drowning out the artwork.
Which is a shame because the artwork is superb. The decision to avoid caricature creates a more authentic look for the narrative, and the choice of black and white artwork is a no-brainer. Powell’s sturdy line work and ink washes produce engaging characters and engrossing scenes. The few architectural scene setters are rendered so beautifully that a single panel is all that is needed to imprint the image in the reader’s mind. This in turn allows Powell to focus his artistic attention on the characters who all look like they’ve stepped straight out of a 1950s Hollywood noir movie. There is an emotional intensity to his figures—their actions and facial features—that do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to character in the comic. The script is, by design, often sterile as it focuses on wider issues than the characters, but any deficiency is filled by Powell’s artwork. At times it feels a shame that there isn’t more work for Powell to do, but the book has such a wide focus, well beyond Dr. Wertham’s life, that it would need to be twice as long to capture all of the information in pictorial form.
Therein lies the essence of this book, its successes and its failures. In order to paint a fully rounded image of Dr. Wertham and his life, without becoming too much of a dry essay, the writers have adopted the style of a true crime novel. The surrounding society, which is important to Dr. Wertham’s story, becomes a big part of the book and large sections of the book is allocated to other characters, the criminals that orbited Dr. Wertham’s life. The cruelty and brutality of these criminals provides the backdrop for Dr. Wertham’s argument about the evils of society. Schechter and Powell show the reader the horrors of the world at the time and contrasts this against the life of Dr. Wertham, a respected, but not overly liked, medical practitioner who found that he could make a name for himself speaking out against elements of popular culture. Dr. Wertham loved and coveted the limelight, as demonstrated in the book by the publication of Dark Legend and the subsequent disappointing stage adaptation. Schechter and Powell aim to bring the society to life, and show how someone like Dr. Wertham could become swept up by everything that was going happening in the world. Within his story, Dr. Wertham wasn’t a villain (no one is in their own story), but he believed he was a hero. His fight was just and he went to the places where he could be heard, newspapers and magazines, and to the people who wanted to hear him.
Credit: Dark Horse Comics
When the book does eventually come around to the most famous part of Dr. Wertham’s life, it is very careful in its portrayal. Large sections of text explain the history of EC Comics, followed by visual representations of Dr. Wertham’s writing in The Seduction of the Innocent. This flips what you might expect from the book, switching the textual and visual media to illustrate the difference between them. The EC comics become literate, something worth studying, while Dr. Wertham’s book becomes gaudy and cartoon-ish. What Schechter and Powell are doing, and do so well throughout a lot of Dr. Werthless, makes the reader question what they think they understand. The creators want you to look at everything from a different perspective. And this leads into the main problem I have with this book: I don’t know if it succeeds at what it is trying to do.
The name Fredric Wertham is abhorrent to a lot of comic book fans. He is placed high on a pedestal as a villain, as the man who “nearly killed the comics industry.” In an essay entitled The Doctor versus the Dagger, the author, Christopher Pizzino, argues that Dr. Wertham cannot be blamed for the ‘purge’ on comic books that happened in the 1950s and demonstrates that the fanzines of the 1960s simplified the environment and looked for a scapegoat (2). In Comics and Graphic Novels, published by Bloomsbury, the writers highlight the works of other comic detractors who question the integrity of comics at the time. People like Geoffrey Wagner, Gershon Legman, and the Ladies Home Journal who were publishing articles speaking out against comics as early as 1909 (3). And who can forget the expert views of Sterling North, who wrote in The Chicago Daily News in 1940, “Virtually every child in America is reading color ‘comic’ magazines – a poisonous mushroom growth of the last two years. Ten million copies of these sex-horror serials are sold every month. One million dollars are taken from the pockets of America’s children in exchange for graphic insanity.” (4)
With a wealth, and history, of anti-comics writing, and the fact that the people running the United States Senate Subcommittee into Juvenile Delinquency didn’t hold Dr. Wertham in high regard (see my previous post regarding EC Comics), it seems disproportionate to hold Dr. Wertham accountable for everything that happened to comics in the 1950s. And, my hope when this book was announced, was that Dr. Werthless would help to set the balance straight. But I’m not sure if it does. Because the book is obsessed with extremes of violence and insanity, while juxtaposing the ups and downs of Dr. Wertham’s life, it becomes difficult to tell if the narrative is positively or negatively in favour of the psychologist’s views. In fact, it is not clear what the doctor’s views are for most of the book. The crime novel element detracts from the biographical element. Too much time is spent on the criminals that Wertham came into contact with throughout his life and not enough on the larger picture surrounding his views and the part he played, or didn’t, in the demise of comics in the 1950s.
Credit: Dark Horse Comics
Dr. Werthless is an exceptionally illustrated book. It looks wonderful and feels sturdy in your hands as you plough your way through the pages. The stories inside are compelling, and the conversational style to the biographical essay makes it easy to read. The only drawback is that it lacks the focal point that you would expect this book to have. For a man who nearly killed comics, the life portrayed in this book doesn’t seem to have much interaction with the comic industry. Or, maybe, that’s the point. Maybe, the one thing that everyone knows about Fredric Wertham, the one thing that has turned him into a figure of hate in comics fandom, wasn’t actually that big a part of his life. He was a difficult man to get on with, but he was a respected doctor and he opened up a clinic in Harlem to provide psychotherapy to the black community despite being unable to raise any funds. Dr. Werthless displays the complexity of this man’s life and the horrific nature of the crimes dominating society at the time. It is a compelling must-read, if unsatisfactory when it comes to comic book history.
Notes
1 taken from an interview for Daily Dead https://dailydead.com/he-studied-murder-and-nearly-killed-the-comics-industry-dr-werthless-qa-with-harold-schechter-and-eric-powell/
2 The Doctor versus the Dagger Comics: Reading and cultural memory by Christopher Pizzino published in PMLA Vol 130 No 3 May 2015
3 Comics and Graphic Novels published by Bloomsbury. Edited by Julie Round, Rikke Platz Cortsen & Maaheen Ahmed ( page 61)
3 As quoted in The Ten Cent Plague by David Hajdu (page 40)
