Zounds! Once again, the innocent citizens of Gotham City have been rescued from the clutches of modern art by their mild-mannered mayor, Rudy Giuliani. The latest menace to civilization? A reworking of the Last Supper, shown at the mayors arch-nemesis, the Brooklyn Museum. Entitled “Yo Mamas Christ,” the offending picture features a naked, black woman, the artist, n the place of Jesus.

Holy, uh, blasphemy! After the fiendish image was zapped by Mr. Giuliani as “anti-Catholic,” the mayor in full, superhero mode launched a renewed campaign against pornography, and called for the creation of a “Commission of Decency,” to police any cultural institution that receives public funding.

Such antics have led some observers to wonder if the mayor is actually concealing a secret identity as an art-world publicist. The tempest he has whipped up has delighted no one so much as the artist in question no doubt in part because it has let her evade all those awkward questions about whether her work is, well, good.

What has engaged Gothamites much more is Giulianis campaign to move stores that sell pornographic materials out of most neighborhoods. After all, to move through almost any section of our culture today from the movies to the internet, from television to a stroll down the block is to be bombarded with images of sex and violence that most Americans might consider fine for consenting adults, but which they are much more leery about exposing their children to.

Our debate over just what is or is not suitable for the kids has gone on for more than half a century now. Its origins over what might have seemed the most innocuous of subjects: the comic book. It was the comic book that would be the last public medium to be put under a self-censoring, industry code and the first to put a real crack in the puritannical, public consensus that came into being after the First World War.

Comic books as opposed to the “funny paper” strips published in newspapers did not even really come into being until 1933. Yet by 1941, one study estimated that some 180 million issues were being sold each year, from over 100,000 newsstands and that children aged 9-14 spent 75 percent of their free time reading them. Objections from parents and educators proliferated almost as quickly. Most of these were about the comics thin stories and simple pictures. There were even fears as Amy Kiste Nyberg traces in her fascinating account, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code,that the poor quality of comics printing would “spoil a child’s natural sense of color.”

But the idea of comic books as a national threat really burst upon the public consciousness in March of 1948. That was the month a 53-year-old, German immigrant psychiatrist named Dr. Fredric Wertham convened a psychiatric symposium at which he charged that heavy comic-book reading had contributed to the delinquency of every troubled child he had ever studied.

Despite how he is regarded now by civil libertarians and comics aficionados, Dr. Wertham was no stereotypical, blue-stockinged censor. During a distinguished career at some of the nations leading hospitals, he fought tirelessly for years to bring the first psychiatric clinic to Harlemone that served its patients free of charge. Wertham had become friends with Clarence Darrow, when he had proved himself one of the few psychiatrists anywhere willing to testify for indigent, black defendants, and his research and testimony would play a crucial role in the landmark, Brown v. Board of Education case that ended segregation in public schools. For his time, Dr. Wertham was a generally broad-minded, tolerant, and idealistic advocate for poor and troubled children and it was from his idealism that his worst excesses would follow. The charges of Wertham and other psychiatrists at his symposium were reported by Judith Crist in Colliers magazine, under the sensational headline, “Horror in the Nursery.” They struck a chord. Post-World War II America was undergoing a fresh bout of moral panic, swept with guilt that the war years had produced a nation of “juvenile delinquents” a phrase that was just then coming into its own.

Wertham would state repeatedly that comic books were not the sole or even the primary factor in producing delinquents. Yet he would pursue the subject almost obsessively over the next decade, producing a host of articles and interviews, and finally his most famous and infamous work, Seduction of the Innocent.

The book, like much of Werthams work, relied heavily on anecdotal evidence from his case studies, and examples drawn from the comics themselves. It is impossible to deny much of his indictment of the medium. Many lines of comics had begun to feature horror stories, with depictions of severed heads and limbs, graphic shootings and stabbings, that resembled the Grand Guignol. The violence was heavily flavored with sexespecially with scantily clad women who were routinely beaten, tied-up, tortured, and demeaned. Non-whites were depicted as inferior, semi-human beings. Still other comics contained detailed plans on how to commit crimes.

Yet Dr. Wertham was less successful in linking such images to the behavior of urban, juvenile offenders. Social scientists have since picked apart much of Werthams methodology and even to a layman, many of his stories strain credulity.

One passage in Seduction of the Innocent,for instance, relates the deleterious effects of comic books on “Annie, aged ten, [who] engaged in sex play with men for which she received money,” and who is quoted as saying, “I meet the men on the docks.” Hmm…a ten-year-old girl who trawls the docks, looking for tricks? Could it be that comic books are not the real problem here? In another instance, Wertham rails against a story that “gives a price list for hurting people in the protection racket” apparently unaware that the list, right down to prices and descriptions, was nearly identical to one distributed by the Whyos, a gang of old-style “juvenile delinquents” who had run the streets of New York some seventy years earlier. Was life copying art, or art life? It was in answering this question that Wertham showed himself at both his most visionary and his most frightening. Preoccupied with the effect that mass culture had on society as a whole, he let his good intentions run away with him.

“People like to be nonviolent,” Wertham maintained, adding, “It is easy to laugh at that as a Utopia; but there is no proof that hostility and violence are an ineradicable part of human nature.”

Actually, it was not easy to laugh at all, considering how much damage utopias similar to Dr. Werthams had just wreaked upon humanity. From this boundless faith, the familiar spiral of the censor soon followed.

It did not matter to Dr. Wertham if comic stories showed that crime did not pay, or that evil-doers would be punished. Even the adventures of Superman were a threat” phantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished again and again.” Meanwhile, “the Batman stories are psychologically homosexual,” and Batman’s relationship with Robin “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together” that would corrupt children. Wonder Woman was “The Lesbian counterpart of Batman”

Wertham saw only one solution. As he told Crist, “the time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores.”

Washington was listening. In the postwar era, hysterical congressional investigations seem to have been Americas means of choice for blowing off steam. Wertham soon hooked up with Estes Kefauver, the irrepressible Tennessee senator, whose interminable hearings on organized crime wildly exaggerated the power of the Mafia, but nearly got him nominated for president. Juvenile delinquency seemed to offer another inviting target, and Kefauvers new Senate subcommittee opened three days of hearings in New York City in the spring of 1954with Dr. Wertham serving as both consultant and chief witness.

The hearings did not go well for the comics and their defenders. William Gaines, whose E.C. Comics published many of the most violent books, was outraged by the attacks on his industry, and eager to testify. But his mind was muddled by diet pills at the time, and he stepped into an easy trap when he told the committee, “My only limits are bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.”

Senator Kefauver then held up an E.C. comic and asked, “This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?”

Gaines dug himself in even deeper. “Yes, sir, I do for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the blood could be seen dripping from it, and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.”

Kefauver: “You’ve got blood coming out of her mouth.” “A little,” Gaines admitted.

Wertham, by contrast, was convincing and self-assured and disingenuous. His testimony failed to mention the results of a questionnaire he had designed and sent out on behalf of the Kefauver committeein which nearly 60 percent of responding psychiatrists found no link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, and almost 70 percent opposed banning any comics. He went on to represent an E.C. Comics story that clearly decried racial prejudice against Hispanics as racist. Why? Because it depicted violent, racist men committing violent deeds and using racist epithets. “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry” Dr. Wertham claimed, abandoning all restraint. “They teach them race hatred at the age of four before they can read.”

“Once you start to censor, you must censor everything,” Gaines warned, pointing out how widely Wertham had flung his net. If any depiction of bad things undermined our children’s psyches, what was not to be banned? The Bible? Most literary classics? All newspapers?

In the end, the committee decided not to censor officially. Instead, the comics were forced into their own, self-regulating code, much like that imposed upon the movies following World War I. A disgusted Gaines dropped E.C.s horror comic lines, to concentrate on his new satirical magazine entitled Mad. Sales of the newly sanitized, homogenized comics dropped precipitously by the end of the decade, although many observers attribute this less to censorship than to the advent of a formidable new contender for childrens attention—television.

Neither outcome much pleased Fredric Wertham. He felt that the comics code did not go nearly far enough, and found plenty more to despise on the tube. The implacable critic of mass culture even condemned coverage of the Vietnam War on the nightly news; such broadcasts, “really are war commercials.” Instead, Wertham went on to publish an admiring study of fanzines in 1973, praising them for their nonviolence, anti-commercialism, and “genuine human voices outside of all mass manipulation.” It was an ironic denouement to his great crusade. For the comics, like every other medium of American popular culture, would soon slip their code and re-emerge in all sorts of raucous, offensive, fascinating, and brilliant new forms. A visitor to almost any, urban comic book store today will discover plenty of sex, and quite a bit of what Anthony Burgesss droogies liked to call “the old ultraviolence” albeit mostly in adults-only sections. They will also find some of the most original, individualistic, and provocative art in America today, from Art Spigelmans classic Maus, graphic novels of the Holocaust; to my personal favorite, Ben Katchor’s brilliant, hallucinatory adventures of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer; to the works of Lynda Barry, Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, Scott McCloud, Harvey Pekar, the Los Hernandos brothers, Jessica Abel, Angus Oblong, and a whole host of others.

In short, the readers and creators of comics today have worked out a typically pragmatic, American solution to the problem of censorship, imposing some restrictions on what is suitable for children but nurturing a lively and independent culture. One would like to think that, if he were around today, Fred Wertham would be a fan of the comics.

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