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replies only: "No animal kills for pleasure alone"- a statement of which
one may doubt both the truth and the relevance. Nor does he deal with
the fact that those young people whose cultural interests are most fully
comprehended in comic books and similar types of art are also likely
to be most active sexually (see Kinsey).
The second point is common coin in the discussion of popular
culture, but it is time we asked whether, in the crude formulation it
usually receives, it really offers any illumination. In what sense does
"society" actually make use of culture as a "servant"? What is the re–
lation to this "society" of those who consume popular culture--or, for
that matter, of the critic himself? And, after all, is an examination of
comic books the most reasonable method of demonstrating that our lives
are difficult? Mr. Legman gives us only his sullen conviction that some
kind of conspiracy is going on.
For his third point, Mr. Legman relies heavily on scare statistics:
five hundred million comic books are printed every year; one Canadian
tree out of-is it three?-goes into the manufacture of paper on which
will be printed pictures and descriptions of violence; an American child
now seventeen has probably been exposed to a minimum of eighteen
million separate images of fighting, torture, and murder. And so on:
one could invent these figures and still be sure they were substantially
correct. But it is not so easy to decide what they mean: we cannot as–
sume that the intensity of an experience is to be measured by how many
individuals expose themselves to it how many times. Mr. Legman has
again made the mistake of thinking that a strong statement of the exist–
ence of a phenomenon implies its significance. (Figures on American
consumption of chewing gum-also, surely, a form of "compensation"–
are likely to be equally "alarming.") It is possible, for instance, that the
tremendous dissemination of comic books is mainly a technological tri–
umph (Mr. Legman himself mentions the principle that bad art drives
out good) . The real problem-aesthetic as well as sociological-may be
what happens to
one
reader confronted with
one
image of violence, and
on this there is little information, since those who write about comic
books do not often read them for pleasure. (My own child, discussing
adult objections to the comics, asked: "What's wrong with things being
exciting?" This seems to me a question that must be dealt with.)
The most interesting element of Mr. Legman's pamphlet is its tone,
which is one of the grossest demagoguery. "In our culture the perversion
of children has become an industry." "That mystery writers are murder–
pimps would be hard to gainsay." "That the publishers, editors, artists,
and writers of comic-books are degenerates and belong in jail, goes with-
