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Communicators are turning to comics to make science pop.
The first time that comics and science met, it did not go well. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham was studying delinquent youth in New York City in the late 1940s and 1950s, when he noticed that many of his patients were reading cheap booklets called comics. He was shocked to find out that these comics were filled with horror and violence. In his popular book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), Wertham claimed that comics were corrupting their young, susceptible readers. These comments gave scientific credibility to an already widespread prejudice against comics voiced by contemporary authors such as Sterling North, who wrote in a Chicago Daily News editorial: "Badly drawn, badly written and badly printed-a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems-the effect of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant."
In the following years, a wave of concerned parents and educators banded together to "break the comic magazine," leading to hearings by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority, which stunted comics' growth for decades to come. These events, which are often told as a preamble to the birth of the underground "comix" of the 1960s and 1970s, were also a huge blow for anyone who hoped to use comics in the classroom.
Wertham's mistake was focusing too much on the content of comics (admittedly not the most edifying stories) instead of on the widespread appeal of the medium. If he had paid more attention, he would have noticed that in the 1940s and 1950s not only the "delinquent youth" were reading comics, but so were pretty much any teenagers who could scrape together the few cents to buy them. Instead of fearing and repressing comics, scientists should have tried to understand what makes them so compelling to young readers and use that information to their advantage. Had they done so, maybe today more people would know science through comic adventures instead of tedious lab demonstrations.
To their credit, some educators of the time, such as W. W. D. Sones in The Journal of Educational Sociology, recognized the potential of comics and advocated for their introduction in the classroom (similar ideas have recently been revived...