The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

A climactic event in The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a 1954 Senate hearing overseen by the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, also known as the Senate Comic Book Hearings. These hearings did in fact take place, with psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham serving as the chief witness against the burgeoning comic-book industry. Wertham had made a splash earlier that year with the publication of his book Seduction of the Innocent, which claimed that lurid images of violence in popular comic books were exerting a pernicious influence on American youth. In this period, comics depicting often violent clashes between superheroes and criminals were rapidly gaining popularity, and the rise of this new genre coincided with a rise in youth crime so that many parents and educators saw a causal link between the two phenomena (González). Wertham’s book became the flashpoint for a moral panic.

In the hearings, Wertham drew a direct comparison between comic books and Nazi propaganda, stating, “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. They get the children much younger” (94). This incendiary claim offers a direct contrast with Joe Kavalier’s own view of his work. Having escaped the Holocaust himself, Joe sees his work in The Escapist as offering hope that freedom is possible and that even enemies as powerful as the German state can be thwarted. Nonetheless, Joe does struggle with the moral weight of his work. Though he believes in the moral value of his comics as a form of catharsis, he also worries that, in offering the fantasy of a strong man who rights wrongs, he may be inadvertently empowering bullies—exactly the opposite of what he hopes to do.

In Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham also claimed that there was a sexual or romantic subtext to the relationships between superheroes and their younger male sidekicks. This claim lent fuel to virulently anti-gay stereotypes suggesting that gay men preyed on adolescent boys. In the novel, Sam Clay—who is both gay and a comic-book writer—strongly rejects Wertham’s claim: 

Dr. Frederic Wertham was an idiot; it was obvious that Batman was not intended, consciously or unconsciously, to play Robin’s corruptor: he was meant to stand in for his father, and by extension for the absent, indifferent, vanishing fathers of the comic-book-reading boys of America (631).

This alternative reading echoes Joe’s view of their shared art form: Comic books, like all works of art, exist to heal emotional wounds.