Magazine Village 〉True Crime
In May, 1947, Arthur Bernhard’s Magazine Village company, a one title publisher, released True Crime Comics, designed and edited by Jack Cole. The first issue (#2) featured Cole’s “Murder, Morphine, and Me”, the story of a young female drug addict who became involved with gangsters. The story would become one of the most controversial of the period and samples of the art, including a panel from a dream sequence in which the heroine has her eye held open and threatened with a hypodermic needle, would be used in articles and books (like Geoffrey Wagner’s Parade of Pleasure) about the pernicious influence and obscene imagery of crime comics.
In the late 1940s, the comic book industry became the target of mounting public criticism for their content and their potentially harmful effects on children. In some communities, children piled their comic books in schoolyards and set them ablaze after being egged-on by moralizing parents, teachers, and clergymen.
In 1948, John Mason Brown of the Saturday Review of Literature described comics as the “marijuana of the nursery; the bane of the bassinet; the horror of the house; the curse of kids, and a threat to the future.” The same year, after two articles by Dr. Fredric Wertham put comic books through the wringer, an industry trade group, the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers (ACMP) was formed but proved ineffective.
