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Released in spring 1956, the fourteen-page pamphlet What's Wrong with Comic Books? (fig. 1) served as a warning to parents, educators, and young readers about the dangers of comic-book reading.1 The bulletin opens with an urgent call to action:
The "comic" book problem is of world-wide concern. It has assumed such serious proportions that many governments, including those of Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the United Nations, have appointed committees to study this matter. In response to a growing outcry from parents, educators, religious leaders and others, the Government of the Province of Alberta issued an Order in Council in 1954 which states: "[I]t is deemed advisable and in the public interest to establish a Board to be known as the Advisory Board on Objectionable Publications to study and investigate the question of crime and other objectionable comics and salacious magazines and to recommend effective action to prevent their sale and distribution in the Province."
Previous scholarship on comics censorship has focused on the 1954 US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency comic-book hearings and the testimony of Dr. Frederic Wertham as the fever pitch in the North America-wide comics moral panic.2 Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent (1954), had been one of the most strident anti-comics voices since the late 1940s, and in 1954 his message found an even wider audience during the televised US hearings. Following the hearings, comic books were censored-by their own industry. The Comics Magazine Association of America introduced a comprehensive new Comics Code for content- sanitizing depictions of violence, marriage and sex, and criminality (Nyberg 166-69). Jean-Paul Gabilliet describes the period after 1954 as a "calming of passions" in which "even if Dr. Wertham continued his crusade, he did so increasingly alone as mass media and, consequently, the public lost interest in this exaggerated moral panic" (237). Bradford Wright similarly notes how Wertham's crusade "generated little interest beyond his own shrinking audience" in "the second half of the 1950s" (178). However, this spotlight on the US hearings and singular figures such as Wertham overlooks what happened after 1954-specifically the continued and collective efforts of citizen action committees in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere to continue the comic-book fight.3
In Alberta, this fight took the form...