For those untutored in Beatnikology, Gershon Legman was a beat writer who attacked comics in the late 40s with the same vigor that the infamous Dr. Frederic Wertham attacked them from the straight world. His most well known essay on this is entitled "The Psychopathology of Comics" and it appears in issue 3 of Neurotica, published by Jay Landesman in St. Louis in 1948.

    I was looking up Allen Ginsberg's first published poem in Neurotica 6, 1950 (entitled "Song: Fie My Fum, it later became the soundtrack to Alfred Leslie's famous Beat movie Pull My Daisy) when I was surprised to discover that Legman had written a small follow-up article that pulled Jack Kirby into his argument. I have written extensively about the parts of Kirby's career that amounted to "conspiracy as usual" business practices that even today keeps him from his full fame as America's most gifted comics artist (and also that he created a "Face on Mars" comics story back in 1957, which Richard Hoagland glommed onto briefly.) Kirby and his then partner Joe Simon were the first to create romance comics with a 1947 title called Young Romance.

    Legman's article is short enough for me to put it in this message below.

    If we accept what Legman says here, we must consider Jack Kirby a "journeyman degenerate of the comic-book industry", even though Legman tries to take credit for creation of the genre, or at least making it popular.

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Legman:

    Eight hundred million books were printed in America in 1948. Seven hundred million of them were comic books. (Richard Barbour, revised.) Of these, nearly half were crime-comics, legalized when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down, on March 29th, 1948, all state laws against printed 'bloodshed, lust or crime."

    The crime-comic collapsed in 1949 in the face of the attack on 'comic' violence in general, begun and led by Dr. Frederic Wertham. The principal shift was to the love-comic, a type previously almost unknown. Since Dr. Wertham made no suggestion as to what might replace the comics' undesirable violence - and since the industry's own self-censorship specifically forbade the new sexuality - the credit for changing the principal formula of the comics from crime to 'love' must be ascribed to the article "Not for Children: The Psychopathology of the Comics" by G. Legman in Neurotica 3 (November 1948) in which the sex-substituted nature of comics' violence was for the first time observed, and a reversal was called for.

    The immediate catalytic effect on the comics industry - desperate for an out -- was astonishing. As of March 1949 comic-books broke clearly into two groups: crime and love. The 'teen-hate types, and about half the crime, became 'love': the superjerk, horror-squinkie, and floppity-rabbit types became eroticized or cowboyized or both. (Even Superman is getting married.) The straight-crime type went almost completely out of business, with only nine new titles appearing in 1949, as opposed to seventy in 1948. (New York Times, Jan. 21, 1950, page 9.) The western-crime type, though carried along on the cowboyification of the country in preparation for World War III. (Saturday Evening Post, March 11, 1950, cover and page 3), nevertheless rose by only half its 1948 total, and already half of these are cowboy-love.

    The shift from violence back to sex had its certain clumsly humor: My True Love (formerly Western Killers). But more conspicuous, by its absence, was that 'popular demand' so much and so well touted previously as the excuse for exploiting sadism. By November 1948 the school-kids of the United States (and their parents) had gobbled up a quarter of a billion crime-comics since March, and were presumably clamoring for more. Instead, they were given love. That is to say, 'love' as the journeyman degenerates of the comic-book industry understand it. The improvement, if it is an improvement, is obviously slight. But if degenerates must control the effective education of the children of the world (the comics are now international), it is perhaps better that they should teach even the worst love than the best murder.

--GL

(Gershon lists only two Love Comics titles from 1937-1948, Sweethearts and Simon and Kirby's Young Romance). Then he gives a page and a half of love comics titles published in 1949.)