Twelve years ago, in 1936, there was not one comic book published in the United States. Today, at a conservative estimate, there are five hundred million yearly. All comic books without exception are principally, if not wholly devoted to violence. The price being only a few cents apiece, and the distribution national, every city child can, and does, read from ten to a dozen of these pamphlets monthly, an unknown number of times, and then trades them off for others. The fortification of this visual violence with similar aural violence over the radio daily, and both together in the movies on Saturday, must also be counted in.
Disguises are still necessary.
About a fifth of all comic books today openly glorify crime, and even these have to take it all back in fatuous exhortations to law and order at the top of every page. The crime comic tells the child that murder is the act of a criminal, and that it will be punished. The educational comic tells him the opposite. It gives murder prestige. A military hero killed so many and so many men.