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Alex Liddell

Alex Liddell is an independent researcher, writer and blogger at Obscuricom.com. They are a philosophy graduate from the University of East Anglia, and their published papers include: ÒDolores Umbridge and the Lawful, Bureaucratic Evil in the Ministry of MagicÓ in A Wizard of Their Age 2: Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation (SUNY Press) and ÒDuality and Double Entendres: Bi-Coding The Queen Clown of Crime from Subtext to CanonÓ in Essays on DCÕs Harley Quinn (Texas Tech University). AlexÕs research interests include comics history, censorship, media representation and LGBT studies.

To Protect the Innocent: Does Comic Book Censorship to Prevent Youth Corruption Make Sense?

nvoking the protection of youth as an excuse for censorship is nothing new, but it did reach now infamously ridiculous extremes in the movement to censor American comics in the 1950s. The polemical book Seduction of the Innocent, Fredric Wertham’s treatise on the influence of comic books on juvenile delinquency, was central to this movement and led to the comics industry imposing rigid self-regulated restrictions on all its content in the form of The Comics Code Authority, which only lost its grip totally on the comics industry relatively recently when DC Comics abandoned it in 2011.