"Sexy, Slangy and Salacious"

N.Z.'s Staple Reading Diet Attacked

Such unanimity may at first seem surprising but there were few parents, teachers or other responsible adults who attempted, during the discussions of the past few months, to make out a case for the lower type of children's comic. No rational person could pretend that the depiction of Young Fornication or Slightly - Older - But - Still - Alluring' Adultery makes suitable reading for children.

Nor would a rational person suggest that stories of germ warfare, Roman, medieval or Russian torture the history of the more lively directors of Murder, Inc.. fights to the death in dark alleys, submerged sub-marines or bombers functioning on one engine, or even invasions by robots from Mars, are successful as bed-time stories to guarantee little Johnny a sound night's rest. No rational person likewise would deliberately set up as heroes of a child's emulation characters of what is euphemistically called "the underworld." the members of which are divided into two categories: the tall, dark-haired types with good teeth, who look like the young Dorian Gray, and have tough fists but hearts of gold, and the short, tough characters, with false teeth, who look like the mature Mr. Gray, and are tough-fisted with hearts of stone. These two classes arc exclusive of all the gentlemen featured in the lower grade of comic. The women are equally distinctive, being either ugly, fat and badly but fully dressed, or beautiful and chiefly undressed.

So when the Education Department in March of this year asked booksellers to cooperate in endeavouring to control this type of comic, it found a ready and almost universal response from religious, academic and commercial circles. The case is self-evident when we see, for example, the mere titles of some of these works intended for the entertainment of children in their early 'teens: I Hunted for Love, Wild Desires Made Me Love Blind, I Lied to Trap a Sweetheart, This Was My Shame, I was too Fast for Love, Mock Marriage, or My First Mistake. The effect on moral life of scenes of brutality and depravity, and on the Intellectual life of a text consisting almost entirely of monosyllables and slang, needs no comment.

It is when we come to the less offensive border-line cases that we find no unanimity of opinion. Some ask merely for a "lift" in the moral and intellectual content of the material, while others have gone to the root of the matter with an attack on the genre itself.

Among those who aim only at a "cleaning up" are the N.Z. Inter-Church Council, and the executives of the Educational Institute and the National Council of Women, who said in a joint recommendation to Mr. Algie: "Realising how deeply embedded in the reading of the people the comic has become, not only among adults, we are convinced that no good purpose can be achieved by their elimination: on the contrary, we believe this form of entertainment, if used with discretion, could be effectively applied to education in various ways."

The first part of the argument is not the most reasonable in the world: the fact that a particular action has became habitual is no reason why "no good purpose" would be served by its elimination; it is equally true to say that because some vice, or disease, has seized a group of people, harm would result from their elmination.

The second half of the statement is an opinion shared by few educationists. Dr. Robert Hutchins, former chancellor of the University of Chicago, has some scathing remarks about comics as "the principal cultural manifestation of our epoch." Most of the printed and broadcast material in the United States seemed to have been produced by, and for, people who had had only three years, "and not very good ones," in the primary school, he said.

This ties in too uncomfortably with the horrifying statement which a Masterton bookseller made last year: "By far the greater proportion—approximately 90 per cent—of the comics we sell are to adults, and by no means only to young adults. A recent comic on teenage romance is one of the most popular we have. We can't get enough of them, but not one is bought by a child."

He is supported by Mr. R. A. Dickie, principal of the Auckland Training College, who says, "Comics are cheap, flamboyant and too much in evidence. As they require little or no effort for perusal they tend to become habit-forming. . . . Children have been found to develop a comic-reading habit which tends to drive out any other kind of reading."

It is wishful thinking to stress the educative effect of comics. The vast majority of those at present available depict either brutality or a degree of whimsy in the animal kingdom which would give any zoo apoplexy.

No teacher living has Inculcated an appreciation of a blank-verse play such as Hamlet or Macbeth by showing his pupils a precis of the plot in two pages of monocrome and the twentieth century idiom. It is equally certain that giving a child a reproduction in comic-strip form of the plot of, say, The Alchemist, will not necessarily make him eager to read Ben Jonson; for the fact remains that an IQ of 60-plus is sufficient for the understanding of a comic-strip, but that the appreciation of wit will always require a modicum of Intelligence and effort.

To those who talk of education through comics, even the most tastefully-coloured pictures depicting the plots of the very best authors, Carol Jackson's example is, I think, unanswerable: one does not teach a child to like spinach by first giving him a meal of marshmallow out of the spinach pot.

We can be assured that children brought up on intellectual diet of comics (even the most superior variety available at present, the English comics for very young children) can never be expected to graduate to a plane of reading above that of Life magazine. The comics have taught them to absorb information at the easiest possible level, and Life continues the process. Looking at pictures is the lowest common denominator of intellectual capacity or appreciation; and it is noticeable, in examining the early comic books, that each new publication alms at less dialogue, and increasingly simple and unsubtle plot-development.

The content of the less objeotionable comics is as lamentable as the style. Margharita Laski says of present day children's literature in general: "The fabulous and the fantastical have become merged in one vast orgy of whimsicality. Not only do intolerably dull children trip off to all sorts of unbearable fairy-lands, but innumerable railway engines and little houses are anthropomorphised to drool and mimble-mamble with a wealth of sickly sentiment;" which fits the thousands of imitator, of Mr. Wait Disney very comfortably.

The epitome of this twentieth century sentimentality is Mr. Disney's own film Fantasia, that monument to pretension and vulgarity, unpleasantly reminiscent of the more whimsical comic-books, and considered. God help us, as a worthy example of Twentieth Century Art.

It was typical because, as the logical progency of the comic-strips, it represented perfectly our motto of Art Made Easy. Art, however, cannot be made as easy as that: when the attempt is made the result is no longer artistic (as in Fantasia) or educative (as in the comic books).

—P.B.