#frederic wertham

Happy Pride Month everyone, and incidentally today we also enter Year #7 of this ongoing project. Therefore triply appropriate to today, we look at the remarkable life of another comic book artist and illustrator: Clarence Matthew Baker.

Born in 1921 North Carolina, Baker later moved with his family to Pittsburgh; where he graduated high school in 1940. While most men of his age and station would have been drafted into service during World War II, a heart condition prevented this and he began studying art at the famed Cooper Union in New York. In 1944 Baker's work came to the attention of comic book publisher/packager Eisner & Iger, whose executives were reportedly so impressed with Baker's minimal portfolio that they hired him on the spot. Baker's style is considered the standard-bearer of what became known as "Good Girl Art;" a pulp style that lends itself to clean lines and a dynamic elegance --particularly when it came to depicting glamorous femme fatale leading ladies. This illustrative style would later be mimicked/homaged by modern-day artists such as Dave Stevens, creator of The Rocketeer.

In that vein, Baker's work quickly elevated from ad hoc background artist to leading penciller and inker, on well-known titles such as Phantom Lady, Sky Girl, Tiger Girl, and particularly the very popular Sheena, Queen Of The Jungle. At a time when racial segregation starkly defined American life (and the comics industry was certainly no exception to this), Baker was nevertheless quietly defying convention by laying out --and eventually defining-- an artistic style all his own. Perhaps his most significant contribution to the art form was in illustrating the then-described "picture novel" It Rhymes With Lust, a 126-page detective thriller that is today regarded as the earliest known example of a full-length graphic novel.

This last title brought its own controversy; notorious moral crusader and faux-psychologist Frederic Wertham brandished It Rhymes With Lust as one of his principal outrage-producers when he testified in Congress about the Evils Of Comic Books and their contribution to the so-called "epidemic" of juvenile delinquency, which led to the much-maligned Comics Code Authority. In 1945 Baker kicked off his own jungle adventure series for Crown Comics, Voodah. Such obvious Edgar Rice Burroughs imitations were innumerable in those years, but Voodah was unique in that the lead character was Black and did not fit the established stereotypes. Fearing consumer backlash after the character's first appearance, Crown's publishers insisted --for the covers, at least-- that the lead character's skin be lightened and that his hair be drawn longer and more flowing, for subsequent serials. This series ran for 15 more issues.

Closeted, Baker nonetheless carried on an understated relationship with publisher Archer St. John --eventual founder of St. John Publications, which featured many of Matt's illustrations in its various titles, including the aforementioned It Rhymes With Lust. Baker and St. John traveled together frequently, and in a 2012 interview Matt's brother Fred Robinson stated "They had a very close relationship. I don't know exactly what it was."

Phantom Lady’s second incarnation was actually relatively short-lived, although the blue-and-red-costumed heroine became the default image of the character in later years, thanks to the distinctive “good time” girl art of Matt Baker. Under Baker’s version, Phantom Lady became younger, sexier, more shapely and wore a costume that left little to the imagination. She appeared in several stories in ten issues of her own title from August 1947 until April 1949, although she also appeared in nine issues of All Top Comics in the same period. However, it was Baker’s art that was, amongst others, showcased by Dr Frederic Wertham in his book Seduction of the Innocent, which became the foundational work for the moral crusade launched against Golden Age comic books in the 1950s, which culminated in the introduction of the Comics Code in the USA. Although the code was aimed principally at the lurid, and sometimes sadistic, imagery contained in the “true crimes” comics genre, sexualised female characters like Phantom Lady were swept up in the panic, with the result she effectively disappeared from print in the mid-1950s, until DC Comics obtained the rights to the character and felt brave enough to relaunch her in the 1970s.

Of course, by the standards of today, when so many costumed heroines are hyper-sexualised, clad in skin-tight spandex and possessing breasts that look like they should have come off a production line, Baker’s cartoony imagery looks like innocent fun, rather than anything corrupting. However, Phantom Lady, along with arguably a whole generation of 1940s tough super heroines simply disappeared and I do wonder if that had more to do with a general societal desire to reimpose prewar gender roles as much as it was to save the nation’s youth.

The pages featured above are from the Phantom Lady story, The World’s Meanest Crook, that appeared in Phantom Lady #15 (December 1947). It is a good example of Matt Baker’s work depicting Phantom Lady in full athletic mode and a sexy depiction of her alter ego Sandra Knight, in the final panel. This version of the character was undoubtedly designed to draw in older male readers as well as the target readership of young teenage boys and girls, but it was hardly civilisation shaking.

Wertham? Yeah.

Ephemerist: It's the comics that's the problem!

Just like social media and the iPad these days, Pokémon and Heavy Metal and horror movies before that, comic books are at the root of all that’s wrong with kids. I wouldn’t know what’s wrong with kids, but even Socrates had a few things to say about them. Anyway, thanks to the efforts of Frederic Wertham c.s. we know that it all boils down to comics, their sordid subjects and lurid images. But…