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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6680594" data-attributes="member: 6681948">As to the side discussion on comics, I agree with the "moral panic" issue.  The innocent get sucked in with the guilty.  I don't think DC or Atlas (Marvel's precursor) were caught up in the more lurid publishing, but Batman was tagged by Wertham as selling homosexual pedophilia nevertheless.What would have happened absent that, and the Comics Code Authority?  Impossible to say.  We have bookstores selling Shades of Grey (and more blatant books) and children's fiction.  Comics may well have evolved down separate paths (adult comics certainly exist today, although not side by side with Archie and Superman).  Like other print media, comics are struggling, and they could easily have been gone back in the '80s as well had direct distribution not been developed.One may as well ask what would have happened if Stan Lee had caved to the CCA, rather than publishing his Spidey tale that largely broke its back, or how comics would have evolved if real Supers had emerged (which Watchmen did, tangentially), or whether pulp magazines would have faced the same backlash if they had not largely been supplanted by picture books long before Wertham came along.For that matter, your own review of the history of animation shows how easily the medium can change - it wasn't that much later that animation was relegated to a medium aimed at children alone.</blockquote>