wertham

In investigating the mechanism of identification in individual children with individual comic books, it became clear to me that comic books are conditioning children to identify themselves with the strong man, however evil he may be. The hero in crime comics is not the hero unless he acts like a criminal. And the criminal in comic books is not a criminal to the child because he acts like a hero. He lives like a hero until the very end, and even then, he often dies like a hero, in a burst of gunfire and violence.
https://open.substack.com/pub/wertham/p/identification?r=g524u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web