@jds

It's that people apparently never learn from it.

FYI: The book was mentioned in the New Yorker as well:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/03/31/080331crbo_books_...

They had a documentary on the History channel last year about this. It was very interesting to watch. They were just as down on comics as they are now on video games.

ah...Fredric Wertham

the Jack Thompson of yesterday.

To those who do not learn from their history is doomed to repeat it.

Hmm come to think of it Iraq is oddly similear to the crusades minus the swords and with more explostions. Anyways off topic.

To the topic. "These comic books are teaching kids how to do crimes! Never mind that Rock and or roll makes teens have premartial sex and they get pregnate! *bum bumm bummmmm!*"

Lets see what the blame for scocieties ill's have been. I know I'm gonna miss some and I'm going to start back before modern history, near the classic age.

Math->Science->That other guys beliefs->music->books->people who could read that wheren't rich->everything that wasn't religeon->Rock & Roll (cuz we all know that listening to the Beatles got you pregnant) -> comics (tought kids to shoot lasers out there eyes and knives out their knuckles, god those were HORRIBLE times! Lot's of fighting with cliche villians like the Joker, and that lamest super hero of all Aquaman! Come to think of it maybe the Aquaman comics should have been banned all he did was talk to fish!) -> Jews-> Communism->hippies->KISS (made people want to "rock and or roll all night on a school night! Oh the horror!)-> Punk kids who sported mohawks with diffrent colors! *bum bumm bummmm!* rap -> boy bands -> anyone who played or saw doom-> vijda games.

I know I missed a lot of blames but I threw in ones I knew the best.

There was a time when the book "Seduction of the Innocent" was fully available on the Net, featuring text AND pictures. Pity the website where I picked it up is down now.

If these historical bannings have taught me anything it's that these critics wish they can reach into peoples' brains and limit our thoughts to content they consider appropriate. Thoughtcrime. After all, every medium is an expression of someone's thoughts.

@Ebonheart
To the topic. “These comic books are teaching kids how to do crimes! Never mind that Rock and or roll makes teens have premartial sex and they get pregnate! *bum bumm bummmmm!*”

See, even talking about comics is making you think of sex, all that talk about people's bums...

@Xlorep DarkHelm
I'd tend to agree, heavy metal got a pretty severe pasting in the media but it was fairly sporadic and mostly involved subliminal messages, backmasking & satanic swearing/images. Oh and of course Ozzy Osbourne personally ensuring that that teenager killed himself by comitting the most outrageous crime of all, recording Suicide Solution.

As for games, I doubt they could really do mass burnings of game stuff, aside from the automatic "EEK! Just like nazi germany" thing that even Faux news would pick up on (more for the hysteria value than any form of moral issue because we know they HAVE no morals), the burning of all that plastic would cause serious levels of potentially toxic fumes. If not toxic directly it'd certainly be bad for the environment & would probably be shut down on account of the emissions.

"Video games made me do it" lawsuits are todays burnings. We don't need a physical fire anymore.

It would be nice if people learned from the past. Yet it is not so.

Personnally I think that the politicians have looked at the comic book thing and are trying to emulate that. After all, look at what happened. Comics were sanatized for nearly 30 years. Isn't the goal to sanitize video games in the same way?

@Aliasalpha
try turning off your safe search :p LOL

Thought police is just shit on the wheel, round it goes and back it comes, no one expects the spanish inquisition - you thought that you weren't a believer ? BURN
now its belief in politicians and their magic powers to protect people via laws, stopping them from the pointless need to think for themselves.
- you thought games were good ? BURN !!

I will *definitely* be buying this book. GP is absolutely right in relating video gaming and comics' continuous struggle - they're very similar to each other.

The struggle continues for both media.

I'll see if I can't get a copy of this book from somewhere; it looks like a nice insight into how bawling reactionaries resurface throughout history, moving from one medium to the next and devoting themselves to the banal bandwagon of dogmatic opposition. Then the next one comes along and suddenly, strangely, the old evil doesn't seem to matter anymore... L'histoire bégaye, as they say.

The governent is not attacking video games because they are ignorant of the truth. They are attacking videogames to improve their approval ratings by "protecting our children". The people who need to read this book are the voters. They should sell this book in every Gamestop and EB. Maybe a curious parent will buy it and learn something. Or maybe little Timmy will buy it for his parents so they at least will have a clue.

@Ebonheart

Don't knock the Joker!

Not until you've read The Killing Joke!

As for Aqua Man.....

MEH.

Video game,s comic books, tv, movies, all of them have this in common.

Yep. Same shit, different day.

The thing is with video games is that were fighting back.

Still a shame what happened to those comic's though :/.

It goes beyond comics:

when storytelling branched away from religion, it suffered the same lambasting;
when speeches began to be written down, that was decried as ruinous to minds;
when novels (as we know them) came in vogue around the Victorian era, they were blamed for young men and women acting out character roles, disobeying their parents, becoming too imaginative or crazy, and committing crimes that had always been committed

--but of course, it let bad rich parents (and parents of rotten childre) blame the novels for their teenaged and young adult children doing those things "below their class" or criminal. Hence, everyone conveniently ignored the reality that crime rates weren't higher, just more publicized with better printing and more widespread news coverage.

Not that this precisely parallels the problem we're seeing today with idiots blaming videogames for the same old crimes even as their rates and the degrees of violence diminish. Oh, wait, it DOES.

Of course, if our politicians spent as much money on education as they do on frivolous, ineffective, and unconstitutional soccer-mom-wooing, more Americans might know that. Or maybe they would at least realize that the government does NOT enforce ratings systems, and it is NOT illegal for underaged children to purchase or see ANY media form.

Then the politicians can stop trotting out "this percentage of parents want videogame ratings enforced by the government" without failing to note that the EXACT SAME number of parents believe movie ratings ALREADY ARE government-enforced, and therefore assume such legislation would put videogames on par with movies for restriction when the reality is, they already are.

George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

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