Wertham cheesecake

Here's a rarity: a pin-up calendar from 1957 lampooning the popular crusade against comics as a corrupter of the youth, chronicled most recently in David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.

The poem:

They're searching for a cause behind

Our kids' delinquent capers;

But whatever do they hope to find

Behind the funny papers?

Via Today's Inspiration, whose Flickr archive of comic strip advertising is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of commercial rhetoric. TI also offers this wonderful 1932 quote from a copywriter about the people who read comic strips:

Sterrett [a popular cartoonist] is frequently asked where he met Polly and her family, where they lived and so on. Such credulousness is only found among the sub-morons among his readers. But, Sterrett believes that that quality of realism which fools the cretins is what delights the morons as well.