The term ‘McCarthyism’ is now used to describe a period of intense anticommunist suspicions in the United States starting from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. This paper examines how McCarthyism affected the entertainment industry and how the culture industry responded to it. It shows that while the public concerns over the morality of the comic strips and animated cartoons touched new heights during the McCarthy era, it reached its climax with the publication of Wertham’s landmark study, Seduction of the Innocent. The paper further goes on to show how comic strips have been used to control the field of social meaning available to children, which of late has been challenged.

During the 1930s, the purveyors of popular culture offered a way of escape to the American people who had just witnessed the stock market crash, the Great Depression, and the First World War, with the Second World War looming large on the horizon. They talked about these in all seriousness. But the same comic strips that gave the American public a way to escape from the frustration of the Depression plunged it into a crisis, as public concern over the morality of comics rose to new heights in the McCarthy era. This concern had been simmering since the medium’s birth, and it reached its climax with the publication of Wertham’s (1954) groundbreaking study, Seduction of the Innocent.

American Literature Journal, Amor in Pound, Classical European Literature, Homosexuality, Diastasis, Olga-Circe-Artemis, Heterosexual Love, Homosexual Love.