"Psyche in Sequence: Psychoanalysis, Comics, and the American Superhero," a Lecture by Valentino Zullo

The many meetings of the comic book industry and the United States mental health system in the twentieth century defined the burgeoning medium. In 1941, psychologist William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman to inspire readers to imagine a utopian future as he advocated for the form of comics as a way to address social issues. In 1948, Fredric Wertham, psychiatrist and director of the Lafargue Mental Health Clinic in Harlem, also took an interest in the medium, but he saw comics as a cause rather than a solution for rising juvenile delinquency in the United States. He attempted to rally parents and politicians to regulate children’s reading practices, taking his cause as far as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in 1954. In the course of a little less than two decades, these mental health specialists would leave an impact on the industry that would shock the form and alter its stories for years. This presentation will explore how comics were redefined by mental health practitioners including how psychoanalysis, the dominant theory of mind in the United States at the time, reframed the stories of the medium. The response committed many comics, including the superhero genre, to a model of the mind which persists even in an era of biological psychiatry.

Valentino Zullo is Assistant Professor of English, Anisfield-Wolf Fellow, and co-director of the Rust Belt Humanities Lab at Ursuline College. He is Associate editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and co-editor-in-chief of Rust Belt Studies. He co-leads the Get Graphic program at Cleveland Public Library where he was the Ohio Center for the Book Scholar-in-Residence and is a board member of the Siegel & Shuster Society. He is a licensed independent social worker and advanced candidate in psychoanalytic training at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center.

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