Page:1954 Juvenile Delinquency Testimony.pdf/21

Rh The last two comic books I mentioned are published by the Entertaining Comic group and I mention it because the publisher of Entertaining Comic group will be appearing here later this morning.

Now, that completes the illustration of the type of comics to which we are addressing ourselves.

Mr. . Just one point, Mr. Clendenen. In talking about the child who is placed in a foster home, turned into a werewolf, you said that psychologically that was disturbing. Why do you say that?

Mr. . Let me refer back to the time that I was operating an institution for emotionally disturbed children. Any child who is not able to live, continue to live, with his own family and who is disturbed and goes into an institution and then later is facing foster-home placement has a great many fears both conscious and unconscious regarding the future. That is, he is very much afraid, very fearful about going out and living with the family.

He has met them, to be sure, but he does not know them and he is a very insecure individual to begin with. This is the type of material that I myself would feel would greatly increase a youngster's feeling of insecurity, anxiety, and panic regarding placement in a foster-family home.

Mr. . Mr. Clendenen, you produced a number of comic books with different titles. Are they all, each one of them, produced by a different company?

Mr. . No, they are not. The organization of the publishers in the comic-book industry is really a very complex type of organization.

I would like to refer here to the Atlas Publishing Co., or Atlas publishing group as an example. Atlas represents one of the major publishers in the comic-book field and, incidentally, there will be a representative of the Atlas Co. appearing also at these hearings. The Atlas Co. is owned by a man-and-wife team, Mr. and Mrs. Martin Goodman.

Now, the Atlas Publishing Co. publishes between 49 and 50 different comic titles. However, this number of comic titles, the 45 or 50 comic titles, are produced through no less than some 25 different corporations.

The Atlas organization also includes still another corporation through which it distributes its own publications. This particular exhibit shows 20 of the different groups of crime and weird comics they produce through 15 corporations.

Now, although several of the other publishers who are in the business of publishing comic books are smaller, the patterns of organization are essentially the same.

In other words, many times they organize themselves in forms of 2, 3, 4, or more different corporations. The end result of this type of corporation is that while there are many corporations involved in the publishing of comic books, the entire industry really rests in the hands of relatively few individuals.

Mr. . When you say they organize into different companies, do they organize into companies that produce nothing but comic books or do they produce other types of literature?

Mr. . No, they also produce other types of literature. Many of them produce different kinds of magazines in addition to producing comics.