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Author: Wagner, Geoffrey
Title: PARADE OF PLEASURE: A STUDY of POPULAR ICONOGRAPHY in the U.S.A.
Place Published: London
Publisher:Derek Verschoyle, Ltd
Date Published: 1954
Description:

192 + [12] illustrated pp., including 12 pp. of black & white and color reproductions of comic book covers and pages. 8vo. Red cloth, cover vignette in gilt, lacks dust jacket. First Edition. Fair to good: a reference copy. Dampsoiling to covers, 1/2" rubbed spot to rear cloth as from tape removal, bit of white residue to foot of spine; small abrasion to front pastedown, foxing.

British-born New Yorker Geoffrey Wagner rails against American mass media, including comics ("the marijuana of the nursery"). Wagner attacks EC with special gusto: "Tales from the CRYPT specialises in necrophiliac stories... No. 34 [features the] attempted rape of a pretty girl who, to elude the monster, throws herself out of the window...'" He also inveighs against misogyny, fascistic overtones ("Batman is another of these Fuhrer incarnations... with a strong right in place of the normal processes of the law"), and the propaganda and racism of war comics.

Parade of Pleasure was released in the UK in 1954 but wasn't released in the States until 1955, after the advent of the Comics Code, limiting its influence on American readers. It is useful to pre-Code scholars mostly for its insights into the international response to Yankee comics, which, despite import bans, traveled the globe with alarming ease. Parliament debated the scourge of American comics in 1951-52, with much concern about the "Americanisation of British Culture," as related by Martin Barker in John A. Lent's Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign [Farleigh Dickinson: 1999].

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