In my book, Wertham Was Right — which you can order here, he tried to mention unobtrusively — I wrote an essay about Dr. Fredric Wertham. Back in the fifties, he was the main purveyor of the theory that the comic books then being published spawned juvenile delinquency and should be…well, it's not clear what action he wanted to see happen. He said kids should not be allowed to read comic books and that the publishers should clean up their contents, but he also said that he was adamantly against censorship. Apparently, he was in favor of comic books just so long as their intended audience didn't read them. Eventually, we had the Comics Code, which tidily laundered the content of comics and got rid of most of what Wertham didn't like and, of course, kids everywhere stopped misbehaving and having social adjustment problems.
Wertham was widely mocked for supposedly claiming that Batman and Robin were gay but that's not exactly what he said. He said their lifestyle was "…like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together." Which, of course, it is — though Doc Wertham was among the very few readers who thought of it that way. But you know how these things go: Once the rumors start, they gain momentum. There are times in the comics when one can almost sense that the writer is having a little fun with that insinuation. In Wertham Was Right, which was called that as an attention-getting joke but also because I thought he occasionally was, I wrote the following…
In one issue of Justice League of America in the sixties, the heroes discover they have contracted a cosmic plague that will doom everyone they've recently touched. Green Lantern shudders to think that he has infected his eternal fiancée, Carol Ferris. The Flash realizes he has doomed his beloved, Iris West. Even the Atom thinks about the fate that will befall the woman in his life, Jean Loring…
Batman, meanwhile, thinks: "Robin…what have I done to you?"
Since my book came out, I have sometimes been accosted by someone who doubts this and thinks it's a scene that exists not in my comics but in my imagination. So the other day, when someone sent me a JPEG of the panel in question, I figured I oughta post it here. This is from Justice League of America #44, published in 1966…
There it is — written by Gardner Fox, drawn by Mike Sekowsky, with inks by Joe Giella and Frank Giacoia. I have to believe Fox was chuckling when he wrote it and, knowing Mike, he probably had to be restrained from drawing Batman playing Judy Garland records with a limp wrist.