If you haven't listened to Part 1 and Part 2 of our series on Chick Tracks,

I highly recommend that you do that first.

And just a heads up, this episode contains some content around sexual abuse.

On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories,

hoaxes and crazes, examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share,

and sometimes the realities we don't.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American Histaria.

We're covering very delicate subject here, a very heavy subject.

We pray now for the listener of this tape-Lord that you will open their minds of understanding.

They'll know what we're trying to say to them, Lord, and we block all the forces of darkness

who would hinder this tape-Lord and the message involved for your glory, Lord, amen.

There are about 60 million, that's 60 million, comic books published every month in the United States.

What a wonderful thing this would be if they were reading something worthwhile,

but they're not reading anything constructive, they're reading stories devoted to adultery, to sexual perversion, to horror, to the most despicable of crimes,

a corpse that came to dinner, ten cents such an able-hood newsstand.

When Jack Chick returned from the South Pacific after serving in World War II,

he entered an America already whipped up into a moral panic about juvenile delinquency,

but more specifically about the dangers of comic books.

The source of this new paranoia came from a German-American psychologist named Dr. Frederick Wurthum,

whose interview in a 1948 issue of Collier's magazine called Horror in the Nursery kicked off a crusade against this favorite pastime of the youth.

This article was then compounded by a symposium hosted by Dr. Wurthum, who gave a speech titled The Psychopathy of Comic Books.

In it, he confidently asserted that young readers were more abnormally sexually aggressive and criminally deviant than those who did not read comic books,

...