symbol for the way Jews were stereotypically depicted as frail and passive. That is, until he took a serum that transformed him into the robust Captain America. The serum was created by "Professor Reinstein," an obvious nod to famed Jewish physicist Albert Einstein. And Superman gave such a pounding to Nazi agents from 1941-45 that, according to legend, Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels jumped up in the midst of a Reichstag meeting and denounced the Man of Steel as a Jew.

A Bad Influence

After the war, however, comic sales started to drift off. One reason for this was the increasing concern that comics were a bad influence on the nation's children. In 1947, Max Gaines's ne'er-do-well son Bill Gaines assumed control of his late father's company Educational Comics,renamed it Entertaining Comics, and over the next few years phased out the wholesome titles like Picture Stories from the Bible in favor of gory, lurid titles like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. The new EC was a hit. In 1952 an EC humour comic book created by Harvey Kurtzman often featured Yiddish words like "ganef," "feh," "oy," and "fershlugginer" in the stories. That humour title was MAD.

This anti-comic book sentiment led in the spring of 1954to the publication of The Seduction of the Innocent, based on Jewish psychologist Frederic Wertham's seven-year-long study of the effects of comic books on America's youth. Dr. Wertham condemned most of the genre, especially crime and horror comics, for having contributed to juvenile delinquency. As the outcry following