Nerd Stabbed in Eye, Wertham Vindicated

[tartysuz]

A fight over seating broke out in the premier panel room at Comic-Con. Short version: geek stabs nerd in the eye with a pen!



This is fantastically ironic for a few reasons:

1. It happened at the end of a Resident Evil: Afterlife panel. The first headline I read made it sound like someone had died.
   
2. The assailant was restrained by geeks, many of whom were there for the next panel, which was about the movie version of Marvel's A-list team of do-gooders, The Avengers.
   
3. Last but not least, the initial, lurid headlines made the incident sound like one of the gory comics that the 1950s juvenile delinquency expert Fredric Wertham criticized in his book, The Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham's main argument was that violent and sexual comics encouraged delinquency and deviancy in children. He was particularly fascinated with what he called the "injury-to-the-eye motif," which was perfectly understandable. First, it is very squicky: it is difficult not to feel repulsed at the thought of being injured in the eye. Second, as a Freudian (he actually corresponded with Freud), Wertham would have been familiar with Freud's theory that an attack on the eye was akin to castration. "A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated," Freud wrote in the essay,"The Uncanny." (The essay was about the E.T.A. Hoffman short story, "Der Sandman." Readers of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics should check out this essay for the Freudian roots of the Corinthian, who ate the eyes of young boys.)

Happily, this whole incident was a lot less serious than first reported. The victim actually wound up with a scratch near the eye. Come to think of it, we shouldn't dismiss Wertham too quickly. Perhaps those first reports were from comics-addled minds that immediately envisioned an EC-Comics style eyestabbing!