Franz Jantzen doesn’t need to explain what the Library of Congress has lost, now that its consumers no longer have the option of ordering silver gelatin reproductions of images in its collection. He’d rather show you.

He points me toward me a high-resolution digital print of Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression. Look at the range of grays, and you can see subtle differences in the textures of the children’s hair and clothes, and in the worried, hard-hewn face of their mother, Florence Owens Thompson. The amount of dirt caked on their fingers and faces is startling. But it’s an effect, he says, that can also be achieved in a darkroom.

Next to the digital print is a darkroom reproduction of the same picture, made using the black and white silver gelatin process. The degree of visible contrast is astounding. The blacks are much richer and darker, while the light grays mute the detail of the fabric—the effect is heavy, but that was the printing style of the 1930s. “A silver gelatin print has a fundamentally different look from any other kind of print,” he says.

From the end of the Great Depression until this year, anyone could order a silver gelatin reproduction, printed from negatives, of any image in the Library of Congress’ collection, most recently for about $100 a print. Not any more: After learning in August that his services would no longer be needed, Jantzen, one of the library’s last freelance darkroom printers, finished his final batch of photographs from the collection this month.

As a cost-cutting measure, the library’s duplication services no longer include darkroom-made prints. You can still order a digitally printed duplication. Or if you want “Migrant Mother” as wallpaper for your desktop, you can download it for free.

“Digital is the future of information management,” says Jennifer Gavin, the library’s acting director of communications. She says the library chose to stop offering silver gelatin reproductions because of customers’ preference for digital files, the difficulty of acquiring photographic supplies, and overall cost-effectiveness. Plus, many of the library’s new acquisitions are born digital, having never touched a piece of film or existed as a negative.

Jantzen, 47, has for years developed black and white photographs in the basement of his 16th Street Heights home; he’s had a contract with the Library of Congress since 2007. The work has been more pleasurable than lucrative. “I like printing for other people,” Jantzen says. “I enjoy bringing other negatives in as an aesthetic challenge.” Jantzen’s not concerned with economies of scale. He would “break out the chemistry,” he says, “even if it was only for one 8-by-10 print.”

The end of silver gelatin duplications wasn’t really a surprise. In 2009, Jantzen developed 202 prints for the Library of Congress—and only half that number in 2010. This year saw an even greater decline. Photo duplication has been part of the Library of Congress’ services since 1938, when funds from the Rockefeller Foundation helped establish the program. But for nearly 20 years, the library has digitized images from its archives, and thousands can be downloaded from the library’s website. Some are low-resolution, like a still from the Charlie Chaplin film A Dog’s Life that is available as a small JPG file of 102 kilobytes, or as a larger TIFF file of 12.9 megabytes. Other images have larger options, like a picture of the Wright Brothers’ experiment with flight at Kitty Hawk, the largest available file of which is a whopping 234.5 megabytes. Gavin says there’s nothing preventing consumers from taking a high-resolution file to an independent printer and having a silver gelatin duplicate made. Of course, you won’t be able to get a darkroom print made from the original negatives anymore, or even a duplicate negative, as has often been the case.

But that’s the way history goes. “The library needs to be thoughtful about providing the greatest number of services to the greatest number of people, with the most effective cost,” says Gavin. “Being cost-effective is not just good government practice. It is a necessity in these times. We are looking at a cut in the library’s budget  in the coming fiscal year below our current spending levels.”

—

The Library of Congress isn’t the only government collection that’s gone digital. By day, Jantzen works at the Supreme Court as a collections manager of graphic arts. Just like the Library of Congress, the court outsourced darkroom reproductions for years, but when its contractor shut its doors several years ago, it began offering only digital options.

While the move to digital seems to be an inevitable solution for managing information, Jantzen sees a threat to a medium he loves. “If no one is requesting black and white images, then there is no longer a service. If there is no longer a service, then there is no longer a black and white [silver gelatin] image,” he says. “Digital has so completely replaced what has been done in the darkroom.”

For an image born from film, Jantzen doesn’t think digital is necessarily better. Hence, the difference you see in the two Dorothea Lange prints. When Jantzen talks about digital photography versus darkroom photography, it can be a conversation of semantics—about what’s a picture and what’s a photograph. If he made it in his basement, then it’s a photograph.

The debate over how to contextualize digital methodologies within photography isn’t new. Paul Roth, senior curator and director of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, sees digital as just another stage in the evolution of photography. “Photography is a set of practices, more than material,” he says. Before becoming a curator, Roth was trained as a photographer, and he considers himself a full-blown film romantic. “That romance is an attachment to the medium and materials. Light changing silver sounds like alchemy. For anyone who went through photography in high school or college and saw an image emerge from the liquid…that’s very powerful,” he says.

As a curator, Roth has used the Library of Congress’ duplication services for several shows at the Corcoran, like the 1999 exhibition “Propaganda and Dreams,” which compared images from the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration to Soviet images from the same time period.

For consumers, Roth views the wholesale shift to digital as a refinement of the library’s democratic mandate. From a preservation standpoint, there are other consequences: “These [duplicate] black and white prints have gone into the world,” he says. “One hundred years from now will people be forging Walker Evans’ signature on the back? This is one way of clarifying an existing print market.” Unlike many digital prints, silver gelatin duplications can last hundreds of years—so it’s not inconceivable, Roth says, that down the line Library of Congress duplications may be passed off as originals.

Of course, museums collect objects, and Roth thinks the shift to digital photography doesn’t mean the end of silver prints, but rather a shift toward an alternative process.

The local gallerist George Hemphill isn’t weeping, either—even though he represents Jantzen’s fine-art work. In the realm of commercial galleries, he says, the physical implements of photography still telegraph authenticity. As silver gelatin prints become rarer, it forces artists who still work with film to make choices. “They might include the negative bracket so it can be identified as a photo. It has some cachet.”

—

Jantzen picked up his last batch of negatives—a hefty 27 orders—from the Library of Congress on October 7. “Usually I turn them around in a week,” he says. “I think I took longer per print because I thought that this might be the last time these negatives would go in an enlarger.”

Every time Jantzen enters his darkroom these days, he’s acutely aware of the process. Despite embracing the rather conservative harangue that photography ends with the silver gelatin print and that digital is an entirely different medium, in recent years he’s begun working digitally for his own art. “That’s where my energy is,” he says. “I‘ve had my own darkroom since I was 11, but in some respects it is no longer as relevant for me—maybe relevant is not the right word. But because the darkroom is no longer a way of thinking, anymore, it feels different to be in the darkroom. What I am doing in the darkroom is no longer current. It feels out of step.”

On Oct. 14, Jantzen shared an album on Facebook: shots of one of his final Library of Congress printing sessions. There was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln from 1864 (the same one used on the $5 bill); several images by Walker Evans; Gordon Parks’ portrait of Ella Watson; and Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” “I had my camera and a tripod,” Jantzen says. “I figured I would make some snaps.” I asked if they were digital photos. “All were digital images,” he responded. “Not photos. For me that is a necessary distinction. Word processing is not the evolution of type-setting.”

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

SLIDESHOW: Franz Jantzen develops some of his final prints for the Library of Congress.

Washington City Paper: Why will you be in Washington?

George O'Connor: I’m in Washington for a couple of things. The School Library Journal is holding a Summit on Thursday and Friday, and I’m doing a presentation for the attendees on reading and graphic literature. I’m going to joined in this by two other very talented cartoonists, Jarrett Krosoczka and Eric Wight, and we’ll be creating a jam comic live in front of the crowd. It should be pretty fun. Then, on Saturday, I’ll be at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival. My graphic novel Journey into Mohawk Country was chosen to represent New York at the Pavilion of the States this year, and I’ll be signing copies at the New York booth from 12:30 until 2.

WCP: What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?

G O'C: Tricky question—stylistically, I’m all over the place from project to project. If I had to define my work, really, I would say it’s a mostly idiosyncratic mix of stuff I’m interested in. And since most of the stuff I’m interested in is stuff I learned about when I was 12, I tend to make most of my comics for an all-age audience, or try to, at least.

WCP: How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?

G O'C: I’m a combo man. I do all my black and white artwork the old-fashioned way—pencil, pen, brush and ink on Bristol paper. Then I scan it into my computer for touch-ups, corrections and coloring.

WCP: When (within a decade is fine) and where were you born?

G O'C: I was born in Long Island, New York in the 1970s.

WCP: Can you tell us a little about your book that you'll be in town signing?

G O'C: I’m going to be here for a couple of things, as mentioned above. For the SLJ Summit, I’ll be promoting my most recent book, Hera: The Goddess and Her Glory, which is the latest volume of my Greek Mythology graphic novel series Olympians (the previous volumes were Zeus: King of the Gods and Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess). Then on Saturday, I’ll be appearing in promotion of Journey into Mohawk Country.  The text of Mohawk Country was written in 1634 by a Dutch barber/surgeon named Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, and it’s a journal of the actual journey he made 100 miles into the interior of what would one day become NY state. None of his words were changed (except for being translated into English), I just made it into a comic. It’s pretty fascinating stuff.

WCP: What is your training and/or education in cartooning?

G O'C: Like many cartoonists, I suspect that much of my training was self-taught or on-the-job, but I did graduate from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn with a degree in Illustration.  I learned a lot of helpful things there, especially about drawing very fast.

WCP: Who are your influences?

G O'C: Some of my faves, in no particular order, are Mike Mignola,  P. Craig Russell,  Jaime Hernandez, Bill Watterson, Berkeley Breathed, and Walt Simonson.

WCP: If you could, what in your career would you do over or change?

G O'C: Huh! I tend not to dwell on the past like that, but if I could somehow take the confidence that I have in myself and my work now, and transpose it back in time to me when I was first starting out, well, that would be pretty sweet. That’s all part of the process of growing as a creator though, it would be kind of a cheat to skip it, like some sort of time paradox.

WCP: What work are you best known for?

G O'C: I’d have to say the Olympians series of Greek mythology graphic novels. Which is very rewarding, as they’ve been kind of a childhood dream come true.

WCP: What work are you most proud of?

G O'C: The most recent volume of Olympians, Hera: The Goddess and Her Glory is, in my opinion, the strongest thing I’ve ever written. I feel like I passed through a new high watermark with that one. The next book in Olympians, Hades: Lord of the Dead is just as good, or maybe even better. Now the pressure is on to keep them at this level!

WCP: What would you like to do or work on in the future?

G O'C: I’m very lucky in that I have quite a bit of work already lined up in front of me for the immediate future—Olympians is projected to run for twelve volumes, and after a few years away I’ve recently signed up a couple of new picture books (about dinosaurs! Yeah!). I have a lot of ideas rattling around in my head, and, like always, they’re based on the things I like. I’m lucky to have a job that let’s me explore my interests like this.

WCP: What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?

G O'C: I go for a walk, or a run, or a long, pointless subway ride. That normally clears it up.

WCP: What do you think will be the future of your field?

G O'C: I think the much-heralded looming digital revolution will be less of a revolution than it will be an addition to the way business is already done—it will just be another way for people to get their content; some folks will prefer digital, others printed.

Mainstream comics (meaning, mainly, superhero stuff from D.C. and Marvel) seems to be going through a crucial period right now—their actual readership is dwindling, as their properties become more and more well-known through other media, like movies and television. I expect we’ll see more creators accustomed to doing work-for-hire for the big two companies strike out and work on their own, creator-owned materials. It’s one thing to do work on a corporation’ characters, it’s another thing to do work on your own.

Jen Sorensen at SPX, 2008

Jen Sorensen, late of Charlottesville, Va., moved to Portland, Ore., a couple of years ago and is making her return to SPX. Jen's Slowpoke comic strip, which incorporated characters introduced in her college strip at UVA, premiered in 1998, and is resolutely political. Her website biography notes, "...Slowpoke has been reprinted in such fine publications as the Village Voice, Ms. Magazine, Funny Times, LA Times, The Daily Beast, CampusProgress.org, Daily Kos, and dozens of altweeklies around the country. Her illustrations have appeared in Nickelodeon Magazine, The American Prospect, Legal Affairs, University of Virginia Magazine, and the Women's Review of Books. In 2010 she received an Aronson Journalism Award from Hunter College in NYC. She is featured in Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists, an anthology edited by Ted Rall, and in several editions of The Best Political Cartoons of the Year." Sorensen is on the board of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, which has only recently opened up to alternative cartoonists.

Washington City Paper: What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?

Jen Sorensen: I draw a weekly comic called Slowpoke that appears in alternative newspapers and magazines around the country, and on the new Daily Kos comics page edited by Tom Tomorrow. CampusProgress.org also publishes the strip. Slowpoke is mostly political, but sometimes I talk about other things like gourmet cupcakes and hipster facial hair.

I also enjoy doing longer-form journalistic comics when I can. For example, I drew a graphic travelogue for The Oregonian about a trip to Montana earlier this year. And I interviewed humor writer Cynthia Heimel (Sex Tips For Girls) for a comic biography that appeared in Bitch Magazine.

WCP: What work are you best-known for?

JS: Slowpoke.

WCP: How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?

JS: Traditional pen and ink, for the most part. I do add some details in Photoshop, but when I try to draw digitally, my abilities seem to regress by about 25 years.

WCP: Can you tell us a little about your books that you'll have with you at SPX?

JS: I don't have a new book to sell, but I will have my latest collection, One Nation, Oh My God! (Ig Publishing), and all my other books.

WCP: You've attended the Small Press Expo in the past—do you have any thoughts about your experience?  If you haven't, what're you expecting?

JS: I used to live in Virginia, so I think this will be my 12th SPX. It's my favorite comic convention. There's something very comfortable about it. Attendees seem a bit more attuned to political comics than at other conventions, which makes a certain amount of sense, given that it's in D.C.

WCP: What are you looking forward to buying or seeing or doing for this year's event? Or who do you want to see, to catch up on old times, or to have a fangirl experience?

JS: Catching up with old friends is a big reason I'm going. There are a few too many to mention here. I can say I'm looking forward to having a second fangirl moment with Roz Chast, whom I got to meet briefly at the Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State last year. She's one of my favorites. I hope I get to chat with Ann Telnaes too. And Diane Noomin. I actually wrote my senior thesis on the Twisted Sisters some years ago.

WCP: What's your favorite thing about the D.C. area? Least favorite?

JS: I like the good restaurants, Politics & Prose bookstore, and the Metro. My least favorite things are the traffic and NoVa sprawl.

WCP: What monument or museum do you like or wish to visit when you're in town?

JS: In the past, I've had the opportunity to view original cartoon art in the Library of Congress archives, and I may get to do that again this year. I also like confirming that the Washington Monument is still there. It's where my parents got engaged.

WCP: What do you think will be the future of your field?

JS: My genre, altweekly comics, is very small, and largely dependent on income from print newspapers. I see our numbers slowly dwindling, but paying websites like Daily Kos help give me some hope for the future. I like to think we'll continue to exist, doing both political cartoons and graphic journalism which, in my experience, readers seem to appreciate a lot.

WCP: Do you have a website or blog?

JS: Yes, my website and blog can be found at www.slowpokecomics.com

The Small Press Expo takes place 11 am–7 p.m. Sept. 10 and noon–6 p.m. Sept. 11 at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, 5701 Marinelli Road, Bethesda. $10-$15. spxpo.com.

David Malki!: Wondermark is a modern comic strip that's made entirely out of illustrations from Victorian-era books. It looks like something out of the 19th century, but it's actually a collage from images I've scanned and manipulated myself. Each day presents a new and different scenario, so there's no continuity, but the strip can be about anything at all, and is frequently surprising. It will sometimes be ridiculous without warning.

WCP: How long have you been doing it?

DM: I'm closing in fast on eight years of creating regular Wondermark comics. I started as a lark while working at an advertising agency, and now I actually own my own book publishing company. The strip and I have taken each other a long way.

WCP: What other type of cartooning or illustration do you do?

DM: I design books for my publishing company, as well as art pieces like greeting cards and posters, most of which are related to Wondermark but not always. I also occasionally make custom Wondermark pieces as private commissions for readers.

WCP: What do you think the future of comics will be?

DM: The future of comics will be a single giant Garfield panel that everyone can type their own name into, and it will follow them around their house reading the newspaper to them while they eat breakfast, and read the sports scores to them in the car. Later, at work, it will follow us everywhere, even into meetings, and project itself looming onto the wall of the bathroom stall, reading random articles from Wikipedia out loud. It will be inescapable.

WCP: Will you be attending SPX this year?

DM: I wouldn't miss it—I've been attending SPX every year since 2006 and I've yet to have a bad time. Truly it is made of wishes and
miracles, or at least my part surely is.

WCP: Do you have any favorite things about D.C.?

DM: I have been known to spend entire days in the Library of Congress looking up funny old newspaper articles about beards. Thank God for this critical national resource.

Carl Cephas has spent the last 10 years of his life fighting his one-time employer, the Library of Congress. Last Christmas, the Library fired Cephas after placing him on unpaid leave for almost six months and 27 years as an employee. This Christmas, it rejected his appeal of his firing.

Cephas first stirred up trouble in the late '90s by keeping a serial-killer trading card set and a copy of Going Postal on his desk. The two items together weirded out his colleagues, so Cephas underwent a psychological evaluation to prove that he was, in fact, just a harmless musical archivist with a weird sense of humor.

I wrote about Cephas in November 2009. This is how I laid out the series of escalating arguments that got him put on leave the previous summer: There was the time he told his supervisor Mary Wedgewood, “Fuck you, go suck eggs,” after she served him with a written reprimand. The time he “engaged in a long and very loud” phone conversation about the dead mice he’d trapped in his apartment, which some of his co-workers believed was “intended to disgust everyone in the room.” There were the many times he refused to clean up the cultural curios that cluttered his work area, his penchant for introducing the word shit into conversation, and his habit of greeting his friends by bellowing, “Hey motherfucker!”

Shortly after our story came out in 2009, the Library concluded its investigation into Cephas’ behavior. Then they fired him. In September of 2010, Cephas had his appeal hearing. That investigation is apparently over as well, and the Library has not changed its mind.

Cephas, who also also runs the Washington Psychotronic Film Society, sent me an e-mail update late last night, invoking Wedgewood, the supervisor with whom Cephas frequently butted heads:

The Library of Congress rejected my plea. I've lost my final appeal there. Sue Vita said that my coming back would be devastating even though she has never worked with me. Now, I have to find a proper legal team because now I can sue the L.C. Every one there knows that the L.C. hired Mary Wedgewood as my babysitter. She even made a character up that does not exist. She told a co-worker (who wants to remain anonymous) that her sole purpose there was to get rid of me. Perhaps out of revenge for the Going Postal episode which I was also innocent off. This is one royal mess. All I need is for the right people to hear my story. They won't be intimidated by the L.C.'s bullying.

I've written a few notes to show you how absurd this thing really is. If something should happen to me, please forward these notes so that people will know the truth. I am not a bad man. I don't deserve this maddening treatment. Thanks for listening.

I sent Cephas an e-mail asking for more details and will update when I hear back.

Bonus: Cephas, who is big into theatrics, made some extranormal videos in which characters talk about Cephas’ travails in the third person. (Sample dialogue: “His cracked tooth got the better of him. His body is becoming septic.”)

Photograph by Darrow Montgomery

Touring as a professional unit since 1980, the McIntosh County Shouters not only keep this form of religious praise and storytelling tradition alive, they demonstrate the vibrancy of this style of music and dance.  There’s nothing staid about it.  The call-and-response vocals are precisely rendered and inspirational in their delivery, and the stomping and broomstick pounding are as rhythmically interesting as anything you hear in hip-hop, go-go, or contemporary gospel.

The McIntosh County Shouters perform for free today from 6 to 7 p.m. on the John F. Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, 2700 F Street, NW. (202) 467-4600.

The McIntosh County Shouters perform for free Thursday from noon to 1 p.m. at the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building’s Coolidge Auditorium, 1st and Independence Avenue SE.  (202) 707-8000.

If you've ever been curious about the America of Bob Dylan—the folk, country, blues, vaudeville, and rock music, the beat poetry, politics, religion, values, art, and Mr. Jones—there are all kinds of fascinating ways to learn about it starting this week.  Unique cultural academic, rock critic, and Dylan scholar Greil Marcus speaks at the Library of Congress tomorrow, and history professor and Dylan scholar Sean Wilentz will be at the Jewish Community Center Saturday night as part of the Jewish Literary Festival. Both have new books out about Dylan, and both events should make for good primers to Dylan and his band's performance at the George Washington University Smith Center on Nov. 13. Bonus: The latest entry in Dylan's Bootleg Series, The Witmark Demos 1962-1964, was recently released.

Tomorrow, Marcus will present his lecture "Sam McGee's Railroad Blues and Other Versions of the Republic." He recently published Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010, a collection of the idiosyncratic, Berkeley-based scribe’s magazine and newspaper pieces.  The presentation has been described by the Library of Congress as an excavation “of a few roots of the American Songbook, examining a handful of indelible and idiosyncratic country, religious, or blues songs from the 1920's, and their modern revisions.”

But this being Greil Marcus,  expect the presentation to reflect some of Marcus’s distinctive canon.  In Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, using often challenging prose, he drew connections between 1920s banjo players, medieval crazies, Dadaists, Dylan, and the Sex Pistols. Marcus also leaps about and demonstrates his cultural knowledge and Dylan’s in The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, and Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. While some find the links he draws a stretch, they’re certainly provocative.

On Saturday, Wilentz, whose father ran a Greenwich Village bookstore in the '50s & '60s where Dylan hung out, will be talking about Bob Dylan in America. Wilentz, who was nominated for a Grammy for his liner notes to Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964—Concert at Philharmonic Hall, was given access to rare material, and the book is being hailed by some for its detailed depiction of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde studio sessions.  The book compares Dylan with Aaron Copland and focuses on Dylan’s interactions with poet Alan Ginsburg, among other aspect’s of Dylan’s life. While professor and author W. Scott Poole has praised Wilentz for writing “the most important book on American history and the most important book on American music in recent memory,” Wilentz is not without his critics. Dylan in America has received some criticism for repetition, and Wilentz  is also controversial for his 2008 writings hailing Hilary Clinton and deriding Barack Obama, and for engaging in verbal battles with other historians. But his presentation should be interesting no matter your take on his approach and views.

Greil Marcus speaks on  Thursday October 21 at 6:15 p.m. at the Library of Congress’ Jefferson Building’s Whittall Pavilion, 1st Street SE, between Independence Avenue and East Capitol Streets. Free, no tickets are required.  (202) 707-5503.

Sean Wilentz speaks on Saturday October 23 at 7:30 p.m. at the Washington D.C. Jewish Community Centre's Ina and Jack Kay Community Hall, 1529 16th Street NW. (202) 518-9400. Tickets: $11, Discounted Members/Seniors/Under 25 $9.

Or, seen a different way, the library shed light on one of the first psychologists to be concerned with pop culture’s effects on children’s mental health. Opinions vary, and people of good faith disagree, but for the few Americans who know who Fredric Wertham is, the ability to read through his letters is a big deal. That’s because Wertham wrote a book about comic books and juvenile delinquency, Seduction of the Innocent, which came out in 1954 as a culmination of a decade-long campaign against comic books, and it quickly became a rallying point for Cold War-era concerns about teenage culture. Although the library has had the records since 1987 (Wertham died in 1981), they’ve been sealed except to people approved by Wertham’s estate. In that time, only two—one who was explicitly friendly to Wertham’s legacy, the other accidently when restrictions briefly lapsed—were allowed to use them.

You might have missed the news, though: A librarian at the institution, Sara Duke, mentioned the opening of the collection on the Comix-Scholar e-mail list, but the library itself didn’t announce it on its blog until Aug. 27, a few weeks after I wrote about it on Arts Desk.

One oft-repeated notion is that Wertham was the comic book industry’s real-life villain—seen as “worse than the Joker, Lex Luthor, and Magneto combined,” comics historian Jeet Heer writes in a Slate review of David Hajdu’s book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Heer writes: “For Wertham, even the most beloved comic-book heroes were suspect: Superman reminded him of Nazi Germany’s SS (a cadre of self-styled supermen), the adventures of Batman and Robin had homoerotic overtones, and Wonder Woman threatened to turn healthy young girls into lesbians.” Many collectors believe that Wertham almost destroyed comics—after being hauled to U.S. Senate hearings at which Wertham testified, publishers created the Comics Code Authority to police themselves, and began selling the bland superheroes that the 1960s Batman television show would mock. Amy Nyberg, the author of Seal Of Approval: The History Of The Comics Code (1998), places a good bit of the blame on Wertham. At the Senate hearings, she writes, “he took the position that comic books were harmful, and he pressed for legislation restricting the sale of comic books to children under age sixteen.”

But Nyberg’s view was still nuanced, and she was one of the first scholars to begin rehabilitating Wertham’s reputation. “Wertham’s argument was much more complex than the idea he was often accused of perpetrating: that there was a direct causal link between comic book reading and juvenile delinquency,” she writes. “The problem of juvenile delinquency, he believed, stemmed from the fact that society was trapped in a ‘cult of violence’ of which comic books were simply a manifestation.”

The Canadian writer Bart Beaty is one of the two people permitted (he was accidentally let in) to use the collection before this summer, and he has probably done the most to rehab the reputation of Wertham. With his 2005 book Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, Beaty agrees that Wertham was right and comic books should have been regulated. Wertham’s research wouldn’t be accepted by most today, as it relied on anecdotal evidence from youngsters he saw in his Harlem practice, where he ran the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic. However, in an online debate with Craig Fischer at The Comic Reporter, Beaty wrote, “When comic book fans tell me that Wertham should rot in hell for criticizing EC Comics I am mystified. Here’s a man who opened a free psychiatric clinic in Harlem at a time when he was one of a small handful of doctors who would even treat black psychiatric patients, working there no less then two nights each week as a volunteer, and providing testimony that was important to overturning American school segregation, and we’re worried about the fact that he didn’t like EC? Talk about missing the forest for the trees.”

The 88,000 items in Wertham’s papers include “notes, drafts, and related materials for Wertham’s major works, including Seduction of the Innocent,” according to the library. As for the other scholar allowed by Wertham’s family to access them? That was James Reibman.

Charles Hatfield, the author of Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, says he had “never heard or read a defense of [Wertham’s] work until 1995, when I attended a conference panel in comics studies that happened to include Wertham scholar James Reibman. To say that I was surprised to hear Reibman defend Wertham, and endorse some of the findings of Seduction, would be a pitiful understatement. I was shocked, frankly, and I remember discussing that panel with my wife and others afterward and trying to grapple with the possibility that there could be a reading of Wertham other than the comic fan’s usual demonization.”

Hatfield found himself torn: “I would soon learn that Wertham was a progressive intellectual, that his expert testimony played a part in dismantling legal segregation in this country, and that he provided low-cost or free mental health care to the disenfranchised and neglected,” he says. “I still believe that Wertham was wrong about comics: not necessarily about the content of the most retrograde and vicious of the comics of that era...but about the supposed impact of the form on literacy and reading habits, which he saw as uniformly detrimental.”

For comic fans and scholars, it’s hard to reconcile Wertham as a good man who nearly killed an art form (in later Wertham works, he expressed admiration for some comic books). Now more will get the chance—in fact, Beaty’s sympathetic reading of Wertham, in contrast to much else written about him, was likely a factor in the estate’s changing of its terms of access.

“There have been a number of users already,” says Len Bruno, a manuscript historian at the library. “I thought there would be a waiting line, and fortunately there weren’t.” Bruno says he no special plans for the collection.

Expect more scholars to examine the papers soon. “After more than 50 years we are still obliged to reference Seduction in much of our comics scholarship, and so the opening of Wertham’s papers to more researchers should be celebrated,” Hatfield says. “This is a very important resource.”

—

I talked to a wide swath of people in the comics world for this article, and they had a number of fascinating thoughts relevant to Wertham and the Library of Congress. Here are a few:

Sara Duke, says the Wertham papers won't be kept in the library's main collection. "The Manuscript Division is keeping the comic books [Wertham used] because he made notations on onion skin paper and inserted them in his comic books,” she says. Wertham’s papers add another important component to the library’s comic-art collection, which includes comic books in the Serials Department and original comic art in the Prints and Photographs Division (including the original artwork to the first Spider-Man appearance).

From the the third day of his debate with Fischer, Beaty discusses whether Wertham's opinion of comics evolved:

I]n Seduction Wertham sees absolutely no value in comic books. It's hard to find a single approving thing he has to say about comics in the entire manuscript (whatever exceptions exist are sarcastic). On the other hand, he does seem to find some value in them in The World of Fanzines, his last book. I sometimes wonder if this is a drastic late career shift in belief (as many argue) or a natural continuation and logical extension of his existing thinking. It seems to me that Wertham did recognize some value in comics – particularly comic strips. He was friendly with people like Milton Caniff (and owned a Caniff original) and Al Capp, for example. I think that The World of Fanzines sheds some light on the reasons: Wertham didn't hate the form so much as the industry (though, clearly, he was no fan of the form). Some of the excised material from Seduction would have made this even more clear. Wertham spoke with a number of cartoonists who told him that it was the publishers who required more blood, guts and gore in the book, and many of these whistleblowers saw Wertham as someone who could help end a practice that they themselves were uneasy with. The draft that Wertham sent to the publisher, for example, contained revelations about DC's treatment of Siegel and Shuster that came right from the source, and would have blown the lid off the shoddy treatment that they received decades before it became a cause celebre in fandom. The lawyers, however, thought it would be actionable and that entire chapter becomes a series of unnamed sources, which considerably dampens its impact (it's so gutted and toothless that I sometimes wonder why he even bothered to retain it).

Joseph Witek, the author of the groundbreaking study Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, has now undertaken a project for which he he is now reading a lot of pre-Comics Code books:

One thing that gets lost in the demonization of Wertham is something that has become clear now that digital scans of pre-Code comics are becoming widely available: his characterization of those comics is often absolutely accurate. To a large extent, later comics readers have been misled by the narrow selection of reprinted crime and horror comics that were previously available—EC comics were not "average" in taste or quality by a very long shot. You don't have to agree with Wertham's ideas about the social or moral consequences of reading such comics to see that many of them contain depictions of violence, sex, and to some extent, racism that go far beyond anything shown in most other media of the day. Many comics were available to anyone big enough to put a dime on the counter that certainly would have "Mature readers" or other content warnings today.

Joel Pollack, owner of the local Big Planet Comics store, on the Wertham legacy:

I discovered comic fandom (and Wertham) at the age of 14. I assumed the popular belief that Wertham had tainted comics, and peoples' opinions of comics, in an irreparable manner. I regularly borrowed Seduction of the Innocent from the Silver Spring Public Library, but never read it fully cover-to-cover. Nonetheless, I felt Wertham was wrong, and that he never recognized comics as an art form. Of course, by the time I discovered Wertham, TV was established as the dominant corrupter of youth, and comics were already becoming a very minor player in youth media. However, I believe the CCA did stifle creativity. Seeing what EC Comics accomplished, even with all of their excesses, made me realize how soporific comics became once the code was installed. As a retailer, I like to know what to expect in the comics I sell, but I’m not sure a ratings system is necessary, as they tend to be inconsistent and often unpredictable.

LoC Manuscript Historian Len Bruno, a specialist in the science and technology collections on why the library didn't collect Wertham's papers for his comic work. He and nine others split up the library's special collections. When one left,

I got all the Shrinks. Sigmund Freud’s papers are a magnet that bring in other collections. Having the Freud papers here is the lodestone, the foundation for other collections to come in and build upon. The library documents any and all aspects of American life.

Bruno, on why the opening of the collection comes 23 years after Wertham's death: “It's not an unusual situation. A lot of collections come with "10 years after my death" provisos. It's business as usual for us." But first, Bruno says:

It was processed and put in some kind of order. We're really blessed that we have a bunch of archivists that are schooled on how to do this and follow classical and traditional ways and respect original order. They look at every piece of paper and spread everything out and once they understand the person and his or her career and why it’s here, they put like with like. To them it's business as usual. It's amazing what they do. It takes a certain type of person who can see both the forest and the trees. You see just one and you're unable to do the job. The average person would look at it and just throw up their hands. They have to respect the details, but not get overwhelmed by them. And once they do it all, the finding aid really is literally that – it tells you need to go to a box to find a particular thing without wasting your time. They prepare the finding aid, right a biography of the person, and a little scope note. They produce a complete package when they're done—really essential when you want to use a big collection like that. To use it, you register with the library, and get a reader card, and then show up, and be over 18, and behave yourself. You can have four boxes at a time, and check with us before photocopying. It's stored offsite and we've been calling in boxes so there's next-day service.

Bruno, on the one restriction still affecting Wertham's papers:

We're required to segregate patient records. There were the equivalent of four boxes of obvious patient records so they were physically removed and put in a closed box at the end of the collection. We had the feeling that Wertham, the way he did things, may havepatient information that didn't jump out at you so there's a requirement that researchers agree that they not disclose patient information or names they come across.

Georgia M. Higley, head of the Newspaper Section of the Serial & Government Publications Division, on the library's comic books:

The comic book collection is one of the largest in the United States, comprising over 120,000 issues. It is mainly, but not exclusively, a product of copyright deposit over the decades. We have original print issues as well as color microfiche comprising several thousand issues. Also, the library recently acquired the Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels database produced by Alexander Street Press. Over the past seven years or so there has been increased interest in comic books by both the Library and researchers. The Library has invested considerable resources to inventory, deacidify, rehouse, and preserve the comic book collection—they are stored in acid free containers in a climate controlled facility. In part due to our inventory efforts as well as increased interest in popular culture by researchers, our comic book collection is being used in greater numbers and with a diversity of titles and subject interests. It is my hope that we will have more interest in the collection, especially since holdings are available through the library catalog giving researchers a good idea of what they can expect to find when they get here

Sara Duke is in charge of another big collection. She says:

The Prints and Photographs Division has about 128,000 works of cartoon art on paper, dating back to the 16th century. We have some exceptional comic book works that have come in by gift—an R. Crumb page, the Steve Ditko art for Spider-Man’s first appearance in Amazing Fantasy No. 15, and works produced in reaction to 9/11. However, the library never had a full-scale collecting effort, soliciting works from individual creators, the way it did with editorial cartoons, comic strips, New Yorker cartoons and illustration.

I asked Duke why not. She responded:

I have never seen any written record of any decision-making regarding comic book illustrations. In my personal opinion, it would be easy to draw the conclusion that the library was affected by Wertham. Perhaps it was because the artists who worked for the comics publishers were treated like work-for-hire and their original art was retained by the publishers. Now, we're preparing for a collecting effort, but of course we're not in the forefront and so it's harder to collect. We can't hope to compete with private collectors at auction. Everyone thinks the library has deep pockets, but because we're collecting in so many different directions—even within Prints & Photographs we're acquiring architectural and engineering works, photographs, fine prints, posters, illustration and cartoon art. For me, it doesn't make sense to spend my portion of the budget on one comic book page—because I'm not serving researchers well. So I have to think about all the ways researchers approach the collection and look to fill in gaps the best I am able. However, I do approach comic artists for gifts and so far have been well received. Perhaps someone who has collected comic book illustration will feel moved, as Erwin Swann, Art Wood and the Herb Block Foundation have done, to make their collection part of the Library of Congress in the future.

Martha H. Kennedy, also  a curator in Popular & Applied Graphic Art, says:

The release of Wertham's papers will make possible careful study of the questionable research methods on which he based his publications, which had such a devastating impact on the comic book industry. This material will hopefully generate much needed reassessment of Wertham's motivations underlying his work on comic books, the child-rearing climate in which he produced it, and his place in the cultural and social landscape of 1950s America.

Duke, on the impact of opening the Wertham papers:

Comics haven't been "just" about superheroes for a long time, but now they have an impact on almost every field of study imaginable. We are in the process of developing a game plan so that we may collect more systematically. I hope the opening of the papers has a huge impact on my department – that researchers will be drawn into the Library to access the Wertham papers and then avail themselves of the opportunity to look at original cartoon art. The mission of the Library is to make its collections available to researchers, both via the Internet and in person, and if the Wertham papers increase scholarship here, it's all to the good.

Washington City Paper: How do you feel about being invited to something as prestigious as the Library of Congress' Book Festival?

Jeff Smith: I was very flattered, and doubly so because I draw comic books so even though graphic novels are becoming more and more accepted, it's still novel.

WCP: So, you were surprised to be invited as a cartoonist to essentially a literary festival?

JS: Yeah. There is one other cartoonist here—Jules Feiffer. I get to sit and have drinks with him. He's a lot of fun.

WCP: Scotch, right?

JS: Bourbon, actually.

WCP: I think Feiffer's a Scotch guy. So has the Library of Congress asked you for any of your original art yet?

JS: About a half hour ago. (Laughs)

WCP: Is there anything you particularly like about Washington?

JS: There's a show called the Small Press Expo, which is actually in Bethesda, and I have a great affection for this area because I've been coming to that for like 10 years. I haven't spent that much time just going through the  Smithsonian or the Washington Monument, which I'm going to do tomorrow.

WCP: Has your audience for Bone been following you to RASL?

JS: I think a lot of them have. Obviously the younger ones, around 9 or 10, haven't. I took almost 15 years to write Bone originally in black and white and then five more years to put it in color with Scholastic Books. If you put those two together, anybody who's started with these—it's been 20 years—they're all grown up now anyway.

WCP: Obviously you're in it for the long haul. Did you ever expect Bone's popularity? Or when did you start to?

JS: No, no. There was a couple of moments where I remember thinking "Wow," but obviously, no I didn't expect it at all. I was hoping maybe to make it, maybe to five years, that's all. Or just finishing it, that's all I need.

WCP: Yeah, that's a pretty impressive run. So how long is RASL going to go?

JS: I think two more years. I don't think there's another Bone in me. I want to make sure I finish it before I kick off.

WCP: Thank you very much.

And with that, Smith went off to greet his younger fans—the audience that made Bone a smash success.

One is Jeff Smith, best known for his massive fantasy epic Bone. He's currently serializing Rasl, a science-fiction mystery about art thievery and murder across parallel worlds. Smith is signing from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., and speaking at the Tens & Children tent from 2:55 to 3:25 p.m.

Two Washington regulars are appearing. Jules Feiffer visits Washington all the time, and I covered one of his recent appearances. He's illustrated The Odious Ogre, a new children's book with Norton Juster, for their first collaboration in 40 years. Feiffer's speaking twice—in the Children tent from 11:50 to 12:35 pm and at Contemporary Life (for his autobiography) from 12:55 to 1:25 pm. He's signing books 2-3 p.m. Brad Meltzer writes comic books off and on, and he recently penned an R-rated Buffy the Vampire story arc—and a few years ago he killed the Elongated Man's wife in a Justice League of America comic. We've looked at his career here, too, and he'll be signing his Heroes for My Son book of minibiographies 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. after speaking at Teens and Children from 10 to 10:30 a.m.

Diana Gabaldon is a new entry in the Platonic index of graphic novel writers. She's written The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel as part of her Outlander novel series. She's talking at Fiction & Mystery 11 to  11:30 a.m. and then signing from 1 to 2 p.m.

Now, honestly, the Post estimates that 130,000 people are coming to the festival, so don't expect to get your books signed. Good thing that Feiffer and Juster will be at Politics and Prose on Sunday at 11 a.m. Noted science fiction writer William Gibson follows them at 1 p.m. On Monday, Ted Rall will be at Busboys and Poets on 14th Street NW at 6:30 pm to promote his new book, The Anti-American Manifesto. An interview with Rall should appear here on Monday.