Not So Funny

The Los Angeles Times ran a cartoon last month showing a hand clutching a pistol and a copy of a comic book called Sordid Crimes. The caption asked: "Do your children handle loaded guns?" The Times* was belatedly getting into the fight against the sex-and-violence comic books which are the bastard offspring of newspaper comics.

Last week the cartoon seemed prophetic: the Los Angeles County sheriff had in custody a 14-year-old boy who had poisoned a 50-year-old woman. He got the idea, and the poison recipe, he said, from a comic book. There were other alarming cases, too. A 13-year-old boy's parents came home from the movies to find his body hanging in the garage. At his feet was a crime comic depicting a hanging body. Two boys, 14 and 15, were caught committing a burglary. The crime comics they had with them had inspired the crime and shown them how to do it.

Outraged by comics that piously headline their pages "Obey the Law" while dripping with murder by meat cleavers, quicklime, axes and buzz saws, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors took drastic action. It passed an ordinance providing a $500 fine or a six-month jail term for selling crime comics to children under 18. The law will cover only the rural areas of the county, but the legislature will be asked to make the ban statewide.

A voluntary association was already trying to clean up the 60-million-circulation comic-book field (TIME, July 12). In full-page magazine ads, National Comics Publications Inc. (Superman, etc.) was plugging the better comics as " a major moral force ... a highly salutary recreation."

In Detroit, Indianapolis, Galesburg, Ill., alarmed parents were getting the law after the bad books. So far, newspapers have been slow to take the stick to their own offspring.

-Which runs Dick Tracy, goriest of the newspaper strips.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.