Number 2261: Through the looking glass with Dr Wertham

What a curious story this is from Adventures Into the Unknown. A dad suffers a radiation accident and fathers twin prodigies, “talking like adults at one year!” The boys’ mother is shown fleetingly, in one panel, then vanishes from the story. The twins take to the Lewis Carroll poem, “Jabberwocky,” and work to decipher it. Bruce, the dad, consults a psychiatrist about the twins’ obsession with the poem. The psychiatrist he consults, Dr Bancroft, is the image of Dr Fredric Wertham, famous critic of the comic book industry, and author of the anti-comics book, Seduction of the Innocent. It is an inside joke, but it makes the tale curiouser and curiouser.

Ogden Whitney did the artwork for this atypical ACG entry, from Adventures Into the Unknown #13 (1950). Whitney would go on to draw dozens of stories for ACG over the years, culminating in his time on the brilliant oddball humor of Herbie, where likenesses of famous people appeared often. As far as I know, I believe this is the only time he drew Dr Wertham.

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