German-American psychiatrist and crusading author who protested the purportedly harmful effects of violent imagery in mass media and comic books on the development of children. His best-known book was "Seduction of the Innocent" (1954), which described overt or covert depictions of violence, sex, drug use, and other adult fare within "crime comics" -a term Wertham used to describe not only the popular gangster/murder-oriented titles of the time but also superhero and horror comics as well- and asserted, based largely on undocumented anecdotes, that reading this material encouraged similar behavior in children.
