A step up in maturity

Crime SuspenStories is famous for being cited by Frederic Wertham as a case to remove comics entirely from the hands of children, with Wertham arguing that children (the targeted audience of comic books), are impressionable to the point that they were beginning to crave the violence they read on the page in their every day lives. Upon reading Crime SuspenStories, however, I saw a lot of the material not as a means to pander to the imaginations of Children, but an effort to reach out to a broader audience- namely adults. Much of the content centers around developed, complex fears that I do not believe children experience in bulk, and the story that most supports this is Murder May Boomerang. Here, a single father works tirelessly to put his son through school to the point of physical and mental exhaustion. The son tries to provide the father with a comfortable retreat in his old age, but the father experiences a trauma (harassment by a loose convict) that pushes him over the edge, and thus the father is doomed to madness as he is trapped in his own memory. I do not believe a lot of children had worries about higher education, loans, and their parents working just to put them through school. The fear of a parent giving their mental and physical all just so one can succeed is a mature fear- something that I know a lot of individuals in college and older experience. Crime SuspenStories works to market to adults, but because the most established audience for comic books was children, people automatically assumed that these particular stories were intended for children as well. The attempt to broaden the comics audience by pushing the terror genre may have backfired and caused concern for America's youth because the target audience was not clearly specified.