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The comic book industry and the United States mental health system met many times during the twentieth and twenty-first century. In 1941, psychologist William Moulton Marston, believing society needed reform, created the character of Wonder Woman to inspire readers to imagine a utopian future and advocated for the form of comics as a way to address social issues. In 1948, Fredric Wertham, psychiatrist and director of the Lafargue Mental Health Clinic in Harlem, also took an interest in comics. Wertham likewise thought society needed reform, but saw the images in comics as a cause rather than a solution for rising juvenile delinquency in the United States. He tried to rally parents and politicians to regulate children’s reading practices, taking his cause as far as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in 1954. In the course of a little less than two decades, these mental health specialists would leave an impact on the industry that would shock the form and its status for years.The enmeshment of mental health and comics would extend beyond these controversial figures, a history that is central to this dissertation project. The meetings of comics and mental health often led to new stories and shaped the future of the form in distinct ways. In this dissertation, I explore these critical moments where the history of comics and psychological health overlap, focusing on mainstream comics to understand the way that the comic book industry developed under the influence—and intrusion—of these practitioners of mental health and how their ideas prompted new stories. The many relationships comics has had with the psychological sciences that I consider in this project offer insight into the changing discourse of mental health in the United States, how those fields have redefined how we think about the self, and how comics have both documented and distributed these ideas.

In this thesis, I expand upon Linda Hutcheon's use of the terms knowing and unknowing audiences that she briefly outlines in her book A Theory of Adaptation. Hutcheon suggests that when experiencing an adaptation, one may be a knowing audience member, someone that knows the adapted work, or an unknowing audience member, someone who is not familiar with an adapted work. Hutcheon proposes the terms knowing and unknowing audiences as a way to reorient adaptation studies to consider the experience and the knowledge of the audience members. This model runs contrary to orthodox adaptation theory or fidelity criticism, wherein the value of an adaptation is determined by its closeness to an original. Theoretical discussions that rely upon studying the closeness of an adaptation to an original text do not provide insight into the text but simply re-establish a hierarchy for an original. Thus, Hutcheon's use of the terms knowing and unknowing audiences is valuable because these terms provide new language to reinvigorate the field. Thus Hutcheon's new language presents a step toward redefining the theory and producing scholarship that explores audience literacy or literacies.