“Pass them over, I should like to read some horror comics.”—Winston Churchill In a June 1952 comic strip, Charlie Brown peruses a comic-book rack overflowing with minimalist titles such as “HATE,” “STAB,” “CHOKE,” “GOUGE,” “SLASH,” and “KILL.” He flings his arms wide before this drugstore altar, labeled “For the Kiddies,” and exclaims, “What a beautiful gory layout!” Blast Comics features a mushroom cloud, another indication that Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts newspaper strip was spotlighting a growing national obsession: the influence of violent and titillating comic books on impressionable youth. Colorful and direct, comic books originated in the mid-1930s as reprints of newspaper strips, then quickly evolved into original adventure and superhero stories that became all the rage with America’s children. Some adults viewed them the way harried parents see video games now—something to keep the kids out of their hair for hours on end, and certainly the Peanuts gang lazed away many an afternoon hunched over comic magazines. Other grownups, however, saw such fantastical characters as Superman, Captain Marvel, the Human Torch, and Wonder Woman as nothing more than salacious trash. As early as 1940 Sterling North, the literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, was editorializing that comics were…