SOURCE: "The Middle Against Both Ends," in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, Vol. II, Stein and Day, 1971, pp. 415-28.

In the following essay, Fiedler dismisses the worry over comic books as a weakness of culturally intolerant middlebrows.

I am surely one of the few people pretending to intellectual respectability who can boast that he has read more comic books than attacks on comic books. I do not mean that I have consulted or studied the comics—I have read them, often with some pleasure. Nephews and nieces, my own children, and the children of neighbors have brought them to me to share their enjoyment. An old lady on a ferry boat in Puget Sound once dropped two in my lap in wordless sympathy: I was wearing, at the time, a sailor's uniform.

I have somewhat more difficulty in getting through the books that attack them. I am...