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Teddy Shearer cartoon.

Will Eisner went there, as did James Baldwin and Richard Avedon. Bob Kane went there, as did Bert Lancaster and George Cukor. Bill Finger went there, as did Neil Simon and Lionel Trilling. Stan Lee went there as did Stanley Kramer and Irving Howe.

DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx has a storied past as a hothouse incubator of all sorts of artistic talent, in both comics and elsewhere. So I was delighted to find a website that reprints material from the schools literary magazine from 1929-1941. Go there and see the juvenilia of James Baldwin, Stanley Kauffman and Robert Warshow, among others. For comics fans, of especial interest will be the cartoons of Teddy Shearer and Mel Casson.

Speaking of Warshow, I’ll remind everyone of something Tim usefully pointed out awhile back, that Warshow’s brilliant essay “Paul, The Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham” is available online. It’s a central document for discussing comics history.

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“The real question is this: Are comic books good or are they not good? Now it all depends on what you want. If you want to raise a generation that is half storm-troopers and half cannon-fodder, with a dash of illiteracy, then comic books are good. In fact, they are perfect.”

Via Bill Kartalopolous, an audio file of a pretty terrific old episode of The Author Meets the Critics, featuring a debate with the infamous Dr. Frederic Wertham.

UPDATE: Oh, and gee, I should mention that this is a different episode than the one Tom Spurgeon highlighted the other day, which also featured Wertham, along with Al Capp.

Because of my dereliction of duty, let me point you to an article I only recently discovered was available online, Robert Warshow’s famous essay on Wertham and EC, in which he references the Capp/Wertham episode in question.