SIR, — This week's article on horror comics surprisingly misses one of
the important prob- lems that is so painfully obvious to anyone who has recently been in the Services. The reading matter of the ordinary soldier—and thus presumably his civilian counterpart too— is very largely made up of magazines and comics of the sort to which your article re- ferred. Whatever his physical age, the mental age of the ordinary young soldier has gener- ally not developed beyond the stage of still being susceptible to the influence of comics. The result is this they fill up part of the picture of his life or his ideas of life as portrayed by films and the like.
Whatever the influence of comics on the young, it is as great and as dangerous, and probably more so, on supposedly older people. who are more inclined to follow the examples given them with realism than are the younger readers. It is here that the greatest danger lies.—Yours faithfully,
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