(note that I do not necessarily endorse the rest of the essay)
Baruch SheKivanti!
The story is told that when the Telzer rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Eliyahu Meir Bloch, zt”l, once found a comic book in the dorm in the Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland, he began crying. The person who was accompanying him downplayed the severity of the find, saying, “It’s just a comic book.”
Rabbi Bloch replied, “In Europe, the bochurim who ‘went off’ were interested in intellectual subjects. They followed communism or Zionism, and we could deal with them by reintroducing them to the intellectual world of Torah. But if they are interested in the foolishness of comic books, they are very far away from intellectual matter of any kind.”
