Pyrts said:
There's a standard set of tricks that fraudulent mediums use -- I've seen a tv show on them.
Comic books prior to the mid-1960s also used to be a good source of stories exposing "psychic" tricks.
Superman, for example, used to have fewer stories about supervillains and more stories about real-word evils (slumlords, exploitative capitalists, tabloid reporters, and various scam artists). A common story would have Clark Kent being invited to a phony seance and using his superpowers to see how the medium was really doing the stunts (which the reader then got to see too). Superman then either surreptitiously exposed the stunts, or (more commonly) put on a hoax that convinced the medium there really was something supernatural and got the medium to bring out all the money the fake had scammed to invest in Superman's scam, which Superman would then give back to all the phony's victims.
There were also various series, such as
Dr. 13 the Ghost-Breaker (who specialized in de-bunking claims of the paranormal), and
Roy Raymond (whose TV show "Strange But True" investigated strange claims, which generally turned out to be hoaxes
although some were hoaxes where something was pretending to be a ghost and it turned out actually to be a space alien...).
What led to these stories becoming far less common is the rise of Marvel Comics in the 1960s, with the idea of a single universe with a consistent continuity in which all the characters lived.
Previously, comic characters lived in an odd multi-reality in which, in one story, Batman might team up with Superman (since they lived in the same reality) and in the very next Batman would be helpless against an alien invasion (since there was no Superman in Batman's reality.) This allowed a great variety of stories -- in one Batman could solve a seemingly supernatural crime, explaining to Robin that it had to be a trick because there are no such things as ghosts, and in another Batman and Robin could or defeat a curse or fight villains with supernatural powers.
Once the idea of a unified continuity, with each story having to fit in, became common, then either ghosts and magic and psychics existed or they didn't -- and once a story was published in which these things were real, it became hard to do ones in which they weren't. (Dr. 13 was re-defined, for example, as an example of someone determined to expose the supernatural as a fake despite the massive evidence all around him that it was real.)
I mention all this not simply to reminisce about comics (although that's fun too) but for a better reason.
Comics once were, and could potentially be again, a resource in educating against superstition and scams.
Decades ago, a comic needed to have circulation in the hundreds of thousands to continue publishing (and some had sales of over a million copies per issue). Today a comic that sells 50,000 copies is doing well, and many comics are published with circulation of under 5,000.
Comic book writers and editors have long been known for being very interested in readers' opinions, and for being responsive to readers' concerns. If more skeptics bought, read, and wrote letters of comment to comics, there is a good chance of influencing the kinds of stories that appear there -- much better, I believe, than one's chance of affecting tv shows, movies, or other media.
If we lefties could use these techniques to take over comics and get more more blacks, more Asians, more women, more gays, and more socially-concerned heroes introduced (to the point that some conservatives wail about comics being part of the left-wing conspiracy), there is every chance that skeptics can do the same.
