Scott: If you have been a comic reader long
enough, you may have stumbled upon this symbol
on the cover of more than a few of your comics.
This is the seal of The Comics Code of Authority.
But what does it mean and why is it there
and where did it come from? Well, let’s find out!
Welcome to Comic Misconceptions,
I’m Scott. I’m sick again and remember
last year when I said that the Comics Code
Authority was an episode entirely on its own?
Past-Scott: The Comics Code Authority is an
episode entirely on its own.
Present-Scott: I think I’m finally going
to get around to it today. The Comics Code
Authority -- or CCA -- is a massive part of comics
history that we as fans cannot ignore. That
being said, this subject is incredibly dense
and I had to make a lot of cuts in the script
because there’s no way I could cover everything.
I encourage you guys to do your own follow-
up research if you want to look into it a
little bit further. I suggest the documentary
“Diagram for Delinquents” as a good starting
point. But with that said, lets learn about
the history of the Comics Code Authority.
First and foremost, what is it? Well, to put
it simply the CCA was a way to publishers
to self-regulate the type of stories, images,
language and other aspects of their comics.
Past-Scott: You can kind of consider them like the MPAA for comic books.
Censoring anything
that they find not suitable for children.
Present-Scott: Shut up past Scott. This isn’t
your time. Anyway if there’s one thing most
people know about the code, it’s that it
was strict. The first set of rules included
such restrictions as, “In every instance
good shall triumph over evil and the criminal
punished for his misdeeds. All characters
shall be depicted in a dress reasonably acceptable
to society. Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity,
or words or symbols which have acquire undesirable
meanings are forbidden”. These are just
some and not even the most interesting ones
personally. If you want to look at the whole
list, I will leave a link in the description
below for you to check it out. But the original
rules that I want to focus on are in regards
to the comic titles and covers. Specifically
“No comics magazine shall use the word
horror or terror in its title, restraint in
the use of the word “crime” in the titles
or sub-titles shall be exercised and the word
“crime” on a comic magazine shall never
shall never appear alone on a cover”. To
me, these are the big rules, at least the
rules that really help you understand the
state of comics before the code was put in
place in the 1950’s. As I have mentioned
a few times before, superhero comics were
really popular in the early 40’s, but started
dying out near the end of the decade and the
beginning of the 50’s. They were still around,
but the comic industry starting exploring
other genres of storytelling. Two of the most
popular were crime and horror. There really
wasn’t censorship or approval -- any sort
of approval system for comics at the time.
So writers and artists could show these gruesome
and intensely violent scenes in stories and
young kids would read them like crazy. A huge
issue facing American culture at the time
was juvenile delinquency. Parents were worried
that their children were starting to have
too much freedom and didn’t respect authority.
And they saw these crime comic books as part
of the problem. The crime books were notorious
for showing criminal activity in a desirable
fashion. They were even cases of the comic
showing the specifications for how to commit
crimes which some worried would inspire the
young readers to try it for themselves. Writer
Sterling North called them, among many other
things, a quote “Violence stimulate” and
he said that parents and teachers throughout
America must ban together to break the comic
magazine. There were also educators who believed
that comics were making children illiterate
because they were reading them instead of
“true literature”. Then of course, there
were religious groups who had strong objections
to the highly immoral content in crime and
horror comics. But the real focus was on the
mental affects that comics had on the minds
of young children. Enter Dr. Fredric Wertham.
You can’t really talk about the Comics Code
Authority without at least mentioning Wertham.
He was a psychiatrist who was notorious for
his crusade against comics. In 1946, Wertham
had set up a very low-cost psychiatric clinic
in Harlem for the underprivileged. While working
in this clinic, he saw many children suffering
from anything from mental health issues, reading
disabilities and even kids who had issues
with authority and/or committed misdemeanors.
And he noticed that the common thread was
that they all had read comics. In all reality,
though, this isn’t super surprising, right?
At this time it was reported that somewhere
between -- somewhere around 90% of both young boys and
girls were reading some type of comic book.
Some accused Wertham of a sort of confirmation
biased. Of course he thinks comics are harmful
to kids because the only kids he sees in his
clinic are the ones who need his psychiatric
help. He isn’t exposed as often to kids
who read comics that are perfectly fine. Maybe
his argument is based on a deductive fallacy.
These kids are violent and have mental issues,
these kids read comics. Therefore, comics
cause kids to be violent and have mental issues.
Regardless Wertham called together a conference
on the psychopathology of comic books in early
1948. This symposium would inspire a few articles
in TIME magazine, the Saturday review of literature
and the Readers Digest to be written up and
bring the issue of comic books -- no pun intended --
to the public eye and build momentum for the
case against comics. It wasn’t long after
that that cities across America started censoring
and banning comics. In some cases, selling
crime comics to anyone under 18 was a misdemeanor
punishable by hefty finds or even jail time.
There are even a few towns that had public
comic book burnings where hundreds or even
thousands of issues were burned in protest.
As you could imagine, the comic book industry
was hit pretty hard because of all this. So
they tried to fix it and got on everyone’s
good side again. A few publishers came together
and formed the Association of Comics Magazine
Publishers or ACMP in July on 1948. This was
their way of assuring parents that their concerns
were being heard and the comic publishers
were trying to address them. The ACMP was
marketed as having quote “a code of ethics
to assure good taste and high editorial standards
only comic magazines that meet the code requirements
are permitted to use the special 'Code Seal'”.
There were a few problems with this, though.
Number 1, not many publishers decided to get
on board with the seal. And number 2, the
seal didn’t really do anything. The code
was basically defunct a short 2 years later
but comics were still being printed with that
seal. Director Henry Schultz said in 1950 that
the association and code were both out of
business. In fact, Schultz went on record
in the 1954 senate subcommittee into juvenile
delinquency hearings by saying quote “ We
do no self-regulation at all except as it
may exist in the mind of the editors as they
proceed in their daily work.” It may have
initially been an organization where publishers
would have to submit comics to be approved
but that was completely gone only a few years
later. Those publishers were able to put that
seal on their comics without having anyone
actually review them. I mentioned congressional
hearings in 1954, these are super important.
Originally, they were just hearings established
to investigate the issue of juvenile delinquency.
But the real focus became centered around
crime and horror comics and the effect they
had on children. Around the same time, Fredric
Wertham released his most famous publication,
“Seduction of the Innocent”. This book
was essentially a warning of the negative
nature of comic books and how they can easily
corrupt the minds of young people. The book
was a huge success that led to Wertham being
a main payer at the senate subcommittee hearings
where he just tore down the comic book industry
by saying things like quote “I think Hitler
was a beginner compared to the comic book
industry”. Ouch! So obviously, the comic
book industry walked out of the hearings pretty
hurt and the publishers and distributors decided
to try again to make a comics code and this
time, stick to it. So, they formed the Comics
Magazine Association of America later that
year in 1954 and created the Comics Code Authority.
The way it worked is that they would hire
someone outside any individual publisher to
review the comics before they would be published
and make sure that they adhere to the standards
of the code. If the comic met the code requirements,
it would go out without the seal of approval
on it. But if it did not meet the requirements,
it would have to be edited first to meet the
standards or it would have to be scrapped
all together. A lot of publishers went out
of business because their toned down stories
just weren’t selling as well as their crime
and horror comics. The original code was just
way to strict. Thankfully things started to
loosen up a little in the 70’s with a rewrite
of the code. One of these rewrites was born
thanks to The Amazing Spiderman #96 that dealt
with the issue of drug use. That comic was
specifically requested to be made by the United
States Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare. But marvel still couldn’t get the
code to sign off on the story because it violated
a vague clause in the comics code. So they
just printed the comic without the code's approval
and it was a success. After that, the code
started going through more changes and rewrites
threw the late 80’s as well. By that point,
the rules weren’t very strict but just a
little more generalized. It was more like,
“Just do your best, use your best judgment.
Don’t do anything distasteful, okay?”
Eventually the code had just kind of disappeared,
it faded out of existence. Independent publishers
didn’t use the code and retailers didn’t
really care anymore. They sold them anyway,
plus many publishers started using their own
in house rating system for comics. In 2011
the last two publishers who still used the
code were Archie and DC. Archie admitted to
not actually sending their comics in for approval
but just printing the seal on their covers
anyway since their comics were pretty kid
friendly. DC on the other hand, was still
sending their comics in for approval. However,
the company in charge of overseeing the Comics
Magazine Association of America was the Kellen
Company who said that they stopped reviewing
comics two years prior in 2009. So who was
reviewing all of those DC comics? Well, it
was one single women named Holly Munter
Koenig who was reading and approving
all of these DC comics by herself in her house
out of the passion she had for what the CMAA
stood for. But in 2011, both DC and Archie
officially dropped the code seal from their
comics and the CCA was gone for good. Now
I do want to talk a little bit about Fredric
Wertham because I feel like he’s the guy
that everyone points to when they think of
how awful and strict the CCA was and how it
kind of ruined the comic book industry at
the time and created the stigma that is still
present today about comics solely being for
children. The fact of the matter is, Wertham
did not want the Comics Code Authority or
any kind of self-regulation. He didn’t want
it, he didn’t like it. Heck, they even offered
him the job as the director of the CCA and
he turned it down. He continued to write articles
against it after it came out. He was as against
the code as you might’ve been. The key thing
that Wertham wanted to do was simply restrict
the selling of comics to children. Specifically
crime and horror comics. Though he was also
not a huge fan of superheroes either. He felt
like Superman taught kids that they can save
the day by being stronger than your enemy
and beating them up. Wertham was anti violence.
He believed that human violence could be completely
eliminated someday, but he felt like these
comics were teaching kids that violence isn’t
bad at all but entertaining and amusing. And
that’s why he set out to do what he did.
Not so that a comics code can be put in place
not so that comics would be heavily censored
or made illegal but just so that certain comics
couldn’t be sold to children under a certain
age. So maybe Wertham’s intentions were
good, but you know what they say about history
being written by the victors. So here’s
a huge question for you guys. One that could
be and I might even turn it into its own episode
someday. Should comics have stricter censorship?
Now I know that a lot of you guess are going
to instinctively say no but hear me out on
this one. I’ve always held a belief that
limitations lend themselves to creativity.
I was on The Weekly Pull podcast not too long
ago -- link in the description if you want
to go check it out -- and Sal from TVLittleHouse
mentioned that he thinks DC’s animated stuff
has lost its subtlety because now they can
just show whatever they want whereas before,
the writers had to think of creative ways
to get around the censors. Perhaps the movies
and shows actually benefited from that censorship.
Plus think of all the fun and goofy silver
aged comics that we had probably thanks to
the CCA. Read literally any of Superman’s
Pal Jimmy Olsen. Don’t even read them just
Google some of the issue covers. They’re
amazing! Again this could totally be its
own entire episode but I want to know what
you guys think. Are you for 100% creative
freedom for the writers and artists or do
you think a stricter set of rules actually
enhance comics? Let me know in the comments.
Once again, I want to stress this topic is
exhaustive and there is no way that I could
have fit everything in this one video without
it taking up an hour at least. There’s a
lot of good stuff that I lazily brushed over
so if you are interested in this topic, go
do some research of your own and see what
you find. And if this is your first time hanging
out with us here at Nerdsync please hit that
big sexy subscribe button. We do weekly comic
book videos just like this one every Wednesday
we don’t want you to miss out on any of
it. Once again, I’m Scott. You can find
me on Twitter and Instagram and we’ll see
you on Friday for a tie-in video and more
things that you thought you knew about comics.
See ya!
