Comics History Recap and Summary of Upcoming US Comics Code Posts
Wertham, Distributors, and Gaines! Oh, MY!
Comics history is rather convoluted, and driven like the wind by external forces as often as internal ones. Beginning in 1935 and continuing to the present, the industry has seen many ups and downs, with its share of amazing successes as well as unbelievable failures. These six posts touch on some of that history, primarily between 1957 and 1997.
Post 1 Thoughts on Comic Book History
Post 2 Comic Book Continuity, Timelines, and Verisimilitude
Post 3 Comic Book Distribution & Putting a Stop to ‘Characters Writing Themselves’
Post 4 Commercial Art, Not Cheating the Reader, and Dissecting the Superhero Trope
Post 5 What’s Gone Missing from US Comic Books?
Post 6 Attack of the Silents
The 1990s saw the twin pincers of destruction first cripple, then almost destroy mainstream US comic books. The first from DC Comics in the form of “The Death of Superman”, and the second from Marvel in the purchase of Heroes World distributors to create an exclusive distributor for their lines of comics.
The US comics world never really recovered from these two events, and has since been shambling on like a slow zombie trying to avoid getting between Woody Harrelson and a case of vegan Twinkies.
The current bonfire consuming the mainstream industry today is well-documented by several other news sites, blogs, Substacks, and video channels, despite the attempts by Disney and Warner Brothers to bury this bad news with astroturfed news stories, purchased reviews, and bots flooding X trying to prop up the crippled and dying industry.
Deep pockets are keeping the corpse standing upright until they choose not to do so. Bad stories and art are going to continue in Current Year Comics.
Until they don’t.
Mox nix.
Rather than focus on the current state of American Comics, the next articles will look further back than 1957 to the wild west periods of comics. Back to when there were few rules of the road other than what came over from newspapers, glossy photo books, magazines, and Pulp publishing.
The wild west of comics was eventually tamed by an ofttimes debated set of rules known as the Comics Code, which was rolled out on October 26th of 1954 by the Comics Code Authority (CCA), a body created by the Comics Magazine Association of America (CCMA).
The lead up to this action and the events that transpired in the years before have been often described as a horrible violation of free speech and expression, as the Comics Code prevented certain types of stories and graphic representations from appearing in comic books that were distributed through the newsstand networks.
This event is still talked about by free speech advocates and comic book aficionados today, though some commentators have clearly not done sufficient research on the events that led to the Comics Code development and implementation.
Over the course of three articles, I hope to provide you the reader with a summary of the pertinent events, the actions which precipitated hearings by the Senate Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, and the actions that brought about the CCA’s Comics Code. Additionally, I will provide many links to original testimony and documents pertinent to the events so you can also conduct research if you are so inclined.
And I suggest you do that very thing — read the source material for yourself. I was taken aback by some things I discovered while researching this topic. Many thousands of words written about these events which I consumed, generated over the course of the 70 years since the hearings in New York City took place, have glossed over, ignored, or were outright misleading regarding some of the events and their ramifications.
The articles are currently projected to cover the following topics:
Post A: Background in the US (1938 to 1953); the “Degeneracy Problem”
Post B: The Senate Subcommittee Hearings; why the Code appeared
Post C: The Aftermath of the Comics Code implementation
Each of these posts will appear when they are complete, but I plan to post the first of them this coming week. The feedback received from readers on the previous six posts was encouraging. Thank you! I hope the upcoming posts will be informative and entertaining for you as well.
I think Jim Gurney touched on it a bit when he did a blog post about Betty Boop. Before the code: pinups. After the code: all charm and appeal gone, the character is well dressed, boring, and eventually her media was canceled.