The American Comics Codes, Epilogue

Links to previous posts and some follow-up thoughts

These posts have been slowly germinating since 1983 and the Bill Gaines interview in The Comics Journal Issue #81.

A small collection of magazine and online interviews started from there, grew slowly over the years, and ultimately led to collecting various comic book history texts. The most recent addition to that portion of the library, Forgotten Adventures, finally prompted writing this three-part series.

The tipping point came with reading Norman Fruman’s recollection about Ken Bald hiding his American Comics Group artwork from his family when they entered the room because he was ashamed of its content. That passage recalled an excerpt from Hajdu’s book where he recounted a story of Tony DiPreta’s concerns about whether his artwork created for Lev Gleason’s Crime comics was possibly hurting kids. DiPreta was impacted enough that he took his burden to confession with his priest.

Were parents, grandparents, guardians, teachers, librarians, and other people who were concerned about children’s welfare from 1938 to 1954 somehow different from these artists who produced the material? Didn’t they also have the choice to be ashamed or offended by what they considered unfit for their children to see or read? These materials were on public display, as well as being available for their children to purchase. Many authors and interviewers had labeled the American Public’s reactions as some sort of ‘fear’ or ‘bigotry’, and thereby implicitly dismissed them as unimportant. Were their concerns unfit for consideration in this discussion?

I thought that the parents’ point of view was worthy of consideration, just as were those of the creators, the publishers, and the freedom of expression advocates. The other groups had many points of view offered in their defense. The American Public and American Families deserved at least one.

I. Previous posts in the Comics Code series.

Note: As with everything on this Substack, what I post here, I post for me. If the material happens to help you in some way, that is great! If you disagree with what you read here, I understand. There’s plenty of other stuff to read elsewhere on Substack. Enjoy it.

1. If you have an interest in the Comics Code Controversy of 1954, then possibly the three posts in this series will be beneficial to your own research. Hopefully, you had some fun reading them.

2. For handy reference, here are the direct links to all three of the posts.

   1. The American Comics Codes, Part A

   2. The American Comics Codes, Part B

   3. The American Comics Codes, Part C

3. And for completeness, here are links to my previously posted series on comic book history, mainly covering the Silver Age through the last portion of the 20th Century.

   1. Thoughts on Comic Book History

   2. Comic Book Continuity, Timelines, and Verisimilitude

   3. Comic Book Distribution & Putting a Stop to ‘Characters Writing Themselves’

   4. Commercial Art, Not Cheating the Reader, and Dissecting the Superhero Trope

   5. What’s Gone Missing from US Comic Books?

   6. Attack of the Silents

4. The primary four references used for these articles are listed below, plus some additional references if you wish to read more about the Golden Age period and the 1954 Comics Code.

   1. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954.

   2. Amy Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, 1998.

   3. David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, 2009.

   4. David Vance, Forbidden Adventures: The History of the American Comics Group, 1996. Can be tough to track down; hardcover.

   5. Jim Steranko, The Steranko History of Comics, Volumes 1 (1970) and 2 (1972). Tough to find, and expensive if you do. I’m a huge fan of “The Best Dressed Man in Comics” for both his art and his stories.

   6. Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes, 1965 & 2003.

   7. Les Daniels, Comix: A History of Comics in America, 1971.

   8. Dick Lupoff & Don Thompson, All in Color for a Dime, 1970.

   9. Blake Bell & Michael J. Vassallo, The Secret History Of Marvel Comics, 2013. A good recap of Timely/Atlas/Marvel Comics from the late 1930s to about 1957 with the Atlas “Crash”; focus on Martin Goodman and his company.

II. Why dig this up 70+ years after the fact?

Why not? People are still going off half-cocked about these events 70+ years later. Might as well throw a few contrary facts and opinions in those peoples’ faces and see if they are dialectic thinkers or rhetorical non-learners set on “Auto-reject.” A little Aristotle never hurt anything, except for the non-learners’ feelings.

1. Too many takes on this event assume a very parochial “comic book” stance of ‘Good Guy vs Bad Guy’, typically taking Dr Wertham and a few others to be the ‘Bad Guy’, with the Comic Book publishers, writers, and artists defaulting to the ‘Good Guy’ role.

   1. There were no white-hat wearing ‘Good Guys’ in this event. This was real life, not a comic book story.

   2. There were some bad actors who offended their customer base enough to have their revenue streams cut off, forcing some to retrench, leading others to change business operations, and pushing other companies out of business entirely.

2. As content creators, we need to know where we have been to gauge where we need to go, and not repeat the same mistakes previous creators made. Intelligence is learning from your mistakes; wisdom is learning from other peoples’ mistakes. This is a great example for creators of entertainment content to study.

3. The Narrative is not a replacement for the Truth.

   1. Narrative is typically the easy path filled with unsubstantiated assumptions, and sometimes outright lies.

   2. Truth is often hard to ascertain.

   3. The continual repetition of Bill Gaines being the tragic hero who bravely fought against censorship is narrative.

   4. That Bill Gaines blithely pushed past the accepted cultural boundaries, which lit the fuse on the powder keg building up under the Comic Book industry, causing the Public to bitch slap Bill Gaines and other publishers until they cried “uncle”, is closer to truth.

4. Words have meanings. “Censorship” is often confused with people saying to the creator “keep that garbage away from me and my family.” Consider the difference between “boycott” and “censorship”.

   1. When individual people reject your work and refuse to buy it from you, then you aren’t experiencing censorship. You are experiencing a BOYCOTT.

   2. When the Government or a business interest keeps your stuff from getting to consumers, or keeps them from finding out it exists, you might just be able to cry CENSORSHIP.

   3. So, when the consumer tells you to piss off with what you are selling — “we don’t want it” — and the Government has no laws that can act against you on that same material, then you know you are living in Gaines Country — and it’s a BOYCOTT!

   4. Dip into the obscene and you have no protections under freedom of speech or expression. It isn’t even censorship at that point. (See more on this below.)

5. Comic book companies in the Golden Age and much of the Silver Age were owned by a tiny group of families employing several thousands of creators¹, marketing primarily to tens of millions of children. This blow-up has many strong analogs to US investigations and hearings on both cigarettes and pharmaceuticals, which also addressed concerns of impacts to children. Comic book companies are oddly assumed to be the “good guys” in this case, where the cigarette and pharmaceutical companies are the “bad guys” in their cases. I find that insane on its very face.

III. Constraints are not Censorship.

Society and culture need to survive to protect the rights we so blithely assume to exist without costs. Constraints are part of a healthy, functioning society and culture in any population greater than “1”. They are also part of how imagination and creativity can be preserved and exercised. Constraints placed on artistic expression are no less valid or important as those placed on building construction, park design, or water treatment plant operations.

The 1948 Winters vs New York decision by the SCOTUS and related cases into the 21st Century demonstrate the difficulty of enacting and enforcing Government bans on content. The most effective “bans” are a those located as close to the person to be protected as possible. In this case, those protections are typically enacted and enforced by the family of the children in question, and not by the Government. Browse this case and this case for more details.

The Federal Government in 1954 at the least understood that new laws and regulations regarding entertainment would be (1) likely to be overturned upon court challenge after Winters, and (2) would be both expensive and difficult to enforce (see the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution). This is why the preferred direction of the Eisenhower Administration was to have the industry develop internally-driven standards for themselves, then observe how the industry enforced those standards.

Parental constraints on what minor children can experience for entertainment are not censorship. Parents who choose to boycott any materials that they consider suspect of being unhealthy for their children are exercising their parental rights and duties. No vendor has the right to demand access to children to sell or even give away entertainment materials, or anything else, outside the purview of parents or guardians.

Constraints imposed upon the comic book publishers from inside a trade association, enforced by some method of review/rejection/rework, and feedback from the outside world, i.e. the customers, could have diffused the events that escalated between 1947 to 1954 with Crime and Horror comics. Such constraints might have either reigned in EC and other out-of-control publishers, or allowed the trade organization to eject them from the group, signaling that those publishers were fair game for targeting by the public’s anger.

Some general thoughts on constraints:

1. Left unchecked, Man’s imagination and creativity falls to the lowest common level—violence, blasphemy, pornography, perverse thrill, and the obscene in general. Call this the Lowest Energy State of Creativity, or LESC, relying on base emotions and primal drives of self-satisfaction over all else.

   1. I like these diagrams — you can call LESC “thinking with your crotch.”

   2. It can become similar to an addiction, for both creator and consumer, in that the dosage has to ever increase to deliver the previous highs.

   3. This continued focus on the self-satisfying base nature thrills can become a prison for the creator with what might become a nigh-inescapable gravity well of self-imposed darkness.

   4. On top of that, it is repetitive. The base nature of Man offers very little in the way of creative elbow room, and what little room there is filled up fast with very boring stuff.

   5. This is part of the darkness that consumes creativity. See this excellent series by Nick Enlowe for background on darkness that consumes creativity.²

2. You are openly sharing more about yourself—the dark side of yourself—than you might think when you create from the LESC.

   1. Ask yourself why you really want to share this story or art that parades things from the self-serving portions of your soul, even with yourself.

   2. If you later recognize LESC work as a mistake, it will be hard to shake that stigma of having created it in the first place.

3. Man is a problem solver, and very few problems come without constraints. Otherwise, they wouldn't be problems.

   1. Limited physical resources and limited time are always drivers for Man to find better solutions.

   2. Creativity is different only in that the yawning pit of the Lowest Energy State is always there, always wanting to devour your creativity in repetitive primal desires.

   3. Your creativity is safer in the higher orbitals, striving for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, farther away from the lower energy states.

4. Obscenity is not protected speech. Not even in the Good Ol’ US of A.

   1. Obscenity adds nothing of value to the social conversation, which is why we have free speech/expression, but obscenity has no protections.

   2. Obscenity only serves to excite the base natures of Man, and is thus valueless. The descent towards LESC funnels you toward obscenity.

   3. You cut yourself off from society and its language when you make obscenity your lingua franca. This can begin and end in your focus turning ever closer toward Evil, rather than maintaining a focus on the Good.³

IV. How does this relate to creating comic books or other entertainments?

Don’t consider yourself beyond the concerns of the general public or your customers. You ignore them at your peril.⁴

“In Will Eisner’s phrase, ‘We were too busy to do our own work.’ Moreover, Eisner said, the people who made comic books ‘only cared about making comic books. We lived in a bubble, and lived, breathed, and ate comic books. The world could blow up outside the studio, and the average comic-book man wouldn’t notice. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what was starting to happen, and none of us was looking out the window to see it.’”

Publishers, editors, writers, and artists in the main didn’t see the hurricane coming at them, as they had no feedback loop from the comic book customers, or were oblivious to the meaning what feedback they did receive. When the Comics Code was imposed and strictly enforced, these creators were relatively unprepared to deal with the new world that faced them. A few like Eisner, left the business entirely, but took the comic book methods to other sometimes unexpected fields.

A side note on standards: Considering establishing standards for yourself, for your studio, or for an entertainment business? The Subcommittee hearings demonstrated some pros and cons of at least three different methods.

1. The best of all worlds might be Dell Publishing, or Dell Comics. They suffered less than most comic book publishers during the 1954 Code creation and blowback from the last half of 1954 through 1956. The Dell VP, Mrs Helen Meyers, said her company was focused on building good comics vice the Crime and Horror varieties.

   1. They stuck to those principles, avoiding association with other publishers when those links might damage their reputation.

   2. How to Do It: Listen and act on good customer feedback, demand that your creators hew to high standards themselves, gatekeep your creation mercilessly to deny entry to those who would corrupt your standards.

2. The next best would likely be the Comics Code participants. Establish standards that you and at least one other group agree to uphold.

   1. Create a process that rewards obedience to the standards and punishes those that deviate from them. Gatekeep again to prevent bad actors from entering, or eject them quickly if you find them.

   2. How to Do It: Get a simple code together that covers the basics. That ACMP Code is not a bad starting point. Build an enforcement mechanism that keeps people in line. The best kinds of enforcement are kicking a member out of an organization beneficial to their standing. Getting your organization to have that kind of cache and clout — up to you to figure it out.

3. You can ignore standards all together, “do as thou wilt”, and see where that gets you.

   1. Bill Gaines and EC were much closer to Thelema than the other options on this list.

   2. How to Do It: Do whatever you want, dude. You are free to act as if those consequences aren’t real. Your own “Good Taste” will guide you!

V. And, we are done.

That’s it. Constructive comments are welcomed. Thanks for reading!

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1. AN OVERVIEW OF THE ORGANIZATION AND OPERATION OF THE COMIC-BOOK INDUSTRY

On first impression, the present comic-book industry would seem to comprise many different publishing firms with no apparent relationship to one to another. On closer scrutiny, however, it is fount that the picture is entirely different.  Information obtained by the subcommittee indicates that, while there are 112 seemingly separate and distinct corporations engaged in the publication of comic books, these corporations, through such devices as common-stock holders and officer and family ties are in fact owned and controlled by a relatively small group of men and women. Thus the 676 comic-book titles are published by 111 corporations owned by only 121 persons or families in addition to 1 corporation which has many stockholders.

From: US Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Juvenile Delinquency. Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency, Interim Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, 1955-6. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 77-90720

2. How The Neverending Story inspired me to write: Part 1

3. In search of Goodness in modern books

4. David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: the Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2008, Chapter 5.