Rousseau 1

Jacqueline Rousseau
ENG4834 Issues in Publishing
Professor S. E. Gontarski
26 November 2015
Good Shall Triumph Over Evil:
A Review of Comic Book Censorship and the Comics Code Act
Designed to resemble a stamp, the Seal of Approval bore the words Approved by the Comics
Code Authority in an attempt to satisfy adults by censoring their childrens reading materials. Once
prominently displayed on comic book covers, this Seal was the regulatory arm of the Comic Magazine
Association of America (CMAA). Their establishment of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) was the
publishers response to their critics. Comic books were quickly popularized during the late 1930s,
mainly due to DC Comics publications of Superman. (Nyberg, 2015). Educators, parents, religious
organizations, and psychological experts quickly rose to the task of discrediting them in the name of
protecting the innocent, which is almost always the primary motivation of censorship as explained by
those who force censorship upon the publishing world. After a decade of leaving their regulation to local
communities, the CMAA was formed in September of 1954, bringing the CCA and Comics Code Act
with it in November of that same year.
Post-World War Two America was obsessed with juvenile delinquents. They were infatuated
with preventing children from becoming delinquent through extreme control over the media they
consumed. The older generation was afraid of the increasingly widespread reach and easy accessibility
of the new-fangled social media of the time, which included motion pictures, television, radio, and
comic books. (Unknown; 2015). The authorities were determined to keep control of the words that were
presented to their children. This desperation for control manifested itself in a major way with the Motion
Picture Production Code of 1930, which sought to regulate movies and television shows in the wake of a
1915 Supreme Court decision on Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, which
held that free speech did not apply to filmography. (Bynum; 2006). The Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America (later known as the Motion Picture Association of America)s committee created
a vague list of 11 donts and 25 be carefuls regarding film of any kind. The code determine what
could be portrayed, but also encouraged promoting traditional values, particularly concerning the role of

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women and marriage. (Bynum; 2006). The Comics Code Act would mirror a lot of these donts and
be carefuls. (Nyberg; 2015).
Comics were viewed as a major threat to society because they were cheap, easily accessible, and
dealt with potentially controversial material that youths found interesting. They were often sold for a
nickel, dime, or quarter in specialty shops, head shops, newsstands, and drugstores. (Unknown; 2015).
Their bright covers were advertisements for the goodies inside: crime, horror, gore, the paranormal, and
sex. The emergence of these magazines marked the first time that children had control over what they
read since they were cheap and not kept in intimidating bookstores or other places where children
needed to be supervised. Their availability and content did not go over well with people in all sorts of
authoritative positions, like parents, teachers, doctors, and clergymen. (Nyberg; 2015). Popular literary
critic, Sterling North, published an editorial in the Chicago Daily News in May of 1940 stating: "Badly
drawn, badly written, and badly printed - a strain on the young eyes and young nervous systems - the
effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoils a
child's natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient
with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the
present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the `comic'
magazine." (Unknown; 2012). American adults at this time feared that reading comics would lead to
more rebellious behavior, which had already been emerging in the Beatnik and Greaser subcultures of
the 1940s and 1950s, respectively.
Everyone who protested comic books did so with the idea of protecting the innocent. The first
major group to challenge comics publicly were educators, who believed that they were ruining
childrens tastes in literature. The second group to protest was the Roman Catholic Churchs National
Office of Decent Literature. From 1938 to the late 1960s, this office published a list of materials that the
Church evaluated and deemed either fit or unfit for moral human consumption. Comic books were
promptly added to the category of unfit. (Sergi; 2012). The principle threat to comics, however, came
from mental health experts. In 1948, the infamous Dr. Fredric Wertham, a respected and well-known
social psychologist, began his public attack on comics with an interview in Colliers Magazine called
Horror in the Nursery. A short time later, he presented at a symposium entitled The Psychopathy of
Comic Books. In May of that year, those same views were released under the same name in the
American Journal of Psychotherapy and in the Saturday Review of Literature in an article entitled The

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Comics . . . Very Funny. His so-called research and findings were largely based on undocumented
anecdotes and no formal studies, yet he strongly claimed that reading this rough material encouraged
similar behavior in children. (Unknown; 2012). Since the juvenile delinquents he saw for therapy
usually read comic books in the waiting room, he concluded that they must influence the kids behavior
in one way or another by either influencing them to try their hand at criminal acts, or by encouraging
them to continue being criminals. His work on comic books largely discredited his legitimate, peerreviewed papers and hes not known for anything else. (Coville; 2011).
In 1947, some comic publishers formed the Association of Comic Magazine Publishers (ACMP).
Its goal was to set guidelines under which comic books would be published in the hopes that it would
reduce the amount of criticism they would get. (Sergi; 2012). The ACMP set up a board of people that
had to approve a comic before it would see print, and they had a short list of standards very close to that
of the previous Motion Picture Production Code: sexy, wanton comics should not be published. No
drawing should show a female indecently or unduly exposed, and in no event more nude than in a
bathing suit commonly worn in the United States of America. Crime should not be presented in such a
way as to throw sympathy against the law and justice or to inspire others with the desire for imitation.
No comics shall show the details and methods of a crime committed by a youth. Policemen, judges,
government officials, and respected institutions should not be portrayed as stupid, ineffective, or
represented in such a way to weaken respect for established authority. No scenes of sadistic torture
should be shown. Vulgar and obscene language should never be used. Slang should be kept to a
minimum and used only when essential to the story. Divorce should not be treated humorously or
represented as glamorous or alluring. Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never
permissible. (Association of Comic Magazine Publishers; 1947). The ACMP failed because some big
companies like DC and Dell comics already had their own internal approval boards, so they didn't join
the ACMP. Also, some of the companies involved had disagreements over parts of the approval
guidelines, which caused them to quit the ACMP and it became practically obsolete by the end of 1948.
(Sergi; 2012).
1948 is arguably considered the worst year for comic books, even though the strict Comics Code
Act that nearly destroyed the business wasnt put in place yet. (Sergi; 2012). By this time, Wertham and
his writing had crippling and lasting effects on the industry. His words inspired fear in local
communities and encouraged them to take action. Parents led rallies which pressured city and state

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governments to pass laws and put pressures on booksellers in order to discourage their sale. The conflict
boiled over on October 26, 1948 in a small West Virginia town named Spencer, where students publicly
burned several hundred comic books that theyd collected for nearly a month under the supervision of
parents, teachers, and priests. The story was published in The New York Times, which caused a similar
incident in Birmingham, New York. Time Magazine picked up the New York story and this sparked
continent-wide events. In Rumson, New Jersey, a group of young Cub Scouts conducted a drive to
collect objectionable comic books, which they donated. In Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a troop of Girl
Scouts collected objectionable books and brought them to a mock trial at St. Marys Catholic High
School and, after finding the books guilty of leading young people astray and building up false
conceptions in the minds of youth, they were burned. In Chicago, a burning was organized by a
Catholic Diocese. In Vancouver, Canada, the JayCee Youth Leadership set almost 8,000 comics ablaze.
(Coville; 2011). (Sergi; 2012).
Werthams book, Seduction of the Innocent, published in early 1954, described depictions of
violence, sex, drug use, and other adult fare within "crime comics, a term Wertham used to describe all
comics, including superhero and horror books. (Unknown; 2015). His work gave prominent legal figures
reasons to take immediate action on a large scale, since widespread opinions were already against comic
books, which is why the CMAA was implemented only a few months after the publication of Seduction
of the Innocent. Since it had already been established in 1948 from the Thomas E. Bond v. William M.
Dustin case determining that crime literature couldnt be banned, Wertham and the courts could not
outright ban every work deemed obscene, as is what happened with the Motion Picture Production
Code. This meant that critics needed to come up with new ideas to make them irrelevant, and they
decided to invoke the fears and assumptions of adults everywhere who were already primed for drastic
legal actions. (Williams; 2011). The United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency was
established by the United States Senate in 1953 to investigate the problem of growing youth crime rates.
It was a subcommittee of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee and was created by a motion of
a Republican from New Jersey, Senator Robert Hendrickson. The first members of the subcommittee
consisted of him, and Senators Estes Kefauver, a Democrat from Tennessee; Thomas C. Hennings, Jr., a
Democrat from Missouri; and William Langer, a Republican from North Dakota. Senator Hendrickson
was initially the chair of the committee but was later replaced as chair by Senator Kefauver. The public
hearings discussing comic books took place on April 21, 22 and June 4, 1954 in New York. They
primarily focused on graphic crime and horror books, and what their potential impact on juvenile

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delinquency could be. The hearings were televised, so senators and the public heard testimony from
child psychologists, a number of people in the comic book industry, and other cartoonists seeking to
decide if comics required government regulation. Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Dell, EC Comics and
others all had representatives here; Marvel Comics and DC Comics were the only two major companies
to make it out alive. The first days afternoon session was decisive in leading to widespread censorship
of comics. Dr. Wertham was the first on the stand and ready to repeat his well-rehearsed assertions that
comics were a direct cause of juvenile delinquency. After that, one of EC Comics publishers and coeditor William Gaines was called to the stand. When he contended that he sold only comic books of
good taste, Kefauver entered into evidence one of Gaines' comics, Crime SuspenStories #22, which
showed a dismembered woman's head on its cover. The interview made the front page of The New York
Times, where he stated in response to a question of if he considered the cover in good taste: "Yes sir, I do
for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding her
head a little higher so that blood could be seen dripping from it and moving the body a little further over
so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody." What the senators and tabloids didnt know,
however, was that EC Comics artist Johnny Craig's first draft included those very elements which
Gaines had said would be in "bad taste, and theyd already cleaned up to the version that was called
into question. (1954 Senate Transcripts; 2011). (Nyberg; 2015).
The CCA and Comics Code Act were put into effect at the end of the year. The list of prohibited
items was massive and increasingly vague: crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create
sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a
desire to imitate criminals. If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity. Policemen,
judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to
create disrespect for established authority. Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered
glamorous or to occupy a position which creates a desire for emulation. In every instance good shall
triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds. Scenes of excessive violence shall be
prohibited. Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gunplay, physical agony, gory
and gruesome crime shall be eliminated. No comic magazine shall use the words "horror" or "terror" in
its title. All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism,
masochism shall not be permitted. All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.
Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to
illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly, nor so as to injure the

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sensibilities of the reader. Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture,
vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited. Profanity, obscenity,
smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden. Nudity
in any form is prohibited, as is indecent or undue exposure. Suggestive and salacious illustration or
suggestive posture is unacceptable. Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any
physical qualities. Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Rape scenes as well as
sexual abnormalities are unacceptable. Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested. Sex
perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden. Nudity with meretricious purpose and salacious
postures shall not be permitted in the advertising of any product; clothed figures shall never be presented
in such a way as to be offensive or contrary to good taste or morals. (Comics Code Act; 1954). The
inclusion of swear words on the list led to the still-popular depiction of curse words being written in
keyboard symbols: @#$%*!.(Coville; 2011).
This list extended to include misogynistic depictions of womenparticularly in Wonder Woman
promoting traditional values, and anti-race attitudes. A notable incident of anti-women values in the
Wonder Woman series in 1960 is where she gives up her powers in order to fulfill her true womanly
desire of raising a family. (Unknown; 2012). An issue concerning race occurred in EC Comics
Incredible Science Fiction #3 in February of 1956. The cover of this issue depicted the main character, a
black astronaut, in Jim Crow society. It was called to court by Code administrator Judge Charles Murphy
to have the main character changed. The astronaut being drawn with beads of sweat around his temple,
somehow eluding to slavery, was the reason cited. The plot dealt with race relations, which meant that
the story would be nullified if the race of the main character was changed. William Gains informed the
judge that "if they did not give that issue the Code Seal, he would see that the world found out why,
causing Murphy to reverse his initial decision and allow the story to run because of the rise in activity of
civil rights activists. (Nyberg; 2015).
Stan Lee often refers to Spider-Man saving the day in 1970. Marvel Comics defied the CCA by
publishing the Spider-Man story arc about drug abuse. According to CMAA files, Marvel had appealed
to publish the questionable issues but was denied. The request, however, triggered a review of the code.
Revisions to the code were crafted in December 1970, and publishers decided to put the new code into
effect on Feb. 1, 1971. The new code relaxed the restrictions on crime comics and lifted the ban on
horror comics, although using the words crime and horror in the titles was still banned. In addition,

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the loosened standards on sex in comics reflected changes in society. After the Spider-Man controversy,
the CMAA added a section on how to handle drug use in plotlines. (Unknown; 2015). In the late 1970s
and 1980s, after the revisions, only four publishers remained active in the CMAA: Archie, Marvel,
Harvey, and DC. A major change in comic book distribution made it possible for publishers to sell
comics without the Seal of Approval, and this caused many companies and artists to start pushing the
boundaries of what was once outlawed. Marvel struck a major blow to the relevance of the CMAAs
self-regulatory code in 2001 when it withdrew from the Comics Code Authority and established an inhouse rating system. By 2011, only two publishers had the Seal of Approval on the cover of their
comics, Archie and DC. DC comics announced in January 2011 it was dropping the Seal of Approval,
and Archie soon followed. (Coville; 2011). The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) is a
nonprofit organization that formed in 1986 in order to protect the First Amendment rights of comic
authors, illustrators, editors, and publishers. It has taken over for the CMAA on the authority of what can
and should be published, outside of internal boards and committees. (Unknown; 2015).
Comic book censorship has a long and complicated history, which culminates in the formation of
the CMAA, CCA, and climaxes in the Comics Code Act of 1954. Inspired by a desire to protect the
youth and force them to conform in the name of responding to rising juvenile delinquency rates in the
1940s, preventative measures quickly got out of hand with a number of public book burnings. Like
almost all censorship cases, the Comics Code Act was designed to prevent the seduction of the
innocent and preserve the good moral culture on which the United States was fixated. As with most
censorship laws and circumstances, it, too, was rendered obsolete in the liberalism of the modern age,
although much later than anyone expected and after losing a lot of talented artists, writers, and
publishers. Unfortunately for the industry, because of this, comics were never really reestablished as
childrens literature and their presence in the modern world is mostly confined to subcultures. One thing
is for certain though: comic books are no longer limited in what they can publish due to a stamp-shaped
seal bearing the words, Approved by the Comics Code Authority.

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