Comics that broke the rules (and got away with it)
Last week we met the Comics Code - 41 rules designed to sanitise an entire medium. This week: the people who looked at those rules and decided they were more of a suggestion. Across every genre - romance, sci-fi, superheroes, crime - the Code tried to flatten comics into something safe… It did not succeed.
The thing about the Comics Code is that it was enforced by people… which meant inconsistently, creatively interpreted, and occasionally outwitted by writers who were considerably smarter than the men reviewing their work.
Here are some of the best examples, spanning the full breadth of what comics can be.
The writer who got the government to break the Code for him
In 1971, Stan Lee (ring a bell?) received a letter from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare asking Marvel to publish a story about the dangers of drug abuse. Lee agreed. The Code, however, explicitly banned any depiction of drugs - even in a cautionary context - and the CCA administrator refused to grant approval.
Lee published the Amazing Spider-Man arc anyway, issues #96–98, without the CCA seal. The story was well-received, covered positively in the national press, and the Code was revised within the year to allow drug depictions in a negative context. Lee had weaponised the government against its own censorship apparatus. Magnificent.
The artist whose name broke a rule — accidentally
Writer Marv Wolfman was working on a DC supernatural anthology in 1970 when a story referred to "a wandering wolfman." The CCA rejected it, as the word "wolfman" violated the ban on supernatural creatures (how would they have handled the Metallica song “Of Wolf And Man” I wonder?). Fellow writer Gerry Conway had to explain to the Code's administrators that "Wolfman" was the name of an actual human being, their colleague. The CCA relented — but only on the condition that Wolfman receive a writer's credit on the first page. The absurdity of this exchange inadvertently launched the practice of crediting creators in DC's supernatural anthologies, meaning author’s rights improved by accident.
The artists who just changed the seal
By 1975, a younger generation of creators had stopped taking the Code particularly seriously. Jim Starlin and Al Milgrom quietly altered the CCA seal on an issue of Strange Tales to read "Cosmic Code Authority." It passed, and nobody caught it, which is strangely delightful (the DVD of Se7en did this as well with a fake Warning screen… but that was more about poking the audience than the censors).
Romance comics and the slow death of “wholesomeness”
Romance comics were among the Code's most thoroughly gutted genres. Before 1954, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's Young Romance — billed on the cover as "designed for the more adult readers of comics" — was outselling superhero titles by a wide margin, with stories that tackled heartbreak, moral complexity and difficult domestic situations. After the Code, new stories pivoted to one subject: the sanctity of marriage which, for some strange reason, was far less exciting.
By the late 1960s, however, a new generation of writers simply started filing real life under the CCA’s nose. The Code had been written to stop sex. It had no rule against stories about the Vietnam war, interracial relationships, or women fighting for equal rights… all of which started appearing in romance comics because, technically, none of it was prohibited. Creators exploited that gap. The Code, written by people who thought "wholesome" meant "without conflict," had accidentally left the door open for something more honest than anything that came before it.
The underground route: don't submit at all
The most direct solution was also the most radical: don't go near the Code in the first place. By the mid-1960s, a loose network of artists on the West Coast - centred on Robert Crumb's Zap Comix, launched in 1968 - had built an entirely separate distribution system through head shops and independent bookstores. No CCA submission, no seal, no rules, producing material across every genre imaginable. Art Spiegelman was there, doing work that would eventually lead to the Pultizer prize-winning Maus. So was Harvey Pekar, creating American Splendor - autobiographical comics about working-class life in Cleveland - and Matt Groening, self-publishing Life in Hell before he went on to create a little-known show called The Simpsons.
The underground comix movement wasn't just a rejection of censorship, it was proof that comics could be anything, and that the medium had no inherent genre, no required audience, no ceiling on ambition. The Code had tried to compress comics into becoming one thing. The underground made them everything.
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