When the government came for comics
Happy April Fool’s day, and welcome to episode 3 of The Macroverse Dispatch! As much as it may sometimes feel like it, not the following story is not a joke…
If you’d prefer listening to reading, then you can hear it on Spotify, iTunes and all those good places. Check it out HERE
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We've covered the rules. We've met the people who broke them. For the last in this series on the CCA, let’s look at how we got here in the first place. The origin story of the Comics Code is equal parts farce and tragedy - a moral panic stoked by a deeply questionable book, amplified by a Senate subcommittee looking for headlines, and resolved in the worst possible way for everyone except Archie Comics.
To understand 1954, you have to understand what comics were in 1953.
Like we said in our first of this series, they weren’t niche in any way… they were the dominant popular reading medium for children and teenagers in America. Publishers were experimenting with every genre imaginable: superheroes, westerns, war stories, romance, science fiction, and - most lucratively - crime and horror.
EC Comics, run by William Gaines out of New York, was the prestige publisher of the era. Their horror titles - Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear - were gleefully transgressive, beautifully illustrated, and written with a sardonic wit that their readers loved. Their crime title Crime SuspenStories published stories with genuine moral complexity. Their science fiction work tackled race, inequality, and Cold War paranoia in ways that mainstream publishing wouldn't touch. By any reasonable measure, EC was doing some of the most sophisticated popular storytelling in America.
Then Fredric Wertham wrote his book.
Seduction of the Innocent, published in spring 1954, was a full-throated attack on comics as a primary cause of juvenile delinquency. Wertham was not a crank - he was a respected Harlem psychiatrist who had done genuinely good work on race and mental health. Here, however, his methodology was to interview “troubled” kids, establish that they read comics, and then draw a straight line between the two. His specific claims were interesting… Apparently Batman and Robin were a gay couple leading little boys down a corrupt path, Wonder Woman promoted lesbianism and was toxic to children as she was physically superior to men, and horror comics were how-to guides for violence. Later academic research found that Wertham had significantly manipulated, and in some cases fabricated, his case studies but, in 1954, nobody knew that yet.
The book landed in a cultural moment primed to receive it. Post-war America was anxious about its children, suspicious of anything that seemed to undermine authority, and already running one of history's great panics about communist subversion with Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Comics - lurid, cheap, and read without parental supervision - fit the profile of a threat perfectly, so cue the public burnings, bans and general outrage.
On April 21, 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency convened hearings specifically on comic books. The star witnesses were Wertham and Gaines.
Wertham was everything a Senate hearing could want - authoritative, alarming, quotable. He described EC covers in terms that made the senators visibly uncomfortable and generated spectacular newspaper headlines.
Gaines - memorably described in the Senate report as someone who "published some of the most sadistic crime and horror comic books with monstrosities that nature has been incapable of" - was something else. He arrived prepared to defend his work on artistic grounds, and he very nearly pulled it off - right up until Senator Estes Kefauver produced a copy of Crime SuspenStories #22 and pointed to the cover: a man holding a woman's severed head in one hand and a bloody axe in the other. Kefauver asked whether Gaines thought that cover was in good taste.
Gaines said yes - for a horror comic.
It was an honest answer. It was also a public relations catastrophe. The headline in the New York Times the following day read: "No Harm in Horror, Comics Publisher Says." The damage was irreversible.
Faced with the prospect of actual government regulation, the major publishers did what industries do when threatened with outside oversight: they regulated themselves, on terms they could control. The Comics Magazine Association of America was formed in September 1954, the Comics Code Authority followed in October, and the 41 rules we discussed in Issue 1 came down like a guillotine. The EC that had been doing sophisticated, challenging popular comics? Gone by 1956.
Gaines was not alone. Dozens of publishers folded or drastically scaled back. The industry contracted sharply, pivoting to the only genre that could comfortably survive the Code: superheroes. The Silver Age of Comics - the Marvel and DC dominance that shaped the industry for decades - was built partly on the rubble of the Code’s carpet bombing.
The Senate subcommittee, for what it's worth, ultimately concluded that comics did not cause juvenile delinquency and declined to recommend federal legislation. The industry, however, had already censored itself, and the damage was done.
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