Intolerant Alliance

Censors of right and left have been cooperating for years.

Jesse Walker from the March 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Comic Tragedy

The Motion Picture Code crippled a young art, but it didn’t destroy it. Many movies were wrecked by Breen’s bowdlerizations, but others were inadvertently improved: By forcing writers, actors, and directors to sneak in their more subversive images and ideas, the new boundaries fostered a certain measure of subtlety. This hardly justifies its existence, but at least it offers a silver lining. It’s harder to make such claims for the Comics Code, imposed in 1954.

Like dime novels, comic books faced attacks from both professional librarians and religious conservatives, with the former claiming that comics discouraged children from "real" reading and the latter adding that the medium led kids to crime and vice. The librarians weren’t the only professional group weighing in on the issue: The National Education Association endorsed anti-comics legislation in 1948, along with laws against offensive films and radio shows. At the same time, the National Office of Decent Literature, a conservative Catholic group, kept lists of comics it considered "objectionable." In theory, the lists were merely an advisory gesture, not a call for legal repression. In fact, as Amy Kiste Nyberg notes in Seal of Approval, her 1998 history of the Comics Code, several police forces used the lists "to clear newsstands of objectionable material, even if such material was not found to be obscene under state law. In nearly all cases, a request by the police department did not need to be followed up by legal action."

The chief crusader against comics, though, was Dr. Fredric Wertham, author of the infamous Seduction of the Innocent (1954). To the extent that he is remembered today, Wertham has an image as a pathetic prude, obsessively searching superhero stories for sexual influences ("Robin is a handsome ephebic boy, usually shown in his uniform with bare legs....He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident") and recycling Comstockian arguments linking juvenile literature to juvenile delinquency. Yet Wertham was a leftist psychologist, not a conservative fundamentalist: He was strongly influenced by Frankfurt School Marxism and by left-liberal critiques of mass society, and he couched his arguments in secular and scientific terms. And if most of his professional colleagues rejected his perspective, he did find several takers among liberal laypeople, some of whom belonged to the U.S. Senate.

In 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held a three-day hearing on comic books, with Wertham as one of its star witnesses. When the subcommittee released its report a year later, it failed (to Wertham’s disappointment) to call for federal censorship, suggesting instead that the industry be given a chance to regulate itself. By that time, concerned by the Senate’s interest -- as well as more direct threats of censorship on the state and local levels -- the industry had already formed the Comics Magazine Association of America and adopted a code even more restrictive than the rules faced by filmmakers. Among its provisions:

* "Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed."

* "In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal [be] punished for his misdeeds."

* "Although slang and colloquialisms are acceptable, excessive use should be discouraged and wherever possible good grammar shall be employed."

* "Special precautions to avoid references to physical afflictions or deformities shall be taken."

* "All characters shall be depicted in dress reasonably acceptable to society."

* "A sympathetic understanding of the problems of love is not a license for morbid distortion."

There was a little room to maneuver here -- the call for "dress reasonably acceptable to society" meant that women had to keep their clothes on, not that superheroes couldn’t caper in silly outfits -- but there wasn’t much. Horror comics almost immediately disappeared, as did the more gruesome crime titles; the satiric Mad survived only by transforming itself into a magazine.

Comics are cheaper to produce and distribute than movies, making it easier for outsiders to evade the Code’s restrictions. In scarcely more than a decade, a new wave of hippie-oriented underground comics ignored the rules and embraced sex, dope, and, occasionally, genuinely sophisticated themes. With the Supreme Court expanding First Amendment protections, the government did not attempt to impose new regulations (though some undergrounds faced censorship at the local level). In stages, the Code itself was loosened.

But an art form’s development had been retarded, a fact one must blame at least partially on the restrictions it had to face. And behind those restrictions stood paternalists of both left and right.

X-Rated Gore