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Comics Code Dead
tverbeek writes "After more than half a century of stifling the comic book industry, the Comics Code Authority is effectively dead. Created in response to Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, one of the early think-of-the-children censorship campaigns, and Congressional hearings, the Code laid out a checklist of requirements and restrictions for comics to be distributed to newsstand vendors, effectively ensuring that in North America, only simplistic stories for children would be told using the medium of sequential art. It gradually lost many of its teeth, and an increasing number of publishers gave up on newsstand distribution and ignored the Code, but at the turn of the century the US's largest comics publishers still participated. Marvel quit it in 2001, in favor of self-applied ratings styled after the MPAA's and ESRB's. Last year Bongo (publishers of the Simpsons comics) quietly dropped out. Now DC and Archie, the last publishers willingly subjecting their books to approval, have announced that they're discontinuing their use of the CCA, with DC following Marvel's example, and Archie (which recently introduced an openly gay supporting character, something flatly forbidden by the original Code) carrying on under their own standards. The Code's cousins — the MPAA and ESRB ratings, the RIAA parental advisory, and the mishmash of warnings on TV shows — still live on, but at least North American comic publishers are no longer subject to external censorship."
The CCA wasn't created by an outside group it was created by comic book publishers it self censor, just like the organizations mentioned in the TFS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority
Archie Comics spokesman mentioned the whole "we're not going to have any women in refrigerators" just because we're dropping the comics code, which is somewhat ironic, as the woman in that particular refrigerator came to be as a direct result of the comics code authority interference. Originally in the Green Lantern story the incident occurred in, the woman in question was supposed to be brutally murdered, but the comics code didn't want people to see a murdered woman, so instead, they had her put in the refrigerator and alluded to it instead. Nice work, comics code.
No, not weird -- just very American.
So...what you're saying is that consumer demand for NC-17 and AO products is pretty low, therefore content providers don't produce much of it?
No, AO games sell fine when they aren't AO. Look at GTA: San Andreas. It sold fine, then it became rated AO and was removed from store shelves at the time, despite the fact that the content couldn't be normally accessed. It wasn't any merits of the game itself that caused it to be removed from store shelves, but rather a pointless rating system by the ESRB.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.