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."

Comments

Re:True in theory

[Bigjeff5]

Blood = G or PG

Very small amounts of it, and absolutely no gore.

The MPAA ratings board is a group of old "married" white women (supposedly parents with children living under roof, though most of them have no children in the house, and why is that the standard anyway?), so of of course tits are going to rate far higher than blood. I'm not being hyperbolic there either. It really is a bunch of old white women.

The ratings really are absolutely ridiculous. Besides being pretty inconsistent from one movie to the next, you can kill a million people rather graphically and still get a PG-13 rating, but show tits for more than about 3 seconds (or more than once) and it's a guaranteed R rating. You can even manage that R rating if you insinuate too much nudity, whether you actually show any tits or not.

Also, Seduction of the Innocent is a great way to find old smutty comics. Some really great ones in there.

Re:Er, what?

[Artifakt]

The comics code was harsh, and it was obvious the people implementing it were stupid fools, toadies and jerks, bent on agrandizing themselves and their political viewpoint from very early on.
For stupidity, the code authors didn't know how to write laws in legal English, so they put in clauses forbidding depicting zombieism and werewolfism (I suppose by analogy with the word 'vampirism'.). One of the biggest reasons many people still believe today that finely ground glass in food is undetectable and will kill the eater is that the code prohibited all realistic depiction of any method of murder that even might actually work, so detective oriented characters such as Batman or the Question had to stop solving realistic crimes and solve impossible ones, where magnets attracted copper and giant magnifying glasses could be rendered invisible yet still focus the sun's rays. Ground glass was a favorite during the 50's, one that became incorporated into urban legends.
For toadying, the early code prohibited ever showing an elected official or policeman committing any crime, even if they were caught and punished. The code linked the American way of life directly with free market capitalism, and prohibited all mention of drug use, even in an negative light, so one of the first cases of a mainstream comic not receiving the code seal was basically that it mentioned "Heroin is bad for you kids, so don't do it, m-kay?" It proved far easier for the code authorities to say "America doesn't have a drug problem, so don't talk about it in comics, at all", than to allow anti-drug messages.