Modern comics have a long history in America, with the first true comic being “Superman No.1”, released in 1938. Before Superman, there were only comic strips in newspapers; the most popular series were collected into what are considered earlier comic books. Superman was the first to have a comic book line, creating the archetype of superheroes. Marvel was founded a year later under the name Timely Comics. Within a few years, there were over a dozen big and small comic book publishers. Some of the more notable ones were Archie Comics, EC Comics (eventually becoming Mad Magazine), Fox Features Syndicate, and Quality Comics. Comics, a new form of media, had many liberties on what they could write about. This led to many stories that had lots of violent crimes being committed. Comics were completely uncensored and very quickly became the top sellers of newsstands. Parents seeing their kids reading these violent comics eventually organized into a country-wide call for censorship.
In May of 1947, several comic book publishers relented after public demand for censorship. The publishers, wanting to avoid government censorship, took a page out of Hollywood producers' books and formed the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers (ACMP) to govern their comics in-house to appease the public and government. The ACMP created the Publisher Code, which disallowed drawing women nude or scantily dressed and showing criminals with sympathy. Many comic book publishers didn’t adopt The Code and the few that did used it inconsistently.
So comic books still went, for the most part, uncensored. In May 1953, The Senate formed a sub-committee to investigate the recent increase in juvenile delinquency. Public discourse over comics came to a head with the release of “Seduction of the Innocent” by Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychologist, in April of 1954. In his book, Wertham claimed that comic books were causing children to become desensitized to violence and want to mimic the dangerous actions in them. Most other psychologists from the same era were skeptical of Wertham. Their voices were quieted when newspaper companies across the country wrote articles about how comic books were causing children to commit crimes. This painted a target on comic books and led to the comic book trials.
A few days after Wertham released his book the subcommittee started hearings against comic books, asking if they needed to be censored. The committee knew they couldn’t take the comic book’s freedom of speech from the start. Their main witness and target in the trials was William Gaines, CEO of EC Comics. EC Comics' bread and butter were horror and crime comics. Their stories were known for having monsters, body horror, and other spooky tales. The senate’s hearings, being led by Senator Estes Kefauver, presented one of EC’s horror covers that had a man holding a bloody axe in one hand and a woman's head in the other. Kafauver viewed the cover as inappropriate since the comic's main readers were children.
Kafauver questioned if EC Comics had any limits to what they would print, and Gaines said that they only print stories within the bounds of good taste. “Good taste” was what Gaines viewed as appropriate for his comics. Kafuver then asked Gaines if he believed the present cover was in good taste and Gaines said it was for a horror comic, and argued that it could have had more blood and gore. The committee didn’t see Gaines's point of view. The papers vilified him, printing that he was selling horror comics to kids and that it was corrupting them.
During this time, Gaines tried to get other comic book publishers to band together against the hearings. Sadly, Gaines was on his own when publishers denounced horror comics as wanting to make a quick buck with no regard for kids.
The committee also disavowed Superman, saying kids have turned sadistic, wishing to see people punished again and again. In March of 1955, after the trials had concluded, the committee gathered their findings in Senate Report No. 84-62. The committee had decided that comic books are too big of a threat to the nation to remain uncensored. They also declared that the responsibility of censorship was on the publishers, not the government.
Before the Report was published, the ACMP and its publisher Code were dissolved and replaced. Comic Publishers again formed a new group called the Comics Magazine Association of America. (CMAA) The group appointed Magistrate Charles Murphy, a specialist in juvenile delinquency, as the head. He created the Comics Code Authority (CCA) based on the failed Publishers Code. The Code went into effect in 1955; publishers had to submit their comics to the CCA, and they would review them and decide if they were appropriate. Before the creation of the CCA, multiple cities throughout the country were burning comic books en masse. Some cities went as far as to ban horror and crime comics altogether.
The CCA was described by comics analyst Scott McCloud: “The list of requirements a film needs to receive a G rating was doubled, and there were no other acceptable ratings!” Murphy hired only retired teachers over the age of 65 to administer The Code and review submitted comic books. Every comic book published had to be appropriate for younger readers.
It didn’t matter if the author wanted it to be for a more grown audience; there was only one rating possible. Nothing in The Code said that kids were the only audience, but that's how Murphy implemented it. The Code had no way to enforce itself other than not placing its stamp. It was the distributors that compelled publishers to use The Code. They refused to buy any comic books that didn’t have the stamp. So, it became impossible to sell any comic books without one.
This version of The Code was the strictest and most nitpicky of all the variations to be made. It didn’t allow for any violence, nudity, or gore to be shown on the page. This created very stilted comics where all the action had to happen off-page. Police, government officials, and government institutions (schools and such) always had to be written in a positive light and shown as competent. Crimes were not allowed to be described in detail and were to be shown as undesirable. Criminals always had to lose at the end and be arrested. Comics were not allowed to have the words “horror” or “terror” in their title, and the use of “crime” had to be restrained. It didn’t allow for what was called “sexual abnormalities,” aka the LGBTQ+ community.
Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group was also banned by The Code. While this seems like a good rule to have, the CCA was staffed solely by white people at the time. They had no interest in preventing racism; this was used as an excuse to censor stories depicting other races.
Depictions of physical afflictions or deformities were banned from comics, excluding portions of the country from being represented in comics. Zombies, torture, vampires, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolves were not allowed to be in comics anymore. Women also had to be drawn with realistic figures. At first glance, this seems like a good rule. However, there was a double standard; the committee didn’t care about men’s bodies or how they were drawn. They only cared about if it showed women with crazy proportions.
The Comics Code completely changed the world of comics in a very short time. More than a billion comic books were sold in 1954, with 25% of them being horror comics. Most comics only cost 10 cents, whereas newspapers and magazines were more than double the price. This led to comics outselling them in large quantities. When adjusted for inflation, comics at the time were a billion-dollar industry. The affordable price led to kids being the biggest consumers of comics. This is a more important movement than most people realize. This was the first time kids were able to choose what they wanted to read, as they now had more options than what they read in school.
Gaines and EC Comics were the main opposition to The Code and only joined when book sales were dropping but after joining their censored comics never were about to achieve previous high sales. Their time as members of the CMAA was very short-lived; by 1956 they stopped publishing all their comic lines.
Before The Code, EC’s best-selling comic lines were “The Vault of Horror,” “Crime SuspenStories,” and “Tales from the Crypt”. Gaines believed that parts of The Code were made solely to kill his comics since they were known for being gory and telling spooky stories with monsters. The Code made them edit or just disapprove of almost all their comics. The last book that EC Comics published was “Judgement Day, " a reprint from before The Code existed. The Code didn’t approve of their story “An Eye for an Eye” so they decided to replace it with “Judgement Day.”
“Judgement Day” was originally released in 1953 and was about an astronaut in a full-body suit going planet to planet to decide if they should be allowed into the Galactic alliance. The astronaut goes to a planet populated by Robots that judge each other based on the color of their outer shell. The astronaut sees the robots' discrimination and decides they can’t join the alliance. The story ends with the astronaut taking his helmet, revealing him as a black man. The comic was about racial prejudice and challenged the norms of the times. Famous author Ray Bradbury even wrote to EC Comics to congratulate them on their story, calling it required reading for everyone in America.
When EC Comic sent “Judgement Day” to the CCA for approval, they were originally denied. Murphy told the writers that they had to change the astronaut into a white man.
Then the writers told him that the race of the astronaut was the message of the comic, he relented and said he would approve the story, but only if they got rid of the sweat on the man's face. The writer Feldstein and CEO Gaines believed that they were being screwed with. Gaines then threatened Murphy with a press conference where he would say exactly why the comic was not being approved. Realizing the threat's seriousness, Murphy let EC Comic print it as it was written. In 1952 EC released their first Mad magazine to terrific reviews. Since these were magazines the CCA couldn’t censor them, letting EC Comics have full creative control. “Judgement Day” was the last comic book that EC Comic printed, and only MAD magazines were made after this.
The Code shaped comics for almost 60 years, with nearly every comic published during this time bearing the seal of approval. In 1971 The Code was revised to soften some of their restrictions. It allowed for some criminals to be written as sympathetic and show public officials as corrupt. With just simple changes the rules allowed for some of the most influential comic storylines to exist. It lets comic books reflect real life, creating more grounded stories. The changes also allowed for vampires, werewolves, and ghouls to appear in comics again. However, only when written with respect to classic stories like Frankenstein and Dracula. Zombies remained banned under The Code since no literary classics featured zombies.
With this being such an obtuse rule, Marvel Comics called their zombies “zuvembies” which were just reanimated, dead people.
In the 1970s, the U.S. government went to Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee to produce comics about drug abuse. While The Code didn’t ban drug use specifically, there was a clause in the CCA that said anything not mentioned in The Code was banned if viewed as inappropriate. This allowed the comic censors to have almost free rein in banning topics they didn’t like. Since the government asked Stan Lee to make this story, he thought there was no way it wouldn't be approved. But the story was denied and Lee was told that drug use was not allowed. Deciding that the government request would legitimize the story, Marvel published the story without the seal. The comic was very well received by audiences and sold well. To save face the CCA said that administrator Leonard Darvin was sick and that acting administrator John L. Goldwater was the one to deny the story. After this, the CCA changed The Code again to allow some portrayal of drug abuse as long it was shown as an addiction.
This would be the start of the fall of the CCA when publishers saw that their comics could still be sold without the seal. In 1984, DC sent “Swamp Thing #29” to the CCA for review, but it was denied. DC not wanting to edit the story published it as is without the seal. In the following years, DC would create new stories like “Watchmen” and “The Dark Knight Returns” without ever sending them for review.
DC would still send other comics in for review but the ones that told more mature stories they didn’t bother sending them. Both of these stories have become highly regarded and have received multiple adaptations. Marvel's relationship with The Code ended in 2001 when The Code wanted them to change the latest issue of “X-Force”. Marvel decided to stop sending their comics for review altogether. In 2010, multiple publishers, including Archie Comics, started putting the seal on their comics without sending them to The Code. Archie Comics' president at the time said The Code doesn't affect his comics the same way they do Marvel and DC. He said that they have no plans to change the content of their comics.
In January 2011, DC announced that it was leaving the CCA and would create an internal rating system for its comics like Marvel. Just a day later, Archie Comics, the only publisher still sending their comics, made public they would also be leaving The Code. The CCA was officially defunct after censoring comics for 57 years. The company in control of the CCA, the CMAA, was dissolved when all the publisher companies funding them stopped sending money. The CMAA, at the same press conference, announced the association was ending and that the seal of The Code would be donated to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund—a non-profit org dedicated to protecting the First Amendment rights of comic book creators and publishers. The symbol of comic book censorship is now used to raise money against censorship.
The CCA being long dead emboldened EC Comics to publish “Epitaphs from the Abyss No.1” their first comic book in 70 years.
Comics have become a cultural phenomenon since they originally came out in the 30s. It would be nearly impossible to find someone who hasn’t watched at least one superhero movie. There have been dozens of movies and shows, both live-action and animated. Countless new comics are being published daily, from big publishers to writers who started by making videos on TikTok. Without The Code writers and artists don’t have to censor themselves just to appease biased critics. They can fully tell the story they want letting the audience read better and creative stories that wouldn't have been possible under The Code.
New York Times article The Press: Horror on the Newsstand
The Comics Journal #81
Hadju, David. The Ten-cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
History - Comics and Graphic Novels - LibGuides at Arizona State University
McCloud, Scott (2000). Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. New York: Perennial. ISBN0-06-095350-0