The Comics Code Authority

Today I was reading about the crackdown on comic books which occurred during the 1940's and 50's, in which the issue of over-the-top violence, gore and sex in comics came under heavy scrutiny and criticism in both the U.S. and Canada.  The central figure behind the movement to clean up comics was Dr. Fredric Wertham,  whose book "Seduction of the Innocent" took no prisoners in describing the decaying filth of society which was a result of children reading uncensored comic books.  The public was outraged about the publishers' crimes that Dr. Wertham brought to light.  Eventually the U.S. Senate held hearings to examine the scope of comic books' influence on the nation's youth.  One of the voluntary witnesses at the hearings was Willaim Gaines, publisher of Mad magazine and the notoriously graphic EC Comics (there's a website featuring Gaines' testimony, which can be viewed here).


Although there had been some local community / state laws passed in the United States, which enforced approval of comic content before publishing and distribution (or outright banned certain comics), no federal government action occurred in the U.S. as a result of the Senate hearings.  Instead, publishing companies found it necessary to police content of their comics themselves, through their creation of an independent supervisory board, called the Comics Code Authority.  This was effectively necessary since wholesale distributors of comics, completely spooked by an angry American public, were refusing to sell uncensored comics.  The publishers had to regain the trust of the consumer, and the Comics Code Authority's big stamp of approval on the covers of their watered down comics was just the thing to do it.  Woo hoo.  It's only very recently that the Comics Code Authority's influence on publishing houses has been reduced to zero (after a long, slow decay), with some publishers now creating their own ratings systems for their comics.    


I have mixed feelings about the crackdown on comics, but ultimately I would have been against the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Something such as what is available to read, and what children are reading, should be left to individual adults / parents to decide.  If adults don't like violent comic books, then the publishers will go out of business on their own (strangely, parents seemed totally unaware of the content of comics being read by their children, until Dr. Wertham and his cohorts pointed it out to them.  That's the real problem most likely).