how censors killed the weird . muy bueno. usar . padid 2014

8/12/2019 How Censors Killed the Weird . Muy Bueno. Usar . Padid 2014

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How Censors Killed The Weird,Experimental, Progressive Golden

Age Of Comics In the 1940s, comic books were often feminist, diverse, and bold. Then

the reactionary Comics Code Authority changed the trajectory of comic

book culture for good.posted on May 2, 2014, at 4:07 p.m.

Saladin AhmedBuzzFeed Contributor

http://www.buzzfeed.com/saladinahmed





Charles 'Teenie' Harris / Carnegie Museum of Art / Getty Images

Comics histories sometimes reduce the Golden Age to the Superman Age:

an era of lily white, squeaky-clean, manly-man heroes punching bank

robbers and selling World War II propaganda. But the raucous variety of

early comics is much more complex. For a weird, wild, 15-year spanbeginning in the late 1930s, the comic book racks of America’s



newsstands were bursting with four-color contradictions. Images of half-

naked, subjugated women appeared side by side with comics featuring

independent heroines, like Women Outlaws.

The comics world at this time was a cacophonous bazaar of stories:sometimes thrilling, sometimes confusing, sometimes revolting. But that

bazaar was swiftly and mercilessly dismantled in 1954 by the newly

formed Comics Code Authority. It was replaced with a viciously policed

shopping mall whose effects resonate today.

Conventional wisdom holds that comics today are conservative,

reactionary. In recent years, outlets from The Guardian to The

Atlantic have published articles on sexism in comics, and fanboys foolish

enough to express their fear of a black Spider-Man are likely to be takento task loudly and publicly thanks to the active presence of antiracist fans

and fans of color on social media. Long made by, read by, and starring

only white males, the story goes, comic books need to be dragged —

or must not be dragged, depending on one’s ideological bent — into the

21st century. We marvel at the increasing popularity of comics, as if

collectively witnessing the first sunlit steps of a pale, housebound man

who has lived in his mother’s basement for decades. What is rarely

discussed, though, is how comics ended up in the basement in the first

place.

While they had some experimental antecedents, the first true comic

books appeared in the early 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression.

At first, most were collections of reprinted strips from newspapers. But

publishers soon saw that there was money to be made with original

material. New titles cropped up monthly and, by the time Superman

appeared in Action Comics in 1938, the era that comics fans and historianshave dubbed the “Golden Age” was in full swing. Somehow, in the middle

of an unprecedented economic crisis, comics had managed to become a

boom industry. And it wasn’t just adolescent white males driving this

boom. We know from advertisements, comics letters pages, and old

photos that comic books in the Golden Age were bought and read by a

wide variety of Americans in terms of gender, class, and race. By the

1940s, Americans from all walks of life were going comic book crazy.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/28/women-comic-book-sexism



http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/how-to-dismantle-the-comic-books-boys-club/281694/









Marvel Comics / Via digitalcomicmuseum.com

The early comic book industry had the shifting, molten surface of a new,

unfinished world. Golden Age writers and artists were inventing a new

form as they went, and they were doing so for little money, and under

grueling deadlines. Quantity was often emphasized over quality, and

editorial supervision was in most cases nearly nonexistent.

The comics themselves exhibited wild stylistic variety. A single issue

of Keen Detective Funnies could contain one story with gorgeous Art

Nouveau-ish illustration, and another with glorified stick figures. The

comic books of the Golden Age were also significantly more diverse in

terms of genre than today’s comics. On newsstands across America — inan era when the newsstand was an urban hub and an economic

juggernaut — comic books told tales of True Crime, Weird

Fantasy and Cowboy Love, Negro Romance, andMystery Men. And

Americans bought them all.

http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/preview/index.php?did=18930&page=2




Fox Features / Via digitalcomicmuseum.com





Even as Amazing-Man and Blue Beetle were rescuing helpless,

infantilized women, badass superheroines like the Lady in Red, the Spider

Queen, and Lady Satan were stabbing Nazis and punching out

meddlesome, sexist cops.

Dynamic Comics / Via digitalcomicmuseum.com

During the Golden Age, the same newsstand might be selling comics with

ape-like, rubber-lipped caricatures of black people next to the black-

owned and created All-Negro Comics.

And the same issue of Funny Pages might contain both “savage redskins”

and Mantoka, the native superhero who battles “white man’s treachery.”





All-Negro Comics / Via digitalcomicmuseum.com

In the early 1950s, as women who’d worked on the home front during

wartime were being “encouraged” out of the workplace, and anti-

communism was at its height, moral panic over comic books hit a fever

pitch. Cities including Oklahoma City and Houston enacted bans of horror

and crime comics. Spurred in part by the sensationalist book Seduction of

the Innocent (a ridiculous sort of Reefer Madness for comic books), the

Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency turned an angry eye

toward comics, and most publishers felt that heavy-handed regulation —

perhaps even outright banning — was imminent. Comic book publishers,in consultation with right-wing politicians, formed the Comics Code

Authority, a self-censorship group, in the hopes that this would forestall

government intervention in the industry. New York Magistrate Charles F.

Murphy, a “specialist in juvenile delinquency” (and a strident racist), was

chosen to head the Authority and to devise its self-policing “code of ethics

and standards.”





Centaur Comics / Via digitalcomicmuseum.com

What Murphy came up with was, in essence, a framework for forcing

comics’ compliance with a uniquely American puritanical fascism. Some

of the Code’s more illustrative points:

“Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for

the criminal.”

“Romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity

of marriage.”

“Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.”

“Policemen, judges, government officials and respected institutions shall

never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established

authority.”

“All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes,

depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.”

And, perhaps, most amusingly:

“Although slang and colloquialisms are acceptable, excessive use should

be discouraged and, wherever possible, good grammar shall be

employed.”

The Code also contained the surprising provision that “ridicule or attackon any religious or racial group is never permissible.” Given the countless

depictions of monkey-like Japanese and minstrel-show black people in

Golden Age comics, one might think this provision a good thing. But

Murphy soon made it clear that this provision really meant that black

people in comic books would no longer be tolerated, in any form. When

EC Comics reprinted the science fiction story “Judgment Day” by Al

Feldstein and Joe Orlando (which had originally been printed to little

controversy before the Code), Murphy claimed the story violated the





Code, and that the black astronaut had to be made white in order for the

story to run.

EC Comics / Via i218.photobucket.com

EC defiantly ran the story anyway, but Murphy had made a target of them,

and the company was essentially forced out of the comics business. The

message was clear: If comics were to be tolerated in this new postwar

order, they had to be purged of assertive women, of people of color, of

challenges to authority, and even of working-class, urban slang. And so

the Comics Code hacked and mangled comics until they fit into the

patriarchal, conservative, white suburban social order that was taking

over every other sphere of American life.

Distributors agreed not to carry comic books that didn’t abide by the

Code, making it functionally as effective as law. And, indeed, with some

slight modifications here and there, it functioned as the law of land for

mainstream comics for almost 50 years. These days, there’s a broad

consensus that the Comics Code — which has been endlessly discussed

and condemned by comics historians — was disastrous, and that it

damaged comics. But nearly all of the critiques of the Code focus

primarily on its dire consequences for white men’s artistic freedom, or

the disservice done to readers in coddlingly denying them explicit sex and

violence. What’s less discussed is the fact that independent women, and

people of color, and all sorts of stories that didn’t fit with the compulsory

patriotism and cop-worship of the 1950s, essentially vanished from

comics for decades. This is a loss that comics are still wrangling with.

What was left didn’t interest adults nearly as much, and comics slowly

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc243/CyberGhostfaceScans/WeirdFantasy18repro-47.jpg

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc243/CyberGhostfaceScans/WeirdFantasy18repro-47.jpg



began to become less ubiquitous and more associated with pasty

adolescent boys.

It would be preposterous to claim that the Code destroyed creativity in

the comics industry. Comics in the decades that followed theestablishment of the Code — the Silver Age when Marvel Comics debuted

and Jack Kirby and Stan Lee revolutionized the art form — had no lack of

masterpieces. But, while a handful of writers and artists in the

subsequent decades found sneaky ways to tell subversive stories within

the confines of the Code, there can be little question that for decades the

Code put a severe limitations on what kinds of masterpieces could be

produced.

The dark comics of the 1980s — Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns — that are often said to mark the emergence of the (post)modern superhero

are almost always treated as eviscerations of the saccharine Silver Age.

But they were in many ways simply a return to the grittier, more “adult”

comic books that existed in the golden age. Only now the sorts of stories

that had once been accessible to nearly everyone were given “for mature

readers” labels, and they were only sold in specialty stores.

Still, these titles proved to be the first signs of changing times. Long

considered outdated by publishers and fans alike, the Code’s influence

began to wane in the 1990s. The new comics publishers that began to

crop up didn’t submit their titles for review by the Code. And distributors,

who had always been the real enforcers of the Code, no longer seemed to

care. Partially because comics had become so marginalized, and partially

because other mainstream media had grown so salacious and violent by

comparison, comics weren’t emphasized in the culture wars of the 1990s.

With the threat of government intervention in the industry effectivelygone, the Code lost its power. It was completely abandoned by the early

21st century.

But rather than returning to their gloriously weird and subversive pre-

Code roots, mainstreamed post-Code comics have — with notable

exceptions — mostly taken the retreat of self-censorship as an

opportunity to revel in cheap violence and exploited female bodies.

With the Comics Code gone, comics have reveled in heroes who gleefully

kill “thugs,” grisly images of women in refrigerators , and superheroine-

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WomenInRefrigerators



http://www.comicbookresources.com/?id=52103&page=article






as-Maxim-model covers . But the independent women, the queer

perspectives, the radical questioning of the status quo that were stifled by

the Code? Comics have been slower to embrace these. And the films, TV

shows, and video games based on comics have followed suit (theoverwhelming majority of which fail even the Bechdel test ).

It doesn’t have to be this way. The Comics Code is dead, and comic book

narratives are in the mainstream of American culture again. If comics are

to retain the wide audience they have taken so long to regain — and if

they are to enter into a new Golden Age — they must do better. And there

are glimmers of hope. The past couple of years have seen an Arab Green

Lantern and a Muslim Ms. Marvel. Writers like Gail Simone and Kelly Sue

DeConnick are shifting the way superhero comics deal with women. Andminded fan campaigns like We Are Comics are reclaiming the long-lost

sense that comics are for everyone.

Let’s do more to reclaim that sense. Let us leave the Golden Age’s

jingoism, racist caricatures, and exploitation of women on the dustheap.

But let us also remember that comics used to do different things than

they do now, and that some of those things were wonderful and worth

reclaiming.

Saladin Ahmed has written about television, fiction, and video games

for Salon , NPR Books , and The Escapist . His fantasy novel Throne of the

Crescent Moon , which George RR Martin called “old -fashioned sword-and-

sorcery adventure with an Arabian Knights flavor,” was nominated for the

Hugo, Nebula, and British Fantasy Awards, and won the Locus Award for

Best First Novel. He lives near Detroit with his wife and twin children.



http://bechdeltest.com/



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