Saladin Ahmed provides a brief history of comic book censorship. He claims that during a “15-year span beginning in the late 1930s, the comic book racks of America’s newsstands were bursting with four-color contradictions.” But this state of affairs “was swiftly and mercilessly dismantled in 1954 by the newly formed Comics Code Authority”:
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.”
What this meant in practice:
The Code … contained the surprising provision that “ridicule or attack on 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 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.
Update from a reader:
This is a classic anti-comic book propaganda. Scare tactics are classic!
(Image: Panels from the original “Judgment Day” comic)
The Dish 
