From: [s--er--n] at [aludra.usc.edu] (Aaron Michael Severson)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc
Subject: Re: Isn't the CCA censorship?
Date: 9 Aug 93 14:03:08 GMT

From a modern perspective, it is easy to underestimate the power of the
Comics Code Authority in the 1950s and 1960s.  In 1955, there was no
direct market.  You would not find a comic book in a conventional
bookstore.  There were three primary points of sale for comic books:
newsstands, dime stores, and grocery stores.  

During the anti-comics movement in the early 50s, there were boycotts
staged against stores carrying comic books the protestors thought were
offensive, demonstrations, and harrassment -- in some cases, parents'
whose demands were ignored would fill carts with groceries at offending
markets, and then leave them strewn about the store for employees
to restock before the frozen and refrigerated goods melted or spoiled.
(I believe one magazine actually advised mothers to do this as a
anti-comics strategy).  From the perspective of store owners and managers,
comics were a minor sales item.  The loss of a few dollars a week
from not carrying an offending book was inconsequential compared to the
havoc that could ensue.  Artistic freedom was not an issue at the
sales level, and the distributors and comics producers knew it.

The threat of being blacklisted by distributors and retailers was very
serious.  To lose the primary market for your books was to go out of
business; there was no question of loyal readers continuing through
subscriptions and direct market sales.

It's important to reiterate here that the Comics Code was not simply
directed against explicit sex and graphic violence.  It demanded
that comics depict the world as the same sort of sanitized,
fictionalized illusion that appeared in LEAVE IT TO BEAVER or FATHER
KNOWS BEST:  a world where no one was ever divorced, where there
was no adultery, or corruption, or abortion, or drug abuse, or
alcoholism, where no policeman ever took a bribe and no parent ever
raised a hand to their child in anger -- the polished, whitebread
image of a propaganda America that never really existed.  The Comics
Code went well beyond the initial aim of protecting children from
life's harsher realities, coming to define the artistic perspective
of a generation.

Consider:  in the late fifties and early sixties, the superhero
comics so popular in the forties nearly vanished, replaced by
Westerns and fantasy science fiction.  Certainly, the superhero
had ebbed somewhat, since so many heroes had been so connected to the
war.  But look at it in terms of the pressures of American society:
the vigilante hero, the tough cops, the hardboiled detectives, and
the other staples of thirties and forties pulp and comics were
born of the concept that the world was a dark and corrupt place
(consider Frank Miller's comment that Batman makes sense only
as a response to a world that's a fundamentally screwed up place,
where established authority is not enough because the established
authority is wrong, or corrupt).  How could they continue when
their creators were ordered to depict their world as a sunny, happy,
safe place?  

The Comics Code Authority is indeed censorship, of a sort that is in
a way almost more frightening than government censorship -- the
self-stifling of artists and their industry to suit the demands of
propaganda.

The CCA's power is largelly faded now, but with the past few years'
new trend towards censorship -- of rock music, of television, of radio
(the FCC's lawsuit against Howard Stern) -- it may not be long before
eyes are once again turned on comic books.