/co/ - Comics & Cartoons

>>976912

First, a little background on CRIME DOES NOT PAY. CRIME DOES NOT PAY was published by Lev Gleason Publications and created by Charles Biro. By the end of World War 2, CRIME DOES NOT PAY was selling 800,000 issues a month, and by 1948, it was selling a million. It was continuously popular until it was completely annihilated by the Comics Code in 1955.

Second, my sources for most of my information on the Great Comic Book Scare are David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague, Gerard Jones's Men of Tomorrow, plus various other sources, including a few blanks filled in by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey's Comic Book History of Comic Books.

Also, in my research, I found the opportunity to get my hands on the 2004 reprinting of Frederic Wertham's infamous Seduction of the Innocent, but I found it so inflammatory that I had a difficult time actually reading it before it had to be returned. I'm going to make the effort to find a pdf of it so that I can suffer through it at my leisure.

>>976919

The cause of the Great Comic Book Scare is abstract, and has almost nothing to do with comics. It was about change, namely the changes going on in society following World War 2, or even bit earlier than that. Change in that people weren't conforming to held standards. You had the educated coming into conflict with the uneducated, you had parents coming into conflict with rebellious teenagers, traditional media coming into conflict with new media, and to top it all off you had the United States coming into conflict with the Soviet Union. There were a lot of changes happening, all at the same time.

While there had been those against comics before the Scare, such as children's book author Sterling North who said the small font in comic books damaged eye-sight, they were usually old media fighting against the new media of comic books. However, this would change as parents saw their teenagers become rebellious, forgetting their own teenage rebellion, and looking for an easy cause for this change in behavior.

Comics fit the bill nicely.

>>976921

Comics in the 1950's were enormously popular. GI's had comics included in their care packages during the war, and when they got back to the states, they brought their taste for comics with them. Having grown tired of superheroes, they gravitated to crime, horror, science-fiction, and war comics, causing the medium to flourish. Then you add the 90% of kids who read them too, and you've got possibly the biggest print medium in United States at that time.

However, because of this explosion of popularity, which coincided with all the changes happening in the world, they became the easy scape-goat. Comics had few defenders, unlike movies or music, and television was in it's infancy. Thus, it wasn't hard for parents, clergy, doctors, and law-makers to claim that juvenile delinquency was caused by all the crime, sex, and violence in comic books. That's how the moral panic started. Comics were seen as a mental poison corrupting their children.

And they weren't going to let that happen without a fight.

>>976924

What began was a country wide crusade against comics that the nation hadn't seen up to that point and has yet to see today. School officials and parent's banned comic books, boycotting businesses that sold them. Comics books were burned on mass, with entire communities setting ablaze heaps of them, all to purge the corruption from their midst. Entire states banned the sale of comics featuring crime, horror, and romance within their boarders. All the while, the parents and community leaders never honored the opinions of the actual children and teens involved. They were considered too stupid or too ignorant of the issue to have a say in what happened to their comic books.

Instead of realizing that comics were protected under the First Amendment of the United States constitution, comic publishers were accused of abusing that freedom by irresponsibly producing such salacious content. Never before or since has there been such a targeted attack on the freedom of the press than the comic book scare, all under the belief that stopping comics was necessary to "protect the mental hygiene" of children.

And it was going to get so much worse.

>>976912

>Defending the four-panel jew.

Shame on you.

>>976926

In 1953, United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. It was going to be a televised subcommittee, not unlike the previous United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce. Already the committee members were associating comic book publishers with members of organized crime in such a move.

Then there was the committee's lead witness, Doctor Frederic Wertham, whose book Seduction of the Innocent, was published just before the subcommittee was formed. Now, unlike others, I don't consider Wertham as the villain of this story, merely that he was the person who threw gas on the fire. Wertham was a pioneering psychiatrist with a distinguished career. Just the man that the moral crusade against comics needed to justify all of their fears.

Wertham genuinely cared about the mental well-being of children and young adults, but drew the wrong conclusions when he found that many of his patients read comic books. In his attempt to protect those children, he wrote Seduction of the Innocent. To say the book was unscientific would be an understatement. Comprising claims from second-hand sources and statements re-framed to support his arguments, Wertham made such accusations that comics promoted crime, homosexuality, and fascism. Note: most sources list only Wertham's issues with superhero comics. I think that doesn't explore the subject enough, but until I actually read the book, it'll have to do.

Now the crusaders had the proof that comics corrupted children, and government action against it.

>>976943

Despite a valiant attempt by EC Publisher and Editor-in-Cheif Bill Gaines to defend comics, the monumentally negative press the sub-committee brought on comics was too much to bare. Newstands were refusing to sell comics and the public demanded that comics be banned. To protect the industry from outside censorship, comic publishers formed the Comics Magazine Association of America, the CMAA.

Though the idea was originally suggested by Gaines himself, envisioning it as a toothless organization just to placate the public, once Archie publisher John Goldwater and DC Comics Vice President Jack Lewbowitz got control of the organization, they turned it into a weapon against their competition. Using DC's own internal code as the basis, they created the Comics Code, a set of rules and guidelines that had to be followed in order to gain the CMAA seal of approval. Without that seal, newstands would not carry the comics, and from the outset it was specifically targeted against Bill Gaine's horror comics, Leve Gleason's crime comics, and romance. It included rules that books couldn't have vampires or werewolves, that the words "horror" or "terror" couldn't be used on covers, and so many restrictions on the depiction of crime that it killed the genre.

Gaines tried to stay in the comics business under the code, but eventually he had to get out of the business all together, focusing solely on the publication of MAD magazine.

>>976955

After the subcommittee (which found that comics were not the cause of juvenile delinquency), the scare died down, but the damage was done. Comics were forever crippled as a medium and superheroes, which were dying out by the fifties, were given an artificial lease on life. Jack Lebowtiz promptly bought out a lot of the companies that went out of business due to the code, which is why DC's comic universe is such a mess.

From what I can tell, Archie and DC basically dominated the industry until the sixties. Of course, it was clear that the code didn't apply to DC, who featured Jimmy Olsen as a werewolf clearly on the cover and made the Comics Code remove the whole horror part of the code when they decided to get into making horror comics in the seventies. The whole Comics Code was something that to kill smaller publishers.

>>976960

Later uses of the code further demonstrated just what a corrupt body it was. In 1971, Marvel was asked by United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare to make a comic dealing with drugs, which they did in The Amazing Spider-Man #96–98. However, despite DC featuring opium smugglers in Strange Adventures #205 in 67', when The Amazing Spider-Man came up for code approval, it was slammed for depicting drugs and not given the CMAA seal. Marvel went ahead and published anyway, and thankfully for them, the code was so weak that newstands and wholesalers carried it.

By the eighties, the code was toothless, eventually being phased out all together by the 2000s.

>>976962

The whole comic book scare is the tragedy of comics. The people who defended comics were either ignored, in the case of children, or vilified, in the case of publishers. The public had a problem but instead of confronting it, they looked for scapegoats to blame, and unscrupulous men took advantage of it to take control of an entire medium for their own profit.

What gets me in the end is that whenever someone talks about the code and the damage it caused, people always, always talk about superheroes. You get DC and Marvel crying how the code hurt them, when in reality both parties benefited from the lack of competition the code created. It's disgusting that they control the narrative to such a degree that people don't even know about the other genres and publisher who really suffered.

The Big Two are kikes who deserve to die for hobbling Comics as a whole using moral outrage. This is why a crash would only be to the industry's benefit. Let this be a lesson to any newfags lurking right now.

>>976964

Has a final kinda thing, I'm going to talk about what Wertham did after the Great Comic Book Scare. I'm first going to say that Wertham was a massive critic of the comics code, feeling the code was hypocritical, merely removing the consequences of crime and violence, making it worse than pre-code material. However, by that time the Scare was over and Wertham's criticisms fell on deaf ears. He continued his pursuit of protecting children from psychological harm, with his studies into the effects of segregation on children being used as evidence in the case Brown v. Board of Education, and later wrote a book dealing with medical professional's involvement in the holocaust.

Wertham visited the world of comics one last time in 1974, studying fandoms and fanzines. He found that participation in such things proved to be healthy and constructive outlets for creativity, which led to him being invited to address the New York Comic Art Convention. Wertham was boo'd off stage and never talked about comics again.

I hope that this has been somewhat edifying about the Great Comic Book Scare. I wouldn't say it's gospel, but from my research I think it's accurate for an over-view. I didn't even begin to get into the details, such as Bill Gaines telling the CMAA to fuck off and threatend them with the NAACP when they told him to make a black character white, or Bob Wood, co-creator of CRIME DOES NOT PAY getting jailed for murdering a woman.

>>976955

>Despite a valiant attempt by EC Publisher and Editor-in-Cheif Bill Gaines to defend comics

His defense of comics is preserved. Too bad that the man was so sleep deprived that the rest of his testimony was a disaster.

>>977079

I stopped when the crime stopped. The rest of the book is a story featuring a superhero named "Warhawk". I also accidentally skipped a page.

Apparently the copy I acquired doesn't have the solution to that mystery. The next page in my copy leads to this strip about buying war bonds.

>>977033

>>977069

>>977080

The thing about DC and Marvel is that they're already on a downward slide, along with the rest of the industry. The reader overturn is virtually non-existent, meaning that when the old fanboys leave the hobby, there's not enough new blood to replace them.

We know that any fuck up on DC and Marvel's part won't kill them, but the ideal is that it's enough of a fuck up to send them into reprints. This means they'd be massively downsized, keeping only a skeleton crew to over-see the republishing of old material, and occasionally coming out with new books in the same way Archie comics does.

>>976960

>Comics were forever crippled as a medium and superheroes, which were dying out by the fifties, were given an artificial lease on life.

I don't think people quite appreciate just how much damage this did to comics. Not only did they replace a growing and diverse medium with immature and sterile superheroes, but it also confined all experimentation to the underground until the mid-80's.

If you look at the big picture, we're only just now starting to recover from it.