The Comics Code years, and what adult comics did instead

By 1954 the American comic book had a reputation problem it had partly earned. Crime and horror titles sold extremely well, some of them were genuinely lurid, and a campaign against them had been building since the late 1940s in newspapers, church groups and city councils. Individual towns had already tried bans and public burnings.

Two things brought it to a head in a single year. A psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, published Seduction of the Innocent, which argued that comics were a cause of juvenile delinquency. And a Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency held hearings on comic books, over two days in April and a further session that June, with Wertham testifying and the publisher William Gaines of EC testifying in his own defence. The hearings did not produce legislation. They produced the strong impression that legislation was coming.

The industry regulated itself first

The publishers formed a trade body that autumn and adopted a code. Comics submitted for review and passing it carried a small stamp on the cover reading that it was approved by the Comics Code Authority.

The document itself is longer than people assume and reads like a list of complaints from the previous five years, which is roughly what it was. Paraphrasing rather than quoting, since versions of the text differ: no horror or terror in a title, no vampires, werewolves, ghouls or walking dead, no scene of crime presented so that a reader might sympathise with the criminal or copy the method, nothing that could make a reader disrespect police, judges or government, no nudity or suggestive posing, no seduction, and nothing the writers described as sexual perversion. Good had to defeat evil. Punishment had to follow.

You can argue about which of those clauses were reasonable in 1954. What matters here is the second half of the mechanism.

A gate, not a law

Nothing in the Code was legally binding. Any publisher could print anything the obscenity statutes allowed and put no seal on it at all.

They could not sell it. Comic books reached readers through national magazine distributors and local wholesalers, and those wholesalers declined to handle unsealed comic books, partly out of caution and partly because retailers were nervous. Losing the seal meant losing the rack, and the rack was the entire market. A private agreement that no court would enforce shaped what American comics contained for a generation, because it sat exactly where the books had to pass.

EC’s crime and horror line ended. What EC kept was Mad, and it kept it by converting the title to a black and white magazine in 1955. Magazines were a different product category, sold through a different part of the same industry, and the Code did not cover them. That single move is the template for everything adult comics did for the next twenty years.

Leaving the system

Three exits opened, in order.

The magazine format was the first and the cleanest. Warren Publishing launched Creepy in 1964 as a black and white horror magazine, and it sold horror stories the Code had prohibited since 1954 without breaking any rule, because it was legally and commercially not a comic book. Format was the loophole.

The second was the underground, which skipped distributors altogether and sold through head shops. That is where genuinely adult comics ended up in the United States, and it is why the American adult comic developed as a small press object rather than a bookshop one.

The third was geography. The Code was an American arrangement. European publishers had their own restrictions, including a French law of 1949 governing publications aimed at young people, but adult comics on the continent kept a route into ordinary bookshops as bound albums with an author’s name on the cover. The result is a tradition that never had to be furtive about the same material.

The Code loosens, then stops mattering

The 1971 revision is the one usually cited. Marvel ran a three part Spider-Man story about drug addiction in 1971 without the seal, the sky did not fall, and the revised Code that year permitted drug abuse as a subject when shown as harmful and let some of the classic monsters back in if handled in the manner of the literary tradition. A further revision in 1989 replaced much of the specific list with broader principles.

By then the direct market had changed the arithmetic again. Comic shops bought non returnable from specialist distributors and did not require a seal, so a publisher could reach a paying audience without the newsstand at all. That is where mature readers imprints, independent black and white publishers and translated European work all landed through the 1980s.

Marvel stopped using the Code in 2001. The last two publishers using it dropped it in 2011, and the rights to the seal were handed to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which is a tidy ending.

The pattern is what carries forward. Nobody argued adult comics out of existence in 1954. They were removed from the shelf by whoever controlled the shelf, and every later fight in this history works the same way, with app stores and payment processors standing where the wholesalers used to be.