Amy Kiste Nyberg
Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code
(1998)
[38] The legal case of most concern to those drafting state and federal legislation against comic books was a case that dealt, not with a comic book, but an adult crime magazine, Headquarters Detective, True Cases from the Police Blotter. Two thousand copies of the magazine were seized in New York under a section of the New York Penal Code that made it illegal to publish, distribute, or sell any book, pamphlet, magazine, or newspaper made up primarily of criminal news, police reports, or accounts of criminal deeds, or pictures, or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust, or crime. The
[39]
book dealer was convicted, but after more than seven years of litigation, lower court decisions were reversed by the United States Supreme Court on March 29, I948, on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional. Similar statutes in eighteen states were overturned by the decision in Winters v. New York.
The Supreme Court found the laws prohibiting depiction of crime and violence in the media unconstitutional as written, since they violated both the First and Fourteenth amendments. Although obscenity and pornography were not protected under the First Amendment, the Court ruled that crime magazines, while containing little of value to society, were as much entitled to free speech protection as the best of literature. The Court also noted that while words such as obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, or disgusting were "well understood through long use in criminal law," the provisions against crime and bloodshed were unconstitutionally vague because the clause had no "technical or common law meaning." Without a precise definition, it was impossible for an individual to know when he or she was in violation of the law. Therefore, the New York law was also in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing due process.
...
The Supreme Court's decision in 1948 set guidelines for media content that are still at issue today. Laws regulating obscenity and pornography are on the books in almost every city and state, but the regulation of violent content in the media, while it spurs periodic public outcry and legislative investigation, ultimately remains the responsibility of the media industries and their self-regulatory bodies.
...
[93] [Fredric] Wertham's book, while it drew on his research, was not intended to be a scholarly presentation of his ideas. He used his book as a vehicle to make his case against comics in hopes he could once again mobilize public opinion in support of his proposed ban on the sale of comic books to children. The book was not an objective overview of the comic book industry but a deliberately sensationalized portrait of the worst that comic books had to offer.
I find it perplexing that this claim of intention (or perhaps the lack of intention to be scholarly ) would ever be seriously made by an academic, whether on their own or anothers' behalf. I can't imagine it is accepted as readily as it is made, but it does survive the editorial process from time to time, as here and a few other places which I've previously noticed but neglected to record.
Nyberg elsewhere makes it clear that both reformers and Wertham himself traded on his imposing credentials. Putting the burden on readers (a) to make an inference about the degree to which such an author intends to be "scholarly," and (b) to gracefully conduct an as-if reading according to this inference, this seems a bit much to ask.
[94] While Wertham's main concern was violence, he also studied the way race and gender were depicted in comic books. In a discussion of the "jungle" comic books, Wertham wrote that while the white people in these comics were blond, athletic, and shapely, the natives were usually portrayed as subhuman or even ape-like. Such portrayals, where the heroes were always "blond Nordic supermen," made a deep impression on children. Wertham noted that such images acted to reinforce attitudes of prejudice at the individual level, but they also worked at the
[95]
broader social level, labeling as "minorities" what really constituted "the majority of mankind." Children, he argued, were presented with two kinds of people: one is the tall, blond, regular-featured man or pretty young blonde girl, and the others fall into the broad category of inferior people. The social meaning attached to such representations becomes clear, according to Wertham, when children are asked to identify the villain in a story and invariably choose the character who is nonwhite, of an identifiable ethnic background, or one who in some other way deviates from the norm. Children take for granted these standards about race; in other words, such representations become normalized. And where nudity was found in comics, it was generally nonwhite women who are portrayed this way. ...
...
Wertham's ideological analysis, while relatively unsophisticated, would not be out of place in the company of media scholarship today that addresses many of these same issues.
No kidding!
Eventually, the purportedly far more
sophisticated
Social Psychologists started
asking
adults the same questions, and purportedly they got the same answers. So, adults are as impressionable as children were once thought to be, and/or the media are an even smaller piece of the puzzle than we thought, and/or anything and everything is
prejudiced
in some direction or other and this always manifests in some measurable way.
[96] One assertion that Wertham made about his readers was that they did not remember entire stories, but only fragments, so the claims by publishers that the criminals always got caught and punished in the end was empty reassurance. Wertham offered this young boy's summary of the stories he liked: "They have a lot of girls in them. There is a lot of fighting in them. There are men and women fighting. Sometimes they kill the girls, they strangle them, shoot them. Sometimes they poison them. In the magazine Jumbo, they often stab them. The girl doesn't do the stabbing very often, she gets stabbed more often." In another example, Wertham cited a comic featuring Hopalong Cassidy in which a barber threatens another man with a razor and Hopalong Cassidy attacks the barber and saves the man. Comments Wertham; "I have talked to children about this book. They do not say this book is about the West, or Hopalong Cassidy, or about a barber. They say it is about killing and socking people and twisting their arms and cutting their throats."
...
[159] One of the few groups to speak out for the potential of comic books was the American Civil Liberties Union. They actually favored legislation over industry regulation. The group argued in a pamphlet published in 1955 that postpublication punishment based on laws at least allowed for the due process of law and a jury that reflected a community's taste. Prior censorship , in the form of a prepublication review process , concentrated power in the hands of the few with no legal recourse . Industry codes, the ACLU argued, inevitably have the effect of inhibiting the free expression of ideas: "Collective adherence to a single set of principles in a code has the effect of limiting different points of view, because individual publishers—as well as writers—are fearful of departing from the accepted norm lest they be held up to scorn or attack and suffer economic loss."
(The pamphlet is online here.)
[162] ...the fan backlash [against "manipulative marketing techniques"] has resulted in a decease in sales on titles whose circulation numbers were artificially inflated by the marketing gimmicks employed by publishers. This downturn has renewed the industry's interest in opening up new markets for comic books. One attempt to market outside fandom was the "creation" of the graphic novel. In the late 1980s, the publication of three titles—Maus, Batman Returns, and Watchmen—caught the fancy of the mainstream press, and journalists unfamiliar with the industry heralded them "as constituting a new and historically unique trend." Publishers capitalized on this notion of a "new breed" of comics to cultivate a new outlet for comics: bookstores. But as comics attempted to make the transition from "comics culture" to "book culture," the "graphic" element of the graphic novel was left behind. As Sabin notes, graphic novels were reviewed in book sections , writers were profiled rather than artists , and the quality of writing was held in higher esteem than the quality of artwork . In short, the co-option of comic books by literary interests was doomed to failure because, as Sabin writes, "it served to remake comics in prose literature's image." The bookstores' interest waned and graphic novels began to disappear from shelves.
[165]
Association of Comics Magazine Publishers
Comics Code
1948...
6. Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.
...
[166]
...
1954...
[167]
...General Standards Part C
...DIALOGUE
...RELIGION
...COSTUME
...
[168]
4. Females should be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.
...
[170]
...
1971...
[173]
...
General Standards—Part C
...
DIALOGUE
...
RELIGION
1. Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible
COSTUME
...
2. Females should be drawn realistically without undue emphasis on any physical quality.
...
[175]
...
1989PREAMBLE
...INSTITUTIONS
In general recognizable national, social, political, cutural, ethnic and racial groups, religious institutions, and law enforcement authorities will be potrayed in a positive light. These include... [...a very long list...]
[176]
...; and social groups identifiable by lifestyle, such as homosexuals, the economically disadvantaged, the economically privileged, the homeless, senior citizens, minors, etc.
Nothing against any of these people of course, but, uh...anybody for ontological nominalism??
If, for dramatic purposes,
...this qualification appears a few times in this version of the Code...
it is necessary to portray such group of individuals in a negative manner, the name of the group and its individual members will be fictitious, and its activities will not be clearly identifiable with the routine activities of any real group.
...
LANGUAGE
...VIOLENCE
...CHARACTERIZATIONS
Character portrayals will be carefully crafted and show sensitivity to national, ethnic, religious, sexual, political and socioeconomic orientations.
[177]
If it is dramatically appropriate for one character to demean another because of his or her sex, ethnicity, religion,..., the demeaning words or actions will be clearly shown to be wrong or ignorant in the course of the story. ...
Well, faced with that dubious prescription, Wertham does have the necessary rejoinder after all:
"
I have talked to children about this book.
They do not say
this book
is about
the West,
or Hopalong Cassidy,
or about a barber.
They say
it
is about
killing
and socking people
and twisting their arms
and cutting their throats.
"
Eventually, if they haven't already started, researchers will have to start talking to people about entertainment in the wake of Wokism. Perhaps they'll be told that it is about beautiful people using supernatural powers to perform mundane tasks.
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