Seal of approval: the history of the comics code.

Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1998)

THE 1950s CAMPAIGNS against "crime" and "horror" comic books were, arguably, among the most important of all censorship movements of the 20th century. Occurring simultaneously

in more than twenty countries, carried on waves of media moralism and blinkered indignation, they led in some cases to outbreaks of book-burning, in other cases to laws banning whole genres of publication. Yet compared with other fields of censorship, for example, film or literature, until recently the campaigns have remained largely unresearched -- except by nostalgic or angry fans, trying to find out what they had lost and how they had lost it. This books adds in some significant ways to our knowledge. How much fuller it makes our understanding of the phenomena is less clear.

The core of Nyberg's book is a narrative of a number of key aspects of the American comics campaign. Beginning from the general moralistic stance taken towards publications for children, which inevitably spilled over onto comic books almost from their inception, she traces the steps that led, by 1954, to a regime of strict self-regulation in the comics industry. Her tale is very telling. She offers a detailed account of the thought of the central figure in the American campaign, Fredric Wertham, drawing on materials that have only recently become available from the Wertham archive. As James Gilbert in his A Cycle of Outrage (1986) has also shown, Wertham is a highly complex figure, combining a liberal passion which made him, for example, a key spokesperson against educational segregation with elements of Frankfurt School pessimism about mass culture. His crusade against the comics brought these two sides of his politics into a curious liaison.

Although Nyberg does not play close attention to the structures and organization of the comics industry itself as Matthew McAllister usefully did in his essay in Journal of Communication (1990), she does nonetheless judiciously show that the industry was already in decline by 1950. A number of publishers were already going to the wall, even before Wertham's campaign started to bite. Others--Dell, most particularly -- refused to associate themselves with a "lower class" of publishers, and thereby weakened publishers' capacity to resist. In telling the tale of the 1954 Senate Hearings into comics books and delinquency, and the resultant self-regulation Code, her research clarifies many things about the motives and conduct of particular participants. For instance, she has uncovered a series of exchanges between Senator Hendrickson, who chaired the first stages of the Senate Hearings, and William Gaines, conservative anarchist publisher of the most important comics of the period, the EC line and the publisher most harmed by the anti-comics crusades. These recently uncovered documents give us a rich picture of the mutual incomprehension of the two sides.

But some of Nyberg's interpretations are less convincing. In defending Wertham against instant dismissal, she claims for him qualities that are hard to substantiate. She argues that in a number of ways Wertham prefigures more modern concerns about the mass media, for example, in his concern about representations of gender and sexuality. Nyberg goes further: "Wertham's ideological analysis, while relatively unsophisticated, would not be out of place in the company of media scholarship that addresses many of the same issues. Another area in which Wertham might be considered a pioneer is that of audience analysis." (95) Here, Nyberg references modern ethnographic investigations. This is very troubling. First, as a number of us have argued, Wertham systematically distorted -- to the point of virtually lying about -- the materials he claimed to analyze. Second, his psychotherapeutic sessions with young offenders on which he based his claims about the effects of comics bears only the thinnest relation to modern ethnographic research -- whose methods were already in this period well developed in the hands of cultural anthropologists.

Part of the problem is Nyberg's own attitude to comic books and their narratives. She does reproduce and usefully discuss one famous EC strip, "The Whipping," which dealt in startling and almost social-realist fashion with racial prejudice. She rightly sides with Gaines in his counter-attack on Wertham's crude and false characterization of this. But beyond this, she simply adopts their own terms for describing the comics: were they "harmless entertainment," as Gaines insisted, or was it, as Wertham felt, that exposure to the "unintentional messages" would over time "build up a social context in which children learned to accept, if not to imitate, the violence?" (73) This is a very narrow reading of the analytic options, and ignores so much of the very fruitful work that precisely constitutes modern "ideological analysis."

Nyberg's main complaint is that the Comics Code, and the complicity of the publishers in its limitations, has restricted comics to "children's fare," and thus restrained the overall creativity of comic book artists and writers. That's a fair point -- but surely only as a starter. It surely needs a wider understanding of the modern construction of "childhood" and of what is allowed to that (as Mark West well did in his Children, Culture and Controversy (1988)), and the wider ideological role of conceptions of childhood. Beyond these, I suspect we will need to consider the comics campaigns in quite different terms, in particular for the way these comic books arose from, but abrasively encountered, a set of hopes and fears engendered out of post-World War II reconstruction. No intra-industry narrative can be a sufficient ground for this.

For those who do not know the important story of the 1950s campaign, this book will enlighten. For those who know the story and wish to expand their understanding of it, it must be read alongside other contributions.