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By Root 459 0

the forces of censorship, founded the Comics Magazine Association of America, an organization designed to self-regulate comic book art and content. The CMAA drew up a new set of guidelines—a Comics Code—that capitulated in almost every respect to the criticism directed against comics by Fredric Wertham and the different comics hearings and conferences. The adopted standards addressed subject matter, dialogue, religion, costume, marriage and sex, and advertising matter, and those standards all but eviscerated the crime and horror books on the market. They put large dents in the romance and superhero titles as well. Comic book publishers, for instance, were no longer allowed to use the words horror or terror in their titles, and these words could be used only sparingly—“judiciously,” as the Comics Code Authority called it—in the interior text. Criminals had to be punished for their deeds, with no exceptions. A stamp of approval would be placed on every comic book adhering to the new standards. Parents would know instantly if their children were looking at objectionable material.

Not every comic book publisher joined the CMAA or went along with its code. William Gaines and EC refused to have anything to do with them, for obvious reasons, and Dell, publisher of Disney and other innocuous comics, objected on principle. Gaines realized that he was all but finished as a comic book publisher, but he continued his new hit publication, a satirical magazine called Mad, which skirted the new code by coming out in an oversize format that distinguished it from comic books and exempted it from the code.

The Comics Code might have spared the industry from outright extinction, but it did irreparable damage to a business that had been expanding to reach an older, more mature readership. Will Eisner’s dream of presenting stories for adult readers had backslid to such a point that had he written The Spirit as a newsstand comic book, he would have had to tone down the feature to meet the Comics Code Authority’s standards. The violence would have been too intense, and his femmes fatales too sexually provocative, for the new guidelines.

Eisner kept up on all these developments, even though they didn’t directly affect his current work. Watching Wertham promote his book on television convinced him that he had been right to discontinue The Spirit. He was tired of the fight, of arguing on behalf of comics’ value as literature, of the constant reminders, now so prominent, that comic book artists were disdained by the public. He was disgusted by the efforts to connect comics with juvenile misbehavior. Aside from his general objections to censorship, Eisner was interested in how this criticism would apply to an industry that had evolved enormously in only a few decades. He’d watched with interest when Milton Caniff, his friend and early influence, eloquently addressed the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce. He’d followed the Kefauver hearings and the development of the Comics Code, which he judged to be well-meaning but ultimately misguided. “We are constantly forming committees to protect people in somebody else’s living room,” he’d grouse, noting that this was an American tradition. “We try to protect people from ideas that we think are bad.”

Comics would limp along for nearly two decades, staying within the framework of the code at the cost of insipid stories certain to offend—or challenge—no one. Many pre-code titles were discontinued, and companies went under. Artists and publishers disappeared from the business, took jobs in commercial art in advertising and mainstream magazines, or found other outlets for their talent, sometimes for the better. Harry Chesler and Victor Fox, whose shops were barely hanging on before the Comics Code went into effect, left the business, content to know that they had cast large shadows in the early days of comics. Charles Biro, whose writing for Crime Does Not Pay helped shape the explosion of true-crime comics in the late forties and whose crime fighter, Daredevil, became a tight