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Topic: Comics Code Authority Censorship? WF 189 (Topic Closed Topic Closed) Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Rick Senger
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Posted: 13 December 2014 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | 1  

Just finished reading the rather surreal World's Finest 189 and 190 from 1969.  The story by Cary Bates features the apparent death of Superman and a scene where doctors dissect (!!) him using super-Kryptonian tools and intending later to divvy up his various organs / anatomical parts to suitable patients in need.  The patients who inherit the parts apparently gain the parts' respective powers (the guy who gets his eyes gets all the attendant super-vision attributes, his lung recipient has super breath, ear recipient super-hearing, and so forth).   Naturally Superman turns out not to be dead and it was all an elaborate ploy with other objectives (typical Cary Bates... offbeat premise somewhat marred by a farfetched explanation), but the tone felt unusual for that era in DC comics. 

Which leads to this:



I know sometimes the Comics Code rejected stories (the famous Spider-man drug story from the early 70s which Stan ran without the CCA approval symbol), but I don't recall ever seeing anything like panel two above.  I thought the CCA was a self-governing body that the publishers created to stave off more direct government censorship, but it's never been clear to me exactly who made the decisions.  Was this just DC deciding they couldn't figure out a way to tastefully depict this rather grisly visual and just slapping a faux CCA censor label instead? 


Edited by Rick Senger on 13 December 2014 at 5:33pm
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John Byrne
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Posted: 13 December 2014 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | 2  

Just DC being cute.
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Larry Lawrence
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Posted: 13 December 2014 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | 3  

It's a cheat, to allow for the surprise ending.
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Matt Hawes
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Posted: 13 December 2014 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | 4  

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Rick Senger
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Posted: 14 December 2014 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | 5  

JB, did you ever have any run-ins with the Comics Code authority?
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Jason Czeskleba
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Posted: 14 December 2014 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | 6  

 Rick Senger wrote:
I thought the CCA was a self-governing body that the publishers created to stave off more direct government censorship, but it's never been clear to me exactly who made the decisions.


In the 60s and 70s (I'm not sure of the exact dates) the CCA was headed by an attorney named Len Darvin.  He and his staff would review the contents of each comic, and sometimes request changes.
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Geoffrey Langford
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Posted: 17 December 2014 at 6:13am | IP Logged | 7  

The CCA was an actual "thing" in it's early days -- but by the mid to late 80s, it wasn't much more than a status symbol sticker on the cover of a comic.  DC and Marvel both used to label the books with the CCA logo, but were in clear violation in doing so.  One that springs to mind is there was a section of the code that mentioned how no comic could bear the title of a villain -- yet DC published the "Biography of Lex Luthor" with a CCA logo on it. 

Didn't they all drop the logo in the 90s?


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John Byrne
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Posted: 17 December 2014 at 6:53am | IP Logged | 8  

JB, did you ever have any run-ins with the Comics Code authority?

••

A few, mostly minor.

The biggest bump actually happened without my being aware of it at the time. When I did FANTASTIC FOUR 236 I used the title "Terror in a Tiny Town," both for the alliterative quality, and the word play on the title of the infamous "midget western," "The Terror of Tiny Town." (My story was also about "little people.")

Jim Salicrup, the editor, told me months later that the Code had balked at my use of the word "terror," it being on their Index, and he had had to argue that it was not being used in an "exploitive" fashion.

Mostly, the Code was innocuous enough, and served to compel us to be clever, in order to "get around" it. The greatest frustration was the varying staff. One could not be sure who would be passing judgement on one's work, and different staffers had different interpretations of the Rules. Especially if there were "personal relationships" involved.

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Marc Cheek
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Posted: 17 December 2014 at 8:26am | IP Logged | 9  

Really...?! Because of Terror in the title? That's laughable considering that was 1981.
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John Byrne
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Posted: 17 December 2014 at 9:08am | IP Logged | 10  

The Code had been updated a few times since its inception, but a lot of the old baggage remained. The list of No-No words included "terror," "horror," and their kith and kin. I understand Len Wein and Berni Wrightson had a similar dust-up with the Keepers of the Code when they titled an issue of SWAMP THING "A Clockwork Horror."

Denny O'Neil used to tell the story of sitting in on a meeting to revise the Code, and witnessing the resolution that vampires and zombies were still not to be allowed, but ghouls were. "You mean," Denny asked, "we can't show the walking dead, but we CAN show people who EAT the dead?" Apparently, the Keepers of the Code thought "ghouls" were goblins.

(Steve Gerber at one time declared he was going to get around the ban on "the walking dead" by putting zombies on roller skates, and calling them "the rolling dead." He did not get around to this, so I later offered a small homage to his plan by naming Sharon Selleck's rock band "The Rolling Dead." Surely one of the in-est of in-jokes ever!)

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Marc Cheek
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Posted: 17 December 2014 at 9:53am | IP Logged | 11  

I've just been reading American Comic Book Chronicles: 1970s and it spoke a little of the revision in the early part of the 1970s, when vampires and such were allowed again. It's funny though - while they did revise it to show zombies, the word "zombie" wasn't allowed, and led to the adoption of the replacement word "zovumbie". Of course the revision led a new spate of horror comics.
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Jeffrey Rice
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Posted: 17 December 2014 at 10:12am | IP Logged | 12  

Ah, the "zuvembies" and those organized criminals in the "Maggia".
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