Comics and Censorship

Design Resource

Comics in Education

The Growth of Comics

Saurabh Singanapalli

IDC, IIT Bombay

Comics and Censorship

• Testimonies against comics
• The CCA
• Underground Comics

While comics had their advocates, they also had a fair share of critics. Although in Europe and Asia, comics did not face much opposition from educators or critics, in the United States the battle lines were drawn between those who would use comics in education and those that saw them as a distracting, and often corrupting, influence on young learners. The debate raged on in America through the 1940s, until the scales were tilted through the intervention of Dr. Frederic Wertham.

Wertham, a psychiatrist specializing in juvenile delinquency, was an outspoken critic of comics and was in favour of government regulation of the medium. His book The Seduction of the Innocent (1954) criticized comic books and magazines for their depiction of violence, sex, crime and drug use. Wertham was especially harsh on the popular crime and horror comics published by houses such as EC Comics. The Seduction of the Innocent raised issues that catapulted Wertham to international fame and drove parents' groups to call for a greater control over comics. Wertham was chosen as an expert witness to testify for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, and used various panels from contemporary comic book publications to make a case holding comics responsible for the rise in juvenile delinquency. This led to the Senate Subcommittee recommending that publishers tone down the content in comics, a direct result of which was the establishment of the Comics Code Authority (CCA). The CCA was formed in 1954 by comic book publishers – who may have seen this as a preventive measure to avoid further criticism or even an outright ban – to regulate the content of comic books in the United States. As part of the Code, a lot of restrictions were placed on publishers. For example, policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions could not be portrayed in any way that would "create disrespect for established authority"; it was required that "in every instance good shall triumph over evil"; it was forbidden to show "instances of law enforcement officers dying as a result of a criminal's activities"; and "excessive violence" or "lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations" could not be used. Thus, the CCA became a censor for comic books, pushing the horror-comic and crime-comic genres out of publication, and leaving only the very tame form of superhero comics as the sole remaining popular comic genre.

And the U.S.A. wasn't alone in their censorship of comics: in the UK, the government had already passed the Children & Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act in 1955, and in Australia and New Zealand some publishers adopted a Code of Publishing Ethics that was similar to the CCA. As a reaction to the censorship, however, a new movement of Underground Comics began to gain momentum. These were comic books that depicted content that was unacceptable or forbidden under censorship codes like the CCA, and were mostly self-published and distributed on a small scale. In the 1980s, these were finally recognized by mainstream publishing houses, and some were even incorporated into the mainstream as the CCA hold loosened somewhat.

However, notwithstanding underground comics, for the twenty years immediately following the establishment of the CCA, the use of comics in education took a firm back seat. Comics were not felt to be suitable for children even as general reading, so elevating them to the level of formal classroom material in schools was out of the question. There were practitioners who used the medium in their classes, but these were very few and mainly exceptions to the rule. It was only in the 1970s that the next tentative attempts were made to bring comic books back into the classroom. It was slow and uncomfortable progress, but the recovery process had already begun. Although many educators continued to be uneasy about comics, this set the stage for the graphic novel which provided the impetus that would finally tilt the scales again in favour of pictorial narratives and sequential art.

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Comics in Education