CODE OF THE BEST

"THANK YOU, Frederic Wertham and McCarthy-Era bullshit! for creating a repressive atmosphere in which only the STRONG survived!"-- Lysdexicuss, TEN CENT DREAMS, 2009.

Although I took exception with Bart Beaty's defenses of Frederic Wertham in earlier posts, I have to agree with Lysdexicss (master of a most excellent comics-reprint blog) that some good things resulted from the Wertham-influenced rise of Code-approved comics.

For instance, though I have considerable affection for the mad old, bad old days of mass-market comic books, especially when they were at their most deliriously pulpy, I have to admit that there was no way that the more salacious and/or violent comics could have survived long-term public outrage. As David Hadju's TEN-CENT PLAGUE makes clear, such outrage predated Wertham's public jeremiads against comic books, and so the anti-comics hysteria would have transpired had he never put in his two cents' worth.

What I find interesting that a similar argument as to the artistically-beneficial effects of censorship was made for the mass-market films of Hollywood: an argument put forth by Thomas Doherty in his 1999 PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD. Toward the end of the book (page 345), Doherty registers his opinion of sound films in the years before the Motion Picture Code clamped down on them in 1934:

"...it would be tempting to sing a lament for the brief four-year-flowering of a vital and liberating motion-picture art in pre-Code Hollywood... The inconvenient truth is that Hollywood's output on the other side of the Code reveals no ready correlation between freedom of expression and aesthetic worth. To take an even longer view... is to suspect that the most vivid and compelling motion pictures-- glorious as art, momentous as texts-- were created under the most severe and narrow-minded censorship ever inflicted upon American cinema."

Doherty's judgment may not be the final court of appeal, but he renders an interesting verdict: as vivacious and compelling as the sound films of 1929-1933 may be. they have the air of the carnival-barker about them, just as did comic books of the Golden Age. Doherty argues that the strictures of the Motion Picture Code caused the artists who worked for the film industry to become more creative, or at least more devious than the low-down approach of the carnival, in finding ways to appeal to the public tastes and still appease the guardians of morality.

This would seem to have strong application to the world of comic books after they underwrote the foundation of the Comics Code in order to present similar guardians with a imprimatur that acted as a Greek aegis, warding off any suspected taint with "the bad old days."

To be sure, many comics-publishers had to kowtow to arbitrary demands from the Code's enforcers, even as film-producers did, and this could and did result in works that became absurdly mannered or preposterously moralistic. Nevertheless, as Lysdexicuss argues, once the mainstream publishers of the early Silver Age found their options somewhat more limited, they had to find new approaches to their material, much as post-Code filmmakers did.

In contradistinction to Lysdexicuss' focus on Marvel alone, I would cite three developments of the early Silver Age: (1) Mort Weisinger's expanding mythologization of Superman and all related titles, (2) Julie Schwartz's injection of hard (albeit juvenile) aspects of prose science fiction into his revivals of Golden Age characters, and (3) Stan Lee's editorial emphasis on humanizing his new stable of superhero figures.

Of the three, the direction of Marvel Comics is most obviously opposed to the "carnivalesque" orientation of the company's earlier incarnation as the entity fans term "Timely-Atlas" after two of the company-names used by publisher Martin Goodman. Admittedly, DC Comics in the early Silver Age was the least carnivalesque publisher still in business at that time, and the content of their post-Code comics probably was not hugely affected by the anti-comics hysteria. But even so, the decision to bring back a new stable of superheroes at that time-- when there was scant evidence from other publishers that such characters were due for a comeback-- marks a shift in their editorial priorities. If nothing else, the DC people may have upgraded their already-stolid repertoire just to further distance themselves from gratuitously-pulpy comics. And without their decision to so upgrade, the Marvel of Lee, Kirby and Ditko probably would have devolved into tame monster stories, quirky "Twilight Zone" stories, and westerns for the rest of the 1960s-- assuming the company even survived that decade.

I'll have more to say later about why superheroes proved such an important choice, against all the other genres which the mainstream publishers might have chosen to "gentrify."