For this quarter's Lunchtime Lecture, we heard Kirk O'Brien discuss the social role of comics and the government's many attempts to censor them. Because the 1950s were an era when the United States was afflicted with the Red Scare and particularly focused on allowing only "appropriate" content to be circulated (read: focused on oppressing minorities and dissenting opinions), comic makers had a long list of rules foisted upon them. Among other requirements of the list were these: police and other forces of "justice" had to be depicted in a positive light; divorce was not to be portrayed as humorous; the words "horror," "terror," and "crime" could not be titles of a comic by themselves; and (strangely) no ads for fireworks were permitted. One of EC's (or Entertaining Comics') books was flagged for a single scene at the end, where a black man was piloting a spaceship (because black people couldn't be astronauts at the time, so heaven forbid a comic depict a black person as an astronaut) However, moral comics were permitted, and those were often quite dark and involved vigilante justice.
I was fascinated and disgusted by the way the prevailing beliefs and opinions of the 1950s affected the development of comics. (In my sketchbook, I have several sarcastic notes that are all some form of "*yay* for the 1950s".) It makes a lot of sense to me that the government of the time would have gone after more progressive or violent comics, because of the era (the Red Scare didn't exactly help ease conservatism). I was surprised that the code of rules went away only recently (really they were out of use by the 1990s, but they only technically went away in 2010), since I would have expected that people would have gotten rid of them sooner. One question I did have was this: if the government was so against violence in comics, why allow vigilante justice to be taken so far? In one of the examples we saw, there was a baseball game, and one player poisoned his spikes so he could slide into the star player on the other team and kill him. The players on the other team were furious, and got the poison-spiked player to come to the baseball field at night, where they dismembered him and played baseball with his body parts. I found that awful to read, and while I won't argue for it to be censored (that would undermine my annoyance about other things being censored), I don't understand how that would be allowed under such a restrictive system.
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AuthorMolly Goodman Archives
May 2019
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