Note sull'episodio
In 1970 a mystery comic was rejected by the industry's censorship board because its narrator was introduced as a wandering wolfman. The fix was to print a writer's credit proving Marv Wolfman was a real person, and creator credits in mystery anthologies were born by accident. This episode builds a biography of the organization behind that ruling, the Comics Code Authority, from the moral panic fueled by Sterling North and psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, through public comic burnings and the 1954 Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency.
We explain how publishers formed the CMAA and hired magistrate Charles F. Murphy to write a code modeled on Hollywood's Hays Code, and how wholesalers became its enforcement arm by refusing to ship books without the seal. Then we follow the cracks: William Gaines fighting to keep a Black astronaut in the anti-racist story Judgment Day before leaving comics for Mad Magazine, Marvel's Zuvembies workaround, Stan Lee publishing the government-requested Spider-Man drug storyline without the seal in 1971, and the long fade through Swamp Thing, Watchmen, Vertigo and Marvel's 2001 exit until DC and Archie dropped the code in January 2011.
- Why the words horror and terror, plus vampires, zombies, ghouls and werewolves, were banned outright
- How artists like Harry Lucey and inker Terry Szenics dealt with rules on how women could be drawn
- Why the 1971 revision let in Shelley, Stoker and Poe monsters but still kept zombies out
- How the Spider-Man issues 96 through 98 proved distributors would still carry unsealed comics
- The seal's afterlife as property of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and a retro Easter egg