Canadian Journal of Communication

Volume 23, Issue 4, April 1998

https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.1998v23n4a1074

REVIEWS
Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code
Amy Kiste Nyberg
Published online 1 April 1998.
Canadian Journal of Communication

Of all the various popular communications media perhaps none has suffered
from scholarly disinterest as much as comic books. Historically
marginalized as neither art nor literature the comic book has never really
been adopted as a legitimate form of cultural expression worthy of
academic notice. As a consequence, the few histories and critical
investigations that have surfaced to date have tended to fall under the rubric
of fan publishing, often featuring little that is of value to the critical reader
and promulgating accepted legends as historical fact. The structural basis
for the maintenance of this type of fannish scholarship is located in part in
the acquisition policies of libraries and archives, which have not historically
welcomed collections of comic books. As a result there are only a few
libraries in North America that can boast collections of comic books of a
size that would be of use to the communications scholar interested in
surveying the history of the medium. The primary result of this ongoing
archival neglect has been to limit scholarship in the area of comic books to
academics who have a long-standing interest in comics as a communicative
form, often as current or former fans. The corollary outcome has meant that
those few academic books which have been produced to date often bear the
markers of fannish interest in the promotion and justification of particular
reading practices—whether they are related to costumed superheroes,
underground artists, or the medium as a whole. In short, most examples of
research into comic books begin from a defensive theoretical or critical
position which attempts to justify the scholar’s interest in the topic by
arguing, as seemingly all books on comics do, that the medium has been
unjustly neglected by scholars and the general public and that comic books
really do have artistic or communicative merit beyond their status as
historical artifacts.
Two recent books bring this issue to the fore in differing ways and to
differing degrees by focusing their attention on that era generally regarded
by comics fans as having been the turning point for the medium and the
industry in the United States (and by implicit extension, Canada): the
1950s. Commies, Cowboys and Jungle Queens: Comic Books and America,
1945-1954 by William W. Savage, Jr. and Seal of Approval: The History of
the Comics Code by Amy Kiste Nyberg each seek to shed some light on the
current significance of comic books by approaching the topic from a
historical perspective. Savage is, in fact, a historian and Nyberg is a
communications professor whose work has been primarily archival.
Released almost simultaneously, these two books offer a quick glimpse into
the current state of scholarly writing on comic books; in particular, the
ongoing fascination with a mythology of the 1950s as a lost moment in
which the potentialities of the medium were squandered by public
disapprobation and publisher short-sightedness.
Savage’s Commies, Cowboys and Jungle Queens is actually a re-release
of his 1990 book Comic Books and America, 1945-1954 from a new
publisher and with a title more likely to attract the interest of casual
browsers in the cultural studies sections of major chain bookstores. The
book is quite short, consisting of eight chapters, most of which include a
reprint of a sample comic book story from the period. In total there are only
about 80 pages of original text in the book to accompany the more than 40
pages of comic book reprints. In some cases the stories are longer than the
chapters which they accompany. Savage’s sections are broken down
primarily along generic lines and he looks in turn at comic books about the
bomb, communism, the Korean War, and cowboys before turning briefly to
other genres. Savage’s choices are strange for a number of reasons. In the
first instance, his thesis is that comic books in the immediate postwar era
became less concerned with escapist adventure and more interested in
contemporary realism, a suggestion that would seem to mitigate against his
attention to the western. Moreover, with the exception of the western and—
to a lesser degree—the war comics, he has ignored the most popular and
most discussed genres from the period. Certainly the most significant
genres in the postwar years were real crime, horror, romance, and children’s
humour, but Savage has grouped all of these together in one chapter
(alongside the more marginal genre of jungle comics), devoting a scant 10
pages to them. From its very organization, Savage’s book, therefore, comes
across as a justification of his own interests in comic books of the period
rather than as a serious history of the production and reception of comic
books following the war.
Savage’s thesis is confusing as well. He begins with the untenable
suggestion that the 1930s generally were not an era marked by social
criticism in popular culture and suggests that it was only in the 1950s that
culture took on a critical voice. He attempts to demonstrate that critical
outlook through reference to a series of escapist adventure stories which
depicted such things as nuclear grenades from which one could escape
unharmed and jungle comics featuring characters with names such as
“Nigah,” although it remains unclear how either of these comic books could
be seriously considered as having addressed serious contemporary
concerns. Throughout the volume Savage introduces a handful of stories
within a general contextual framework and provides little in the way of
substantive analysis. The workings of the industry at the level of production
and distribution are completely absent. In their place stand narrow textual
readings which do not go so far as to attempt to identify the writers and
artists of the stories in question. As a result, Savage’s portrait of the comic
book industry is a monolithic image wherein no distinctions are made
between artists or publishers. To this degree the comic book industry may
as well have been the product of a single entity, which is the way that
Savage unfortunately presents it. The result, therefore, is a book which is
little more than a hodge-podge of anecdotal observations on the topic of
comic book stories selected with little discernible rhyme or reason. It is
difficult to see how Commies, Cowboys and Jungle Queens could be of any
value to anyone seeking a better understanding of comic books or even of
media representations of various social concerns following the Second
World War.
Nyberg’s history of the development and changes to the comics code is
superior in every conceivable fashion, despite the fact that it too shares a
number of the same problems. The comics code was a self-regulatory code
adopted by the majority of American comic book publishers in 1954 in an
effort to quash the ongoing negative public image of the industry. Seal of
Approval, therefore, deals with the history of anti-comic book sentiment in
the United States and industry efforts to combat that sentiment, rather than
with the comic books themselves. This narrower focus allows for a far
greater attention to historical detail than is evidenced in the Savage book.
Indeed, the greatest contribution Nyberg’s book makes to the study of
comic books is the critical compilation, for the first time, of various
commentaries on comics from the 1930s through to the 1950s. Equally
important is her research conducted in the archives of the Comic Magazine
Association of America (the administrators of the code) and in the archives
of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency which investigated
comic books in 1954. Throughout the book Nyberg points to the major and
minor figures in the comic book controversy of the postwar period and
provides a more solid foundation for understanding that particular moral
panic than had previously existed. These efforts shed a great deal of light on
areas which had previously been illuminated solely by fannish histories and
the recollections of various players from the period.
Despite the ground-breaking nature of her archival research Nyberg’s
book is not as strong when it comes to converting that research into critical
analyses. Nyberg’s book has two primary theses: that the comics code did
not destroy the comic book industry in America and that the most
noteworthy critic of the American comic book, Fredric Wertham, has been
largely misinterpreted by subsequent readers and historians looking back on
the criticisms which he leveled at the industry. Nyberg makes the case for
both of these arguments very forcefully and clearly and there can be no
doubt that she has erased the possibility of returning to earlier
understandings of the period. Nonetheless, she might have strengthened her
argument by extending it beyond the discursive battle over comics’
presumed effects on their audience and into, for instance, economics.
Nyberg argues, for instance, that some publishers were put out of business
by the implementation of the code in the fall of 1954 but that others
suffered from the distribution crisis that rocked the magazine industry in the
1954 and 1955. Greater attention to this distribution crisis would have
greatly enhanced her argument that the code itself was not the proximate
cause of the decline of many comics publishers. In the same vein, Nyberg
would have been well advised to pay greater attention to the two publishers
who refused to adopt the comics code but who continued to publish comic
books nonetheless. Neither Dell, the industry’s clear sales leader which was
known primarily for its humour comics featuring Disney characters, nor
Gilberton, the publisher of the highly profitable Classics Illustrated book
adaptations (and who is erroneously identified as Gilbertson throughout the
book), ever joined the organization. This crucial counterpoint to the history
of the code is downplayed insofar as it does not tend to support Nyberg’s
conclusion that the adoption of the code was the only option open to
publishers at the time. Similarly, an international comparison would help to
clarify much. Nyberg mentions Canada’s 1949 criminalization of crime
comic books only in passing despite the fact that the bill’s proponent, E. D.
Fulton, was an important player in legislative efforts against comic books in
the United States. A cross-cultural analysis of the successful campaign
against comic books in Canada would certainly have added some insight
into the reasons that similar campaigns failed in the United States. Also,
although Nyberg addresses the similarities between the comics code and the
film production code adopted in the 1930s, she does not make an argument
as to why specifically comic books should come to be regarded as a
problem in the 1950s (20 years after their origin), at a time when the film
production code was being increasingly dismantled.
The one element which these two books share is a fascination with the
figure of Fredric Wertham, a liberal psychiatrist and the author of the first
book ever addressed solely to the topic of comic books: Seduction of the
Innocent (1954). Both Savage and Nyberg dedicate an entire chapter of
their respective books to the man and his work, and their differences on this
topic say a lot about the relative qualities and shortcomings of their work.
Wertham has long been regarded within comics fandom as a bogeyman, the
man who had attacked and killed the vibrancy of comic books in the 1950s.
Savage’s interpretation of the man fits this picture handily. He takes a
cynical view of Wertham which suggests that comic books were identified
as a causative factor in juvenile delinquency simply because they were an
easy target with which Wertham could make a name for himself. Savage
describes him as “blatantly opportunistic” and his writings as “pompous,
polemical, biased and poorly documented” (p. 96), ending his comments
with a celebration of the fact that many of the comic books which Wertham
criticized are now more widely read than his writings. To this end,
therefore, Savage simply reiterates a long line of fanzine-level writing on
Wertham which has fixated on him as the key to the ongoing
marginalization of comic books as a cultural force.
Nyberg’s interpretation of the man and his work are significantly more
nuanced. She departs from fannish images of Wertham when she correctly
argues that his work had nothing to do with censorship and little to do with
the media effects paradigm as it would come to be constituted in the United
States. Instead Nyberg places Seduction of the Innocent into a history of
Wertham’s writings about society and violence in order to demonstrate
many of the nuances in his arguments and the ways in which they have been
misunderstood and mischaracterized by his critics. Nyberg’s analysis of
Wertham ultimately concludes that his work is best understood in relation to
the work of the Frankfurt School, a conclusion which she stipulates rather
than demonstrates and which is not convincing given Wertham’s public
feuding in the 1950s with Erich Fromm and other Marxist psychiatrists.
Moreover, Nyberg falls prey in a number of instances to the type of fannish
tendencies that her book, for the most part, sets aside. In retroactively
defending the comic book industry from Wertham’s attacks, for example,
she mischaracterizes the power dynamic between the two forces, suggesting
that the unaffiliated psychiatrist Wertham held greater cultural potency in
the United States than the combined powers of the comic book industry, at
that time a massive publishing force. Painting this industry (which sold
more than one billion comic books per year) as a victim requires
considerable misinterpretation of the data. At one point Nyberg rejects
Wertham’s claim that he had been the object of a smear campaign paid for
by the comics industry and then, on the same page, states explicitly that
they had indeed launched a campaign against him. Similarly, she argues that
the industry lacked credentialed psychiatrists who could have refuted
Wertham’s arguments despite the fact that she had outlined the writings of
more than half a dozen such experts who were actually in the employ of the
comics industry earlier in the book. These types of contradictions which
depict the large and highly profitable business as hapless and defenseless in
the face of a lone-man campaign do serious damage to the history of the
industry which Nyberg had gone to such lengths to portray.
If the reactions to Wertham’s published commentaries by Savage and
Nyberg betray a fannishness in these books it is perhaps not altogether
unexpected. Wertham is, after all, the man that most comics fans have come
to hate, even the ones who have never or will never read his work. Worries
about Wertham are symptomatic, I would suggest, of larger worries about
the status of comic books as a cultural form. Throughout these books one
encounters a constant undercurrent which suggests that comics, and by
extension fans of comics, have been unjustly maligned for decades. Nyberg
suggests that by the 1970s the code was a failure because it had failed to
challenge the public’s perception that comic books were for children,
despite the fact that the major publishers of the time were, in fact, only
interested in publishing comics targeted at children and despite the fact that
some adults continued to read them. Here one finds a touch of fannish
anxiety about the cultural valuation of comic books intruding into the
discussion, a sense of shame for an adult to be reading this kid’s stuff.
Which is itself the real shame because as long as scholars concerned with
comic books feel a need to apologize for the content of comic books while
they study them there appears to be no reason for non-fans to take the
medium seriously at all.

REFERENCES
1. Savage, William W. Jr. 1990. Comic Books and America, 1945-1954. Norman, OK: University of
Oklahoma Press.
2. Wertham, Fredric. 1954. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Holt & Rinehart.
Sections

1. References