Comics Code Dead 316
tverbeek writes "After more than half a century of stifling the comic book industry, the Comics Code Authority is effectively dead. Created in response to Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, one of the early think-of-the-children censorship campaigns, and Congressional hearings, the Code laid out a checklist of requirements and restrictions for comics to be distributed to newsstand vendors, effectively ensuring that in North America, only simplistic stories for children would be told using the medium of sequential art. It gradually lost many of its teeth, and an increasing number of publishers gave up on newsstand distribution and ignored the Code, but at the turn of the century the US's largest comics publishers still participated. Marvel quit it in 2001, in favor of self-applied ratings styled after the MPAA's and ESRB's. Last year Bongo (publishers of the Simpsons comics) quietly dropped out. Now DC and Archie, the last publishers willingly subjecting their books to approval, have announced that they're discontinuing their use of the CCA, with DC following Marvel's example, and Archie (which recently introduced an openly gay supporting character, something flatly forbidden by the original Code) carrying on under their own standards. The Code's cousins — the MPAA and ESRB ratings, the RIAA parental advisory, and the mishmash of warnings on TV shows — still live on, but at least North American comic publishers are no longer subject to external censorship."
Re:Er, what? (Score:4, Interesting)
The comic book code was exactly the same. Only it ended up being harsher than any sort of external censorship (in the US). You'd think people would learn not to fashion the ropes by which they are bound, but the idea of "let's censor ourselves so outsiders don't censor us" still has a lot of currency.
Re:True in theory (Score:5, Interesting)
By teh same token, a G or PG rating is the kiss of death. They laced "Back to the Future" movies with profanity just so they could get a PG-13 movie.
So the ratings really serve to compress all the movies into PG-13 and R, the difference being the amount of tits and blood.
There are no really good kids movies or really good adult movies made anymore. I don't see anything like Fellini movies made these days. Or movies like Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
In a lot of ways, the ratings have really killed truly creative movies; they have to fit the mold of PG-13 or R to get screened.
Re:True in theory (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly. Adult-rated movies/games/books are considered unsellable in Walmart, Kmart, et cetera, so artists can't find any publishers to buy their work.
Also I've found the ESRB to pretty much worthless. When shopping for kids this past Christmas (aged 10 and under) I didn't have a problem finding "Everyone" or Kid games for the girl with the Nintendo, but the boys with the Xbox was a real challenge. Almost all the games are rated Teen or Mature.
Of course the boys wanted the Mature "kill as many people as possible" games like Medal of Honor, but I refused. I tried to find games lower then "T"-rated since I thought 8/10 years old were too young for teen content, and discovered it was nigh-impossible for the X360. I'd sooner let them see a copy of Playboy, then the gratuitous violence in many of these games.
It took some effort but I did eventually find games without blood. So the ESRB is great in theory..... assuming the consumer actually has a choice. Sometimes they don't. (Another random example: I refuse to let any of them see the movie musical Annie because it's rated PG and has random swearing in it.)
Re:True in theory (Score:3, Interesting)
By teh same token, a G or PG rating is the kiss of death
Some of the highest-grossing movies were rated G. Like the annual Disney/Pixar animations. PG movies also grossed high.
So basically you're flat wrong.
Re:True in theory (Score:5, Interesting)
Blood = G or PG
Very small amounts of it, and absolutely no gore.
The MPAA ratings board is a group of old "married" white women (supposedly parents with children living under roof, though most of them have no children in the house, and why is that the standard anyway?), so of of course tits are going to rate far higher than blood. I'm not being hyperbolic there either. It really is a bunch of old white women.
The ratings really are absolutely ridiculous. Besides being pretty inconsistent from one movie to the next, you can kill a million people rather graphically and still get a PG-13 rating, but show tits for more than about 3 seconds (or more than once) and it's a guaranteed R rating. You can even manage that R rating if you insinuate too much nudity, whether you actually show any tits or not.
Also, Seduction of the Innocent is a great way to find old smutty comics. Some really great ones in there.
Re:True in theory (Score:3, Interesting)
That's because you're buying games for the 360, which is loaded to the brim with mature shooter games and the few developers that put out family-friendly games on the system don't put out anything very good. You might find better luck on XBLA, although really most of the good all-ages games are on Nintendo systems.
Re:Didn't know there was a Comic Code (Score:4, Interesting)
You are missing the part where the self-censorship was coerced under threat of government censorship.
There were several large movements in the government to censor all media via government agencies similar to the FCC. In fact, one of the reasons the FCC has such broad powers over television and radio content is because the broadcast industry couldn't come up with a workable system similar to the MPAA or RIAA.
The MPAA, RIAA, and CCA were the various industries' attempts to avoid complete disaster in the form of government censorship. It is not like the industry leaders for these groups got together one day and said "Hey, you know what would be really great? If we set up an independent board to rate our movies for us so parents would know whether they want their kid to see our movie or not! Yeah! Wonderful idea! Lets all pitch in and help out!"
Rather, they got together and said "SHIT! We're gonna get fucked in the ass by the government if we don't do something! What if we set up an independent board of reviewers to rate the movies for us? Would that work? Maybe, lets try it."
They were coerced deals worked out between Congress and the various industries in order to avoid censorship laws that would completely destroy those insustries. They are about as voluntary as forcing a slave to put on his own shackles at gun point.
The death of the CCA does prove, however, that the industries have within their own power the means for escape. The gun is still pointed at movies and music though; comics were never targeted as hard as movies and music because they simply are not as popular. Books are rarely censored because it is a lot harder for a book to qualify as obscenity (one of the criteria is that it cannot have any redeeming social value - a hard thing to say about any literary work). Too people are simply not as interested in written smut as they are illustrated smut. Prior to the 60's, though, many important literary works were banned in the US due to isolated passages that could be considered obscene. Since the Supreme Court rulings required both a prurient theme throughout the work and no redeeming literary value, almost all books are back in.
Such "codes" fail in a world of easy distribution (Score:4, Interesting)
And until "real" censorship, i.e. government mandated censorship, happens, this will stay dead. Let's hope for a long resting in peace.
The only reason such "codes" could fly is that the makers of art had to rely on a distribution system that could force such arbitrary restrictions on them. Write to our code or we don't publish, and if we don't, nobody worth mentioning will. You will not sell your comic, you will not show your movie, your game will never be sold.
Now, the internet makes the whole scheme crumble. You don't sell my game, my comic book, my movie and nobody in the US does? So I sell it through a publisher in another country, and unless the US forbids import of the game (and unless they plan to swing that censorship hammer, they won't), I couldn't care less for your "code of conduct". People who are fed up with your "coded" content will gladly look abroad and with global shipping, yes, it might cost them a bit more, but they get what they want. Whether I pay 5 bucks for a comic I don't want or 8 for one I do is not going to break my neck financially.
But it sure will break yours, since I'm not the only one who can't care less for your "coded" crap.
Re:True in theory (Score:5, Interesting)
The MPAA rating isn't designed to protect children from content, it's designed to protect studios and theater owners from lawsuits and boycotts, and secondarily from state and federal regulation (btw, the first one has more historical precedent than the second and would be much more serious from a commercial standpoint -- it used to be in the 30s that studios might have to produce at least two cuts of a film for the United States, the one that the studio releases everywhere, and the one that releases in Jim Crow south.)
Children do not file lawsuits, lead boycotts or write letters to congress. Old busybody white women do (arguendo I accept your stereotype), thus they set the standard. Kids sneak into whatever film they want, studios game the edge, etc.
Recently this brushed up against Tom Hooper and his The King's Speech, which he was shocked got an R rating, when in every other film market on Earth (even and remarkably the government-rated ones) it was a family film with a G or PG equivalent. All for one seen where people swear, in a completely non-sexual context and for humorous effect.
Re:Didn't know there was a Comic Code (Score:4, Interesting)
And this seems to reveal why US comics are so dull and boring compared to comics from the rest of the world. It's made so blunt by various code and censorship that it it's completely nonsense.
Go look at stuff like Bernhard Prince [wikipedia.org], Largo Winch [wikipedia.org], Modesty Blaise [wikipedia.org], XIII [wikipedia.org], Garth [wikipedia.org] (Not to be confused with the DC Comics character with the same name), Thorgal [wikipedia.org], Asterix [wikipedia.org], Axa [wikipedia.org]...
Re:True in theory (Score:3, Interesting)
It gives a "private organization" too much authority over the rest of us. Not always directly, but through the use of things like collusion and intimidation. And it let's them dictate to our legislators the regulations we all must live under. So now we have indefinite copyright, absurd obscenity law, ongoing prohibition, a smothering bureaucracy, war, etc etc etc...
Re:Er, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
The comics code was harsh, and it was obvious the people implementing it were stupid fools, toadies and jerks, bent on agrandizing themselves and their political viewpoint from very early on.
For stupidity, the code authors didn't know how to write laws in legal English, so they put in clauses forbidding depicting zombieism and werewolfism (I suppose by analogy with the word 'vampirism'.). One of the biggest reasons many people still believe today that finely ground glass in food is undetectable and will kill the eater is that the code prohibited all realistic depiction of any method of murder that even might actually work, so detective oriented characters such as Batman or the Question had to stop solving realistic crimes and solve impossible ones, where magnets attracted copper and giant magnifying glasses could be rendered invisible yet still focus the sun's rays. Ground glass was a favorite during the 50's, one that became incorporated into urban legends.
For toadying, the early code prohibited ever showing an elected official or policeman committing any crime, even if they were caught and punished. The code linked the American way of life directly with free market capitalism, and prohibited all mention of drug use, even in an negative light, so one of the first cases of a mainstream comic not receiving the code seal was basically that it mentioned "Heroin is bad for you kids, so don't do it, m-kay?" It proved far easier for the code authorities to say "America doesn't have a drug problem, so don't talk about it in comics, at all", than to allow anti-drug messages.