Comic books were once considered a national threat.
In the mid-20th century, comic books came under fire in the United States. Though the medium started out as reprinted collections of popular newspaper strips in the 1930s, it quickly grew into a diverse and wildly popular original art form. By the 1940s, original comics filled newsstands across the country; in 1948, 80 million to 100 million comic books were being sold in the U.S. each month. This was far from a niche hobby; comic books were mass entertainment for a range of ages (though primarily children), covering everything from superhero adventures and Westerns to genres such as horror, romance, sci-fi, and war stories.
Across the country, some church groups and parent organizations began expressing concerns that comics glorified violence and led to delinquency. Public comic book burnings began in the late 1940s as a protest. The concern reached fever pitch in 1954 with the publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which argued that comic books were a major cause of juvenile crime. Though widely publicized at the time, Wertham’s reporting was later found to be deeply flawed, often misrepresenting research to support his claims.
The outcry that followed led to Senate hearings and, eventually, the creation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), a self-governed body that publishers used as a censorship guide to stay in the good books of distributors and newsstands. Under the code, scenes of violence, horror, and anything deemed morally questionable were heavily edited or banned altogether. The backlash reshaped the comic book industry for decades: Superheroes such as Batman, originally dark and gritty, were toned down to seem more wholesome, and entire publishers went out of business. The CCA had a decent hold on the industry until the 1970s, when specialty comic book stores started popping up. Direct relationships were established with publishers, bypassing most distributors, and eventually, the code was dropped, allowing the comic book industry to resume its expansive storytelling.
