Right to Censor? Article by aviewaskewed, 02:54 AM 22nd Mar Disclaimer: The following column is entirely the opinions of the author (even at that we aren‘t sure), any similarity to the opinions of any other staff or affiliate of theendlesscrew.com is entirely coincidental and unintentional. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all creator comments have been gleaned from other sources and no creators have actually endorsed any aspect of this column. This one is for all the people who weren’t just totally ready to walk after the way I trashed the Cup O’ Joe panel…I’m pretty sure this one will make you walk away. One of the things I always figured would be a staple of this column would be controversy. Anybody who has spent any significant amount of time around me knows that I am a very opinionated guy, and have absolutely no shyness about sharing my views. However, I really think a lot of the topics I’ve been hitting on lately have…hmmm, I don’t want to say are lightweight, they’re important, and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, but I don’t think they really generated any great feeling towards what I was saying other then pretty much universal agreement. Today, I think I’ll be changing that a little. Today, we’re going to talk about censorship and ratings in comics, and why I’m ok with at least careful editing, and warning labels. Now, for everyone who didn’t just hit the back button on their browsers immediately, I’ll explain. I’m not a fan of telling people what they can and cannot watch, I’m not advocating that all comic books be sanitized so that they can be of consumption for everyone, no, what I’m saying is that for one thing, society is too stupid to let artists make their art. Seriously, comics has been getting blasted longer then video games or film, people just cannot seem to take a real interest in what they’re children are exposed to, and educating them. I know, I know, there are families that have difficulties making time for each other because of work or whatever else, but the fact is, if you can’t take 15 to 30 minutes with your kid, to teach them right from wrong, and know what kind of material their reading, viewing, playing with, then I’m sorry, you’re just a horrible parent. So, in that vein, we need at least warning labels on books so that the artists aren’t dragged into court all the time because some stupid individual can’t really fathom how an issue of say, The Punisher, wouldn’t be appropriate for their five year old. Hell, even with the warning labels people don’t always listen. It’s a point I once argued in my Lit on Film course a couple semesters back: Creators need something they can point to and say “this absolves me of responsibility to do your job as a parent”. As I was pointing out before I hit that tangent, comics have been targeted for many years. I’m sure everyone reading this right now has seen the little “approved by the comics code authority” sticker on your comics at some point in your life. What a lot of people probably don’t know, is the hows and whys about that stickers appearance on your books. See, back in the fifties, a psychiatrist named Frederick Wertham decided to get in on the booming business of figuring out why kids do criminal things. Ok, maybe that isn’t entirely fair to Mr. Wertham, he may have actually believed the swill he was putting out there, but I tend to just give “educated” people a benefit of the doubt they may not necessarily deserve. Anyway, Wertham wrote a book called “Seduction of the Innocent” (it may actually still be getting occasional printing if you’re interested), in this book, he claimed to have found the source of juvenile delinquency and homosexuality: comic books. Yes, seems those four color funny pages were leading kids down the old moral sewer, never mind that strips such as the Justice Society which appeared monthly in All-Star Comics were attempting to tackle the issue, and in many cases, trying to promote getting kids involved with good activities in their community, and the war effort in WW2. Obviously, I don’t hold much regard for Mr. Wertham’s claims. Congress did though, and held special hearings on the issue of comics, of course, being politicians, fairness wasn’t on the agenda. They trotted out the most violent books they could find, mostly from the now defunct Entertainment Comics (publishers of Tales from The Crypt, and Mad Magazine most notably), as cover after cover of undead freaks, severed heads, the committee issued an ultimatum: Either the comics industry create a censoring body, or be shut down and outlawed by the government (I have often wondered if Roy Thomas’s later story about the JSA being called before the HUAC and being given a similar ultimatum of unmask or disband was perhaps an echo of this hearing and decision). Well, the publishers chose option 1, what else could they do? So the Comics Code was born. The problem was, it seemed designed to kill off EC who did a lot of horror and crime books that no one else seemed able to match. It also put ridiculous restrictions on things that would later be overturned. So, with that in place, the industry pretty much handcuffed itself for the next twenty years or so. Batman and Robin got girlfriends because of the allegations they were a gay couple, and the Bat lost his edge. But around the 70’s people like Stan Lee started defying the Code (because they would not let him use Spider-Man as a vehicle to rail against drug use) and slowly but surely, the Code’s hold eroded as horror books came back, and Batman was made darker. The Code only exists now as a shadow of it’s former self, they basically rubber stamp any book that their paid to rubber stamp. Marvel phased it out altogether in favor of it’s own labeling system. I think Marvel did the right thing there, but now they’re going about it all wrong. See, DC does something similar, in that they have a mature readers line, and then everything else. Essentially, that’s what Marvel is trying to do, use the ratings as a guide for what fits into what line. But the problem at Marvel is that they’re allowing outside licensing deals to dictate content. So something that was supposed to be a MAX book, could become a toned down, more PG-13 esque work if say, a television deal was involved (*cough* Shanna the She-Devil *cough*). Warning labels protect artists, but censoring work to make it more palatable to outside media is just crap. You’re in the business of making comics? You make comics, all other considerations are secondary. I believe in protecting the artists from prosecution, but not altering their work for market considerations. The second thing editing can do is it can actually make the work better. Just because you have the freedom to show people get horribly killed, or drop F-bombs everywhere doesn’t mean that you should. An early criticism I got on this column (and it was a damn good one) was that I was swearing far too much, and being too angry to really connect with the readers and get my point across. Sometimes, less is more, hinting that the corpse is horribly mangled, or showing someone die in a less then graphic approach will actually get you better drama. So I really don’t think it’s a bad thing to have editors looking over work, and sending it back to a writer if they think they’re crossing a line, it’s hard for an artist to be objective about what they’ve done, next to impossible actually. So to wrap this thing up, I would honestly like to see a time in which we don’t need warning labels, in which we aren’t going to encourage artists to tone it down for fear they’ll be sued by somebody too stupid to realize that a work of art does not inspire otherwise wholesome people to do bad things. Until that day comes, we need labels, we need ratings, we need some editing (although as I just pointed out above, I think we’ll always need that since some people think a mature readers banner is a license to swear and splash huge amounts of violence on the page). But what we don’t need, is holding back, we don’t need companies trying to censor and change work because they’ve got considerations outside of telling a good story, whether it be to movies, or money. I live by a simple motto, that I think produces the best work “let creators create” you guide them back on track when they stray off course, but that’s IT, you don’t ask them to change their work for any other reason. We need more cutting edge, risky stuff like Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum, and not toned down, company inspired censorship like Frank Cho’s Shanna The She-Devil Next week: Haven’t decided yet, we’ll see what I turn up with, still wanting to do a mailbag type column…so please send any comments to avie@theendlesscrew.com, or contact me on the forums, and you can have the limited immortality of seeing your name in this column. Back to Rants