Comics and Censorship

You Can't Say That!

When I was a kid I discovered many old books about comics and cartooning in my home away from home, the Snohomish Public Library. Almost every one of them mentioned the arcane rules regulating what you could and could not put into a syndicated comic strip.

These weren't official rules, like postal regulations. They were rules of thumb developed by editors based on feedback from their readers. "Feedback" usually meant a threat to cancel a subscription. Editors, the story went, estimated that for every person who complained there were several times that number (3, 4, and 5 were common figures) who felt the same way but didn't bother to write. So the editors passed each complaint up the line and threatened to drop the strip if the syndicate didn't keep its cartoonists in check. The result, the story went, was that newspaper strips were among the most conservative storytelling forms, their content dictated by a vocal minority of readers in the South and the Midwest.

I read so many variations of that story that I began to wonder if it was an urban legend. The alleged list of taboos included obvious stuff like nudity and profanity, but also depictions of black persons, alcohol use and snakes. Authors always mentioned snakes. Yet at the same time these strictures were supposedly in effect, major strips broke many of the rules. Just one example was Leslie Turner's Captain Easy, which offered plenty of lingerie shots and backlit semi-nudity.

I still don't know whether readers demanded those hidebound restrictions, but I'm certain editors believed they did. A case in point is this remarkable Bud Sagendorf Popeye strip I found on Segni & Disegni's site. It is dated 13 April 1976.

 
This strip was the payoff of an extended sequence in which a vampire menaces Olive Oyl. She scares him off by using the moonlight to cast a shadow shaped like...a dagger?! Anyone want to bet on what might be hidden beneath that pasteover? I didn't think so.

Obviously someone at the Syndicate got scared that some editor would figure some reader would be offended by the words "A cross!" I suspect the hypothetical editor feared not an outraged atheist, but rather a conservative Christian who found the scene sacriligeous. And this was in 1976, well after strips like Doonesbury had challenged most of the old taboos.

When I was drawing Dallas in the early 1980s I had my own brush with editorial second-guessing. One storyline had bad boy J. R. bribing a hot-pants Arab oilman by offering him a shot at his niece Lucy. J. R. presents his offer by showing the oilman a sexy photo of Lucy in a swimsuit. The "reveal" is in the final panel of a Sunday page, where there is plenty of room to show the picture that makes Abdul's mouth water.

From the beginning the Syndicate editor instructed me to be ver-r-r-y careful not to make the picture sexy, lest it shock an editor into cancelling the strip. I was to present Lucy in a demure pose in a one-piece swimsuit with a high neckline and a modest cut about the hips. I did what I was told. The result looked something like this.

And believe me, there was no cleavage--precious little bust, in fact--and the legs were chastely crossed. But when the editor saw it he still wondered if the drawing went too far. At his instruction I pasted an enormous piling over the middle of the figure, large enough to cover any conceivable area of interest, drawn large enough (and carefully placed) so as to avoid any unintended phallic suggestion. It came out something like this (I no longer have a copy of the strip to show you):

Actually, I think this sketch shows a little more than the revised art; I was charged to eliminate any chance that someone might ogle Lucy's boobs. Not the sort of thing to fire the passions, is it?

The incident spotlighted a fundamental problem with basing a newspaper strip on the Dallas TV series. The two key elements of the show were sex and booze. In the strip we couldn't do sex--period!--and the booze was limited to endless shots of  J. R. pouring from a bottle of wine. Kind of took the wind out of the sales.

San Diego ComicCon 2010--2

Girls! Guns! G-Strings!
As I mentioned in my last post, one's skull would have to be numb indeed to miss the central theme informing a majority of ComicCon's displays: sexualized violence.

Years ago, in the days when panting fanboys were creating the concept of "good girl art," their quest was for scantier clothing and poky nipples. As the Market's inexorable drive for profit eroded the media's creaky self-regulatory machinery, we got what we wanted and then some: acres of flesh, scandalous action poses, and button-popping bosoms big enough to float the Titanic. Even then the groundwork was being laid for the next evolutionary phase. The mainstreaming of bondage fetishism and the rise of slasher movies helped cement the new role of newly-naked comic book women as sexy torture victims.

Of course the image of the beautiful, terrorized victim is as old as our patriarchal society. What's different today is its intensity and pervasiveness. At first one might imagine that the more recent wave of images of sexy women as perpetrators of violence emerged to balance out the powerlessness of the earlier sexy victims. Really it's just a variation on the same theme. They may pack guns the size of Volkswagens, but these busty amazons wear the same wire micro-bikinis, strike the same sweaty wide-legged poses, and twist their mouths in the same screams of pain. They still get raped, beaten, shot and flayed in page after lovingly-rendered page. The main difference is that after the abuse they carve their abuser's entrails out.

I can't buy the idea that this is all okay. The official line, supported both by leftist free speech advocates and rightist believers in unregulated markets, is that this fetishized misogyny is harmless. The mayhem is imaginary. People can tell fantasy from reality. Those who indulge in these fantasies achieve catharsis as well as orgasms. They would never carry their fantasies over into the real world.

My problem is this. Teachers have known for years that repetition and immersion change attitudes as well as increase knowledge. Propogandists have known for generations that endlessly repeating the same lie alters a target group's beliefs. With repetition and immersion cults brainwash members into doing everything from panhandling to killing themselves. Most significantly, advertisers have over a century of proof that repetition and immersion can make consumers lay out vast amounts of money on the stupidest products for the most irrational reasons.

Yet somehow this rule doesn't apply when it comes to the linking of sex with violence against women. Men don't become more physically and emotionally aggressive toward women. They don't become more tolerant of violence in general, or more inclined to abuse in their personal relationships. It's all harmless fantasy!

If someone can explain to me how that works I'd be much obliged.

Perils and Pitfalls of the Golden Age

It's Like Comics on Speed!
If you haven't been following John Adcock's fine blog Yesterday's Papers, here's a good reason to begin. John is running excerpts from a series of rabid anti-comic book feature stories first published circa 1945 in The Southtown Economist. This Chicago newspaper began documenting comics' contribution to perversion and juvenile crime long before Dr. Wertham published his first article. It's a fascinating look not only at the persecution of comics, but also attitudes about propriety in the waning days of World War II.

John's first story is here. The second installment dissects a "Captain Freedom" story from an issue of Speed Comics (No. 35, November, 1944). Which is what prompted this post. While John turned up an image of the book's cover, by lucky chance I have scans of the whole issue. Without attempting in any way to steal John's thunder, I would like to present the entire story, "Revenge of the Insect Giants," to provide context while you read the Economist article.

In the story a villainous beekeeper creates giant killer bees to take revenge on a tormentor. Captain Freedom must intervene to set things right. The newspaper article doesn't mention that the beekeeper is a stereotype "hayseed" locked in an ongoing feud with a neighbor. When not feuding, Jabez Mather, the beekeeper, is growing, for no apparent reason, some giant bees. A bee escapes and stings the neighbor's bull to death. It's good news and bad news: the bull was about to maul Captain Freedom's pals, who are vacationing with the Captain's alter ego nearby.

But then the neighbor finds his bull killed by "this bee stinger." Not even pausing to wonder that the stinger is two feet long, the distraught neighbor grabs a shotgun and shoots up Mather's beehives. To Mather this is the last straw. He runs to his "bee laboratory" vowing revenge.

Mather dispatches a giant bee to kill his neighbor. Captain Freedom hears the man's dying scream and confronts the giant bee. However the creature expires before the Captain can attack. The bee had left its stinger in the neighbor, and drops dead.

The kids try to spy on Mather but they're discovered and trussed up. As the article's horrified writer says, the mad beekeeper paints the youths with nectar so his bees will kill them. Just why they deserve death isn't clear.

Neither is Mather's sudden elocution upgrade. While his neighbor was shooting at him, Jabez had said things like, "Ye be shootin' up my beehives! I'll git ye fer this!" As he slathers on the nectar, the new improved Jabez intones, "First I anoint my victims to make a decent dish...soon giant bees will hatch and have a royal feast on these nectar-smeared kidlets!"

When the Economist claimed that Captain Freedom bashes through the barn door with his head I thought they'd simply misinterpreted bad drawing...but by golly the journalist is right! Hearing the kids' screams the good Captain head-butts his way into Mather's lab.

He's met by several giant bees. The Captain is outnumbered but Mather is taking no chances. He throws a convenient jug of nitric acid (a must-have on many New England farms) at the battling hero.

Sadly, Mather's aim is poor. Instead of frizzling Freedom, the acid splashes the giant bees. "My beauties!" Mather emotes. "I have destroyed my beauties!" An attempt to run is cut short as Captain Freedom tackles the bee-keeper, delivering a righteous speech: "Save your song, you dirty killer! Save it for the jury!"

But the heinous hayseed will never need to comb his hair for a trial. A blow from Captain Freedom knocks Mather into the beehives. The bees swarm from the smashed hives and promptly sting the farmer to death. Just in case we don't know that's what's going on, Mather cries, "YEEOWW! I-I'm being s-stung to d-death!"

Captain Freedom chases the bees away with a smudge pot. It's too late, though. A caption tells us: "But--DEATH...comes for the bee-keeper. Ironic death!" In case we slept through the two previous panels, Mather helpfully recaps them, briefly lapsing into Cowboyspeak to do so: "I'm c-cashing my chips! My own bees stung m-me to d-death!" Exhausted by approaching death, Mather is unable to maintain his lofty villain dialogue. When he launches into a last-minute self-justification, it's in his own voice: "I'm not really a killer like you said, Mister...just was aimin' to settle accounts with that no-account Hiram!"

This statement evinces enough sympathy for the Captain to murmur, "Take it easy!" as the bee-keeper expires. Though this ought to be the story's ending, there's a half-page, balloon-crammed anticlimax. This is the exchange The Economist describes. Captain Freedom, having read the last caption and liked it, paraphrases it for his funerary speech: "He died the same way he killed his neighbor--IRONIC JUSTICE!"

This, too, should have been the end of the story, but the kids still need to stage a leave-'em-laughing finish with Captain Freedom's alter ego (the kids don't know publisher Don Wright is Captain Freedom). And that, finally, is the end.

The end of another grisly, mind-rotting comic story. Another attack on our children's minds and morals. Not even a rousing memo from General "Hap" Arnold could counteract this story's evil effects. In fact, immediately after reading it I ran out, smeared two neighbors with Sioux Bee honey, and blasted their beehives with a shotgun I found in my garage next to my jug of Nitric Acid.