Breaking the code

But the big blow came when a psychiatrist, Dr. Fredric Wertham published his book Seduction of the Innocents, in which he proclaimed that comic books were to blame for youth delinquency. The sales dropped dramatically, and the companies felt themselves forced to take action. In their desperation, they reached for the instrument of self censorship, founding a commission to which all the pages had to be sent before publication. They would be scrutinized, making sure that there was no sex in them, not to much violence, enough patriotism etc. When all was in order, the comic got the seal of approval in the form of the comic code stamp on the cover; without that, no book could be published. Eventually, it was Stan Lee who broke through all this, and things went on the up again, but that's another story.

I got reminded to all of this when going through some of my old stuff. I broke into the Bondage magazine business in the late seventies, so I had been published for a good fifteen years, when all of a sudden I started getting my work returned, with constricting remarks written on the copies like here.