BW Media Spotlight

“For The Children.”

These three words have ruined industries, restricted advancements, and until recently restricted entertainment. Although that last one is debatable. I’ll get to that. Over the past few installments I looked at the individual tenants of the Comic Code and which rules were rather silly and which kind of worked…had the Code been about kid-friendly comics. But it wasn’t.

There should be multiple kinds of comics for every genre taste and age group, just like every other media type. While comics were forced to adopt standards that were good for kids comics, other forces pressured distributors to not sell comics without the Code. Thus comics for older readers, people who would buy horror or romance comics, were left behind. It’s this insistence that comics were only for kids that older readers of yesterday, who have become creators today, have fought back, so that titles that used to be kid-friendly aren’t today.

I didn’t start this article series to condone or condemn the Comics Code. There is something in between overly restrictive and protecting the children. In the previous installments I have gone over the Code itself, going over things that make sense from their point of view…that comics are for kids only and nothing there should be bad for kids because adults only read novels and magazines. It’s like they thought comics were a form of illustrated storybook. This may explain what went wrong with the Authority and with the Code itself.

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