Think of a future where the comic code of 1954 was not a thing

Think of a future where the comic code of 1954 was not a thing

The American comic industry would be in if not bigger than the manga industry in Japan. This fucking code held comics back for years and allowed Marvel and DC to prosper

>This fucking code held comics back for years
How so?

It really wouldn't. The American Comic industry is the way it is because of the difference in distribution, not content. Our car culture has a bigger effect on comic books than the echoing effects of the code does.

The code completely destroyed every genre but capes and still it crippled capes. The code was so tightly constructed only squeaky clean shit got through, while horror and pulp died. Both of which were thriving at the time but got shitcanned because of it.

Dude it literally destroyed whole genres. Like even if we just look at horror comics- they're gone. All totally gone. Then the whole crime investigations and stuff that didn't involve capes- you immediately get shot sideways because now you can only depict comic criminals in certain and constrained ways. You're also unable to depict certain tropes and individuals totally in the realm of comics now.

Superheroes never had a void to enter and never really took off. Watchmen, Astro City and other works like that were never created - though Batman and Superman would probably survive.

Crime and horror are dominant genres, and best selling comics are comic book equivalents of Law and Order - police procedurals and stuff. There's also a lot of romance and drama comic popular with the female audience.


Without the superhero ghetto, comic book shops and direct distribution never take off, and instead comicbooks are still sold mostly on newsstands.

Without superheroes, Marvel never took off, instead biggest publishers are EC Comics (with MAD and Tales from the Crypt), Archie Comics and National Comics (because superheroes never took off again, they never felt the need to honor Batman and Detective Comics by changing their name to DC). Marvel Comics instead publishes long running romance series started by Jack Kirby - for a time.

Because of the lack of superhero revival, superhero movies aren't a thing, neither Batman or Superman movies get made. However, 90's comic book crash still happens, but since Marvel doesn't have any movie rights to sell to save themselves, instead they simply vanish of the face of the earth.

Manga boom in the 90's hits comic industry hard, since due to similar nature of American and Japanese comics, they are directly competing. It's not unusual to see american and japanese comics sold in the same bookstore.

In general, comics aren't seen as a 'nerdy' thing and are seen as something similar to TV and books, just another artform. "Nerd culture" focuses on video games and tabletop RPGs instead.

Yeah that's absolutely true. The Comics Code effectively killed off a bunch of genres or drove them underground. That's still not relevant.
Manga thrives in Japan because it's printed on cheap newspaper and sold in news stands. Big phone book anthologies are viable as a business model there because their commuter culture means news stands still exist.
Whereas in the US, that is not the case. Our car culture and the lack of country wide pushes for mass transit mean that all print media is dying off in a much bigger way, and news stands, the main vector that manga and comic books would be sold, aren't a thing anymore. To get manga in the US, or comic books, you need to drive out to a specialty store; they're not an impulse buy to pick up on your way to work like manga is in Japan.
That lack of open distribution also leads to the monopoly that is Diamond Comics Distributors. If they want to push one genre over others, nothing can stop them, as they're the only pipeline to content.
It's cars, man.

I want this timeline now
Why??

Capeshit thankfully never has stranglehold on comics and Sup Forums doesnt have superhero fanboy was.

Maybe some other genre wars start but in that universe my alternate self will never have to deal with "Who would win a fight Super Vs. Goku Vs Batman with prep time"

Batman and Robin confirmed for gay

I miss old timey horror and fantastic scifi comics.

Please give me that timeline

>crippled capes
That's bullshit. Superhero comics was basically the ONLY action comics genre that was allowed within the rules.
Western wouldn't fly because of limits on violence, and crime comics couldn't fly either because of the rule that every crime must be punished at end of every issue.

Superheroes like Flash and Spider-Man that non-lethally defeated their enemies and put them in prison from where they could break out the next issue was pretty much the sole possible way to do an action story in comics in 50s and 60s.

Considering that most superheroes by this time were already non-lethal (to be kid-friendly) and already had recurring villains, this wasn't as drastic of a change as you imply.

So Code slightly limited capes, but it ALSO offered capeshit chance to reign supreme due to destroying competing genres.

>comics are seen as just another thing, another art form

FUCK

It still hurt capes and their companies. It also drove off readers and it never recovered. The code pretty much ruined the comics industry. It is what it is today because of that code.

Weren't DC and Marvel big supporters of the code aswell?

The alternative was government censorship.
Also Marvel didn't exist at the time yet, I think they wer called Atlas Comics?

Sounds like a grimdark future to me.

So, the present?

I don't want to because I approve of it and I understand the reason behind it.

Nearly every book released between 1954 and the mid 70s is total shit.

Because comics before 1954 were really great.

I was just getting into older comics.

more comics like Muthafukaz get to exist, which is a good thing

And what the fuck is that?

At least we don't have a Social Justice Code yet.

ITT: Non-capereaders and their shallow understanding of history

MAD became a magazine in the 50's, bypassing the code
Warren Mags produced Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella magazines in the mid-60's, bypassing the code, and stuck around for at least until the early 80's
Underground comix were around in the 60's
DC still had varied genre books in the 60's and 70's and even had a few horror based books in the 70's--House of Mystery and House of Secrets were turned into horror titles again, arguably darker than it had been previously.
Marvel got sword-and-sorcery in the 70's
In the 80's First Comics titles like American Flagg were outselling a lot of DC comics.

Yes, CCA made it easier for superhero comics to gain dominance, but there were like multiple points of entry where it didn't have to be the only dominant genre. There was like multiple points of entry to doing other genres. Blaming superhero comics for the lack of varied genres just ignores the other problems that led to this in the first place.

>Like even if we just look at horror comics- they're gone. All totally gone.
They didn't really leave, they were all just garbage giant monster pseudo-horror that also infected film in the 50s

>noncapereaders

You make that sound like a bad thing

I'm a non-capereader (for the most part) and this is a pretty accurate history of of non-superhero comics (minus the alt comics movement that started in the early 80s). Still, I would argue that it wasn't so much the CC itself that damaged the development of non-superhero comics, but the Nationwide outrage surrounding the issue - they had fucking Senate hearings about it. I'm curious what you'd say the "other factors" that lead to superhero domination in the medium would be.

Personally, I think it's being pushed off the newsstands and being relegated to a niche hobby rather than the somewhat broad appeal it maintained before Frederick Wertham and the moral outrage police accused comics of turning children into delinquents. Naturally, with a smaller (and shrinking) audience, comics companies are more likely to play to that audience than diversify their subject matter. But that's just my two cents.

>but the Nationwide outrage surrounding the issue - they had fucking Senate hearings about it.

I thought this at first, but then I looked into comics history and the only thing this would've affected would've been the late 50's and maybe most of the 60's. And even in the 60's there were other avenues to take like making your comic a black-and-white magazine or going underground. If outrage over comics were still a consistent thing after the 60's, the Warren Magazines wouldn't have lasted as long as they did. Hell, even after Mad got turned into a magazine they still had shitloads of complaints and outraged parents (though not to the level of the 50's), but they were able to keep it going for a long time.

My personal feeling? It's because companies kind of floundered out. For all the terrible things Marvel and DC did to creators, they were still managed well enough that they could keep going for decades. Warren Publishing went under due to business problems in the early 80's and had to declare bankruptcy. First Comics had financial issues during the 80's and then went under during the early 90's. And usually when these companies go under it can't be because no one was interested in non-superhero comics. I mean Warren used to publish Famous Monsters of Filmland, a magazine about horror films, which logically should've sold well in the 80's! But there were internal problems within the company.

Maybe there's other factors that led to those companies' problems, but I really don't think the Code prohibited anyone from doing a non-superhero comic, at least after the 60's. If no one wanted horror books because they wanted superhero books, DC wouldn't have kept House of Mystery a horror book for as long as they did (1968 to about 1983) and made it a J'onn J'onzz book again.

Also...

>Personally, I think it's being pushed off the newsstands and being relegated to a niche hobby rather than the somewhat broad appeal it maintained before Frederick Wertham and the moral outrage police accused comics of turning children into delinquents. Naturally, with a smaller (and shrinking) audience, comics companies are more likely to play to that audience than diversify their subject matter. But that's just my two cents.

Maybe. But again, they still diversified somewhat when the code relaxed--70's had Marvel with their sword-and-sorcery, DC with horror. Even with the newsstand problem there was an opportunity with comic shops in the 70's to the 90's to stock different genres that wouldn't be stocked on the newsstand. Maybe they were still in fear of the code but other people could take other alternative routes.

And I think there's still other avenues people can take their comics. Jeff Smith's Bone isn't a superhero comic, but it still sells well to the all-ages crowd for a lot of reasons, despite no other new stories (other than the Bone Coda). Walking Dead and Saga sell well so there's still a market for non-superhero stuff. But I think it depends on what you want your non-superhero stuff to be.

> (minus the alt comics movement that started in the early 80s)

Yeah, I forgot to add this one. And what ended up harming that time was too many people trying to bandwagon on the success of TMNT and people blindly buying TMNT knockoffs in the hopes they're worth something some day. It ended up resulting in retailers reluctant to buy black-and-white indies in general. Regardless, Fantagraphics, Aardvark-Vanaheim, and others kept on.

No significant change. DC and Marvel would still stop publishing anything but superheroes by the mid 80s. EC would stick around and might even have remained to this day. But ironically during the silver age cape boom they would have started publishing capes too.

Learn about your hobby, fuckwad, and not from Sup Forums

Good analyses. I actually was reading about the Warren collapse a little bit ago. Bad financial decisions and getting sued by the Bradbury estate for titling a magazine 1984 really didn't work in their favor. They put out some great stuff too. Artists were actually clamoring to work for them back in the day because Archie Goodwin was such a great writer to illustrate for.

Anyway, I don't know what would've happened if the Warren mags had stayed around. But I know that it's readership wasn't exclusive to comics fans (as with mad back in the day) so it's possible readership could've been broadened if publishers would've focused on trying to maintain a broader audience outside of the comic shops, but it's hard to say. Kind of annoying that what kinds of comics get out there are determined by what the companies are willing to put out and what the market deems profitable. But it is what it is. I'm happy reading fantagraphics and d&q anyway.

>The code completely destroyed every genre but capes
How did this meme get started, anyway? Horror is the only genre that languished. Western comics, romance, war, comedy still continued essentially unchanged.

I think most people emphasize on its effect on EC so much that they either forget or are just unaware of what else was popular back then

Would Batman still get at least one cartoon in this world, I wonder.

People kind of romanticize it. EC sold well (especially enough that other companies tried to copy it) but Dell was still the top selling comic publisher at the time, IIRC. There used to be a site that showed circulation figures from the 50's but I can't find it now. It wasn't on Comichron.

>Western comics, romance, war, comedy still continued essentially unchanged

Western and war comics had to be censored heavily to meet the requirements of the code (no guns, blood, etc.) and with the exception of Archie and a few others comedy comics (like mad and humbug) had to be converted to a magazine format to avoid the code entirely. Sales is one thing, but they didn't continue unchanged.