This makes me curious. I’ve read those two articles as well as Wikipedia and they don’t really answer my question.
What exactly was the CCA? I understand that they were an informal authority with no legal enforcement ability and that they enforced a published code. What I can’t find by looking around the web was the physical nature of the authority.
Were they an organization with offices and paid employees? Did publishers have to pay a fee to have their comics approved? Were they a group of volunteers from the comics industry? Was there, at the end, some guy (either paid or volunteer) who sat and approved each issue of Archie?
I don’t think so. The Wikipedia article describes several disagreements between publishers and the authority.
One example:
This example would seem to argue against the idea of in-house enforcement.
Of course, it’s possible that in more recent times it was in-house. It wouldn’t seem like an actual “authority” would have much to do regarding Archie comics.
The CCA was established pretty like like the Hays Code for movies. It was an industry organization put into place to ensure that the government wouldn’t step in and do the censoring.
Once it got established, though, everybody bought into it. (Except Disney, which stated that it was too pure and Innocent ever to need to.) If your comic didn’t have the Code Seal on it, nobody would sell your comic. That was the true power. You could write whatever you wanted, but nobody would touch it.
Yes, somebody went over every single drawing and word balloon and judged them. Every comic from the entire industry. Imagine how much you must have hated every comic book in existence after about a week. That included Archie and every kids comic not published by Disney. The writers and artists got bored, too, and tried to slip stuff in.
It worked. MAD became a magazine instead of a comic book. Nobody else even tried to buck the system until the underground comics of the 60s. But they were sold through head shops and other places that didn’t care about the Code. Normal newsstands wouldn’t touch them.
Spider-Man did an antidrug series (early 70s, I think) without the Seal that got a lot of attention. The Code started to reform itself a bit. That’s what lead to the zombie and vampire craze of the early 1970s. They were suddenly allowed.
But it was the rise of the comic store that killed the Code. Independents had a place to sell comics who didn’t care whether they were properly mainstream. The Code has been a relic for years. Marvel pulled out a decade ago, but it’s really been dead since the 80s.
I recall, as a young child, reading a lot of Gold Key comics. They never had the CCA endorsement; but then, they were mostly reprints of stories featuring kid-friendly characters: Yogi Bear, the Flintstones, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, and similar, all in stories that would never run afoul of the CCA anyway. At the same time, I read Superman and Batman and Archie (all CCA-approved), which led me to the conclusion–when I was older–that the CCA was more a self-regulating industry code than it was an imposed-by-a-governmental-authority one. Much later, I would learn about “freedom of the press,” and suchlike; which solidified my conclusion that the CCA was an industry code, without many teeth. If comics went against the Code and still sold, there wasn’t much the Code could do about it.
I read 10 Cent Plague about the comic book industry from it’s early days until the creation of the CCA. It was an independent body with a staff. Comic book publishers who participated paid user fees that funded the CCA.
