Washington Post Censorship Article.

[Michael A. Chary]

[I got this from Joyce Brabner. ]

HOLY CENSORSHIP, BATMAN! GUESS WHO'S BANNING
COMIC BOOKS

By Mark Gauvreau Judge

(c) 1996 The Washington Post

Sunday June 9, 1996

SEVERAL MONTHS ago, a piece of art was destroyed when its
owners deemed it unfit for public consumption.

The work in question was not a sexually explicit Robert Mapplethorpe
photograph that shocked conservatives into a frenzy of censorship. It
was a comic book called "Activists!" and its censors were liberals.

"Activists!" had been commissioned in 1990 by the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, a leftist social justice organization devoted to
nonviolence and political activism. The fellowship had ordered the
comic in an attempt to attract a young audience to their cause, but when
some black staff members saw the finished product they were shocked
at what they called "racist" drawings of African Americans. Most of the
20,000 copies of "Activists!" were summarily confiscated and
destroyed.

The story in "Activists!" that had raised objections was nonfiction.
"Survivin-N-DaHood" depicted the lives of black New Haven
community organizer Pat Boozer and her children, who had told their
story to Joyce Brabner, the writer of "Activists!" As reported in
Publishers Weekly, Boozer claimed that there were no objections to
"Activists!" by the black staff members until they discovered that the
artists who drew the comic were white. The staff members say they
found the "old-time representations" to be offensive regardless of the
artist's race. Boozer tried to convince the fellowship to let her have
copies of the comic to distribute on her own, but the group declined.

While the destruction of "Activists!" might seem an extreme, freakish
episode, it points to the history of political hostility to comics, from the
left and the right. As a pop art form that doubles as a surprisingly
sophisticated medium of storytelling, comics have long been politically
incorrect.

The first comic strip appeared on Sunday, Feb.16, 1896, in the New
York World, a newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst. Called
"The Yellow Kid," it was a satire of city life that chronicled the
adventures of its hero, an urchin who wore a yellow nightshirt. Its
success led to more comic strips that were aimed at a large audience,
including adults. According to Roger Sabin's "Adult Comics: An
Introduction," one of these strips, "Krazy Kat," boasted an "underlying
intellectual complexity, coupled with Dadaist artwork and Joycean
language, [that] made it a favorite with the American intelligentsia: poet
e.e. cummings was known to be a fan, and President Woodrow Wilson
was reported to have read it every morning before Cabinet meetings."

Soon comics were being sold in book form and marketed to kids. In
1938, the first issue of Action Comics was published, featuring the
adventures of Superman. It was followed by Detective Comics, starring
Batman. These titles inaugurated what collectors call the Golden Age of
comics, the era of the all-American superhero: Superman, Captain
America, the Human Torch, the Flash. These characters were mostly
mouthpieces of the hyper-patriotism and austere moral ethic of the war
years and they dominated the field well into the 1950s.

A dark underside of comics surfaced in the Eisenhower years. EC
Comics, a company that specialized in such titles as "The Vault of
Horror," "Weird Fantasy" and "The Haunt of Fear," dished up tales of
ghoulish terror, hard-boiled crime and risqu=E9 fantasies that were
influenced by the pulp fiction of the time. Concern over comics grew so
intense that (as with rap and rock lyrics today) congressional hearings
were held and public moralists worried about the values of America's
youth.

The EC hearings, held in the spring of 1954, were inspired by
"Seduction of the Innocent," a tirade against comics written by
Frederick Wertham, a senior psychiatrist with the New York
Department of Hospitals. Among Wertham's charges were that comics
were fascistic fantasies, that they caused juvenile delinquency and that,
in the case of Batman and Robin, they depicted a homosexual fantasy.
When Wertham took the stand at the hearings, he ended his statement
by declaring, "I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic
industry." After what came to be known as "Wertham's Crusade" was
finished, comics were driven off many newsstands and forced to carry a
seal of approval from the Comics Code Authority, a self censoring
organization set up by the industry. Wertham is still cited in comic
circles with bitter repugnance as the right-wing crank who almost
single-handedly destroyed the industry. But the good doctor was a
Marxist whose public philosophy was informed by the Frankfurt School,
a leftist institution that preached an anti-mass-culture gospel that
scorned pop fluff like comics.

The 1960s brought a renaissance of the form thanks to a new generation
of super-heroes created by Marvel Comics. Under the creative steam of
writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, Marvel would give the world the
Amazing Spider-Man, the Mighty Thor, the Fantastic Four and X-Men.
Unlike the superheroes of the Golden Age, their protagonists suffered
quotidian human problems-- money troubles, romantic failures-- that
made them more sympathetic. In one memorable early issue of Spider-
Man, the hero almost lost a battle because he had a cold.

Yet for all their realism, superhero comics in the '60s were still largely
mired in the innocence of the Golden Age-and they still were required to
carry the approval seal of the comics authority. Other, non-superhero
comics, however, weren't as constricted.; The 1960s saw the birth of
underground comics, including the "Freak Brothers" and "Mr. Natural."
While many of these books reflected the satirical aesthetic that had
begun with Mad magazine in the '50s, the satire was leveled at the
sacred cows of the counterculture as much as at the Establishment.
Robert Crumb, considered the father of underground comics, was
known for his hostility toward hippies and ersatz revolutionaries. Crumb
is the forefather of a new generation of underground comics, books
such as "Hate!" and "Peep Show" whose anarchic spirit is outright
derisive of the phony liberal hip of Generation X.

In 1986, superhero comics became fully immersed in the adult world.
That year, artist and writer Frank Miller published "Batman: The Dark
Knight Returns," an astonishing work that is so mature and compelling
that it popularized use of the term "graphic novel" to describe comics of
exceptional length and sophistication. It tells the story of an aging Bruce
Wayne-- a k a Batman-- who has forsaken crime fighting. Neurotic,
obsessive and tortured by the personal failures of his past, he comes out
of retirement to wage war on a city plagued by lawlessness and gang
violence.

"The Dark Knight Returns" caused a boom in adult interest in comics
and a wave of newspaper articles announcing that "kids comics [are]
growing up." It also brought rebukes from liberal readers, who were
repulsed by what Kirby heroes are built like Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Spiegelman noted, and such shapes and the attendant fantasy of power
expresses 'The triumph of the will, the celebration of the physicality of
the human body at the expense of the intellect."

Spiegelman's charge against Kirby may seem ludicrous-- if fantasies of
strength and power are fascist, then a lot of us are Nazis. But
underneath it runs a more profound concern with the morality of comic
book narratives. His problem with certain super-heroes has less to do
with their physique than with their philosophy. Many of the superheroes
are ground in a rigid ethic of right and wrong where criminals-- who,
unlike the victims of Hitler, are far from innocent-- are punished and
their excuses for their actions rejected out of hand by the hero.

This impatience with the therapy of the victim culture is particularly
evident in the Batman graphic novels. In "The Killing Joke," Batman's
arch-nemesis the Joker kidnaps Commissioner Gordon and attempts to
drive him insane. When Batman shows up, the Joker justifies his actions
on the grounds that a capricious personal tragedy unfairly caused his
own insanity. But Batman discovers the commissioner hasn't cracked.

"Despite all your sick, vicious little games," he tells the Joker, "he's as
sane as he ever was. So maybe ordinary people don't always crack.
Maybe there isn't any need to crawl under a rock with all the other
slimey things when trouble hits... Maybe it was just you, all the time."

The theme is repeated in "Two-Face: Crime and Punishment," by J.M.
Dematteis and Scott McDaniel. The villain, Two-Face, is revealed to be
the victim of child abuse at the hands of an alcoholic father, and in his
rage he tries to interrogate his father on live television. His father turns
out to be Batman in disguise. "We all know pain," Batman says.
"Everybody has scars. But we each choose what we do with our pain.
Your father made his choices, and you made yours."

This kind of stuff doesn't play well with the inner child set, who are
reluctant to call a sin a sin and are wary of the kind of tough, unfiltered
realism currently found in comics-- even when, as in the case of
"Activists!," those depictions are employed to push the left's own
causes. Artistic renditions of the world and how people live in it are
notoriously resistant to psychotherapeutic gerrymandering, just like the
super-hero fantasies of power that Jack Kirby so peerlessly expressed.

In the end, "Activists!" found an audience. It was put on the Internet,
and author Joyce Brabner distributed a few surviving hard copies. The
modern censors found what Wertham did: that killing comics and the
dreams of justice that give rise to them is like trying to snuff out sexual
fantasies or the desire to fly. It's a task for which there isn't enough
kryptonite in the universe to accomplish.

To View ACTIVISTS! see www.redweb.com/wraith/Activists
--
Court Philosopher and Barbarian, DNRC http://ezinfo.ucs.indiana.edu/~fchary
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