Fredric Wertham, MD is responsible for everything bad about comics. Well, not quite, but he certainly tried his best to ruin them with his 1954 bestseller Seduction of the Innocent, a poorly-researched piece of cod-psychology that suggested comic books were going to turn children into murderous, sex-crazed deviants because Batman and Robin are pals and horror comics had zombies in. Despite it being utter nonsense - not that that's stopped people before - the book caught on to such a degree that it inspired a hearing in the senate. As a reaction to all the controversy, comics publishers voluntarily put together the Comics Code Authority, which essentially banned anything good from happening in comic books and forced publishers EC out of business. The Code had many bonkers rules that comics had to be careful not to break, lest they be denied a CCA stamp of approval, which would mean nobody would want to sell the title. Amongst some directly inspired by Seduction of the Innocent - criminal behaviour must not be celebrated, and homosexuality was never to be depicted - were some equally unexplainable criteria, such as not using the word "zombie" or "wolfman", and a strange stance on race. It was these last two especially that sunk EC Comics. Really, how could a publisher that dealt in horror comics survive when it couldn't refer to or even depict zombies, vampires, werewolves, or even feature the words "horror" or "terror" in the titles of its comics? The final nail in the coffin for EC was when they chose to republish "Judgement Day", a pre-Code story about racial prejudice that the CCA wouldn't pass because the main character was black. That was in 1956, and EC never published a horror comic again. The Comics Code, meanwhile, managed to hold out until 2010 before becoming extinct.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
