The Nightstar Zoo

Seeing the sad state of the comic book industry today, I think that one of the major problems with it nowadays is that, specifically, nobody's bothering to look at what's being produced with an eye towards proper censorship. So you end up with stuff like Justice League members performing brainwashing, innocent women getting raped to death in a Superman comic, Sue Dibny getting raped, then later assassinated, and Captain America comics bad-mouthing the Good Ol' USofA.

...And then people wonder why Comics don't sell to kids anymore.

You wanna know why Teen Titans sell? Because it's what kids wanna see. Super-powered Action with Cool, heroic characters beating on evil villains (and doing so conscience-free) in stories where Good Triumphs Over Evil in the end.

You know why the Batman Animated Series and it's follow-ups were successful? Because it was what both kids wanna see. Along with everything mentionned above, it had characters with real motivations and even a few villains whom you could sympathise with, although you could still clearly tell the good guys from the bad without a scorecard.

Unfortunetly, folks like Millar don't seem to understand that, and clearly won't write those kind of stories unless someone puts up limits. The Comics Code Authority was originally set up to impose such limits, and to a large extent, it worked.

Then, in the mid-eighties, the Industry tried creating more and more comics intended for a mature audiance, and the CCA standards were left by the way-side. Unfortunetly, this has eventually led to the above-mentionned problem stories. Clearly, leaving the comic book industry without censorship of any kind has had a negative impact on the industry.

We need a new Comics Code Authority. One that is up to date with morality and political correctness standards of today, and which allows for serious, dramatic modern storytelling within those standards.

And if the comics industry won't do it themselves, then maybe it's time people started lobbying for it to happen. Being Canadian myself, I can't do much about it, but maybe those of you living in the States can raise Congress' attentions on the matter?

After all... If Congressmen have time to complain about Spongebob Squarepants, I think they have time for this, especially since it's for the kids, right?

The CCA was generally awful. It was created in the same era and way of thought that got us anti-sodomy laws and separate drinking fountains. Right now, it'd only be censoring for children an industry that is only read by adults. (An increasingly smaller industry, of course, as its fanbase dies off as it gets older, with no influx of new readers.)

But enforcing guidelines isn't going to solve anything. Putting such content demands on comic books and not any other form of entertainment is retarded. Why should we keep adult themes out of comics and not out of movies, television, and books? Those are all full of rape, too.

No, the only way to keep these things from happening without, y'know, forcing nazi-esque limitations on our freedom of speech is to not buy crap that's crap. If people don't want to see things like Identity Crisis, then maybe they shouldn't be buying Identity Crisis!

The answer should never be censorship.

(Not to mention the only reason the CCA existed in the first place was due to public pressure. The public doesn't care about comics anymore. It was the stores and shops that carried comics that enforced the "carry CCA-endorsed-comics only" rule. But no comic book shop is going to do that. It'd be retarded. And you can't constitutionally force stores to follow through. Like I said, the only reason the CCA happened before was because of public hysteria. And these days, the public doesn't even know comics exist.)

And, yeah, good luck trying to get a Roomies!/IW! collection published with a CCA enforced.

All the CCA ever enforced was crappy writing.

CCA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority

Also, moving this to Balloon Animals.

Comics... for kids?

Hee!

Starline

Sorry... Didn't know about the Balloon Animals forum thing.

...because, y'know, political dissent is in the same league as rape and murder.

I do agree that the comic industry needs to produce more works for children. I don't think that re-establishing the CCA or any other kind of censorship would contribute much to that end, however, and I think that the negatives would outweigh the positives. The book industry doesn't need a censorship agency to encourage works for children, so why should comics?

Check out some of the stuff the CCA put through and see why they never did comics any good.

Well, I won't press the subject any further, but I will say that I've noticed this: Everyone in the public and the media thinks that comics are for kids, except the people who actually make and read comics.

I think censorship is acceptable in the context of private, free market pressures -- I mean, it's pretty hard to argue that you have a constitutional right to be published. It's only when censorship is mandated by the government that it becomes an infringement of the First Amendment.

Take some of the Keenspace comics that are getting print attention -- in order for that to happen, You Damn Kid! has to become You Darn Kid!, and the comics featuring naked nuns have to be nixed from the print version. That's because the papers don't want PG-13/R-rated comics, and the reason they don't is because they're selling a product, and the public doesn't want that kind of material in said product.

Me, I think everyone should just take responsibility and rate themselves, be open and honest about what kind of content you're producing, and let the public make an informed choice about whether they or their children should view it.

LoneWolf23k Teen Titans has a character who betrays the teen titans and then repents and gets killed/stonerized which is not what I call a conscience free story. Another character that is going to destroy the world in the future and can seem to do nothing to stop it. Kids want stories that don't talk down to then but simply tell a story. If they didn't then Spiderman (90's), Gargoyles, and X-men would still be on TV years after the shows ended.

Plus have you actualy seen some of the CCA rules such as

The letters of the word "crime" on a comics magazine shall never be appreciably greater than the other words contained in the title. The word "crime" shall never appear alone on a cover.

No comic magazine shall use the word "horror" or "terror" in its title.

No unique or unusual methods of concealing weapons shall be shown.

Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

CCA rules were stupid and lasted way to long.

Yeah, a lot of CCA rules were devised specifically to put EC Comics out of business. They had nothing to do with protecting children, and everything to do with leveraging public panic against a popular rival.

I think Marvel's got the right idea here with their rating system and Marvel AGE line.

Bishy Thor and crappy writing aside, it's a step in the right[?] direction to hook young readers.

As for the Comics Code, I believe Seanbaby said it best,

1. The CCA was, at least to an extent, a voluntary measure, the companies involved agreed not to do any newstand circulation of materials that didn't fit it. To what extent this came in because of non voluntary pressures I'm uncertain. But it was abondoned because the industry decided to, rather than any lack of enforcement.

2. Okay, let me get this straight. You WANT there to be nothing but kids stuff out there? To see everything that was done in the last 20 years to give comics a halfway decent reputation to be for nothing? Why do you hate comics so much? Is this one of those 'anything that isn't normal must be destroyed' things?

Okay, the CCA would be fine for stuff rated Y or E.

Now, here's the thing. Video game makers are rating their own materials now, and it's working out quite well. Parents can tell at a glance what kind of stuff is in a game, and can decide for themselves whether or not to allow their children to play the game.

So why not do something like this on the comics? Set up standards similar to that of the video game industry, and rate the comics.

So like a superhero story that adheres to all the CCA standards would be an E, a comic geared for little ones would be a Y, etc etc etc.

Meanwhile we can still have stuff like Tank Girl and a lot of the stuff in Heavy Metal magazine that's rated M.

Why not?

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Anybody remember the Hays Code? For movies? Way way back when no villian could profit in a film, and reference to anything even remotely resembling sex or nudity was censored... Hitchcock showed a flushing toilet in Psycho, and that was considered over-the-line for the day. Double Indemnity had to evade the issue with slang and innuendo. In the original Ocean's Eleven, the group of good-natured, funny thieves do not get to keep the money.

Before the Hays Code, Tarzan and his Mate had some pretty explicit stuff in it. These days, even PG-13 movies can have realistic violence, profanity (to a certain degree,) and blatent references to sex that are anything but subtle.

Just mentioning.

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Chibi-Spaz!

Actually, Oggy, the CCA, like the ESRB and the MPAA, was an industry-sponsored ratings board. The problem was that they only had one rating ("approved"). It's like if the MPAA only gave out PG ratings, and everything else was considered X.

Well, as I mentioned above, Marvel has already established an in-house rating system. They even tried to base it off the MPAA ratings, but it turns out the MPAA had those trademarked, or something. They came out with this system to avoid further legal trouble.

Don't forget, the CCA approved this travesty.

Oh my God.

I... I... I have no words for this.

They should have sent a poet...

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I've read it.
It is good. Impressive that they managed to merge such different settings and make it work.