DC Slips Off the Chains of the CCA!

In a country like America, where the right to 'free speech', i.e. expression restricted only by hateful intent, was legally established in the very first amendment to our government's founding constitution, the fact that any art, mode of communication, or media could be censored because of fear of a nebulous 'corruption of the youth' is horrible. That this system of censorship has operated from the 195os into the 21st Century is stupefying. And the final defeat of that is something to be celebrated.

Today, DC Entertainment finally announced its rejection of the approval system of the nearly six-decade-old Comics Code Authority in favor of their own rating system.

[via @Newsarama via DC Source blog]

The Comics Code Authority was formed in 1954 to stem the tide of fear in the US population, mainly engendered by Dr. Fredric Wertham, that comic-books (mostly Horror comics, but others as well) were psychologically dangerous. The good doctor wrote a book titled "Seduction of the Innocent" which treated comic-books as powerful and dangerous tools aimed at children. (Which in a sense is very true.) The other half of the Big Two, Marvel Comics, put out the first mainstream comic-books without the Code's stamp of approval in 1971 and stopped making use of the Code entirely a decade ago in 2oo1.

According to Wikipedia.org with DC pulling out, only Archie Comics and Matt Groening's Bongo Comics will continue to send their comic-books to the CCA for approval.

Hopefully, Archie will follow the series of daring choices they made in 2oo9 and last year and reject the Code as well. Leaving Groening to make a pretty clear decision between being the only publisher still utilizing a sixty-year-old structure of censorship or keeping some shreds of the revolutionary reputation he once had for creating Television's "The Simpsons".

It won't be long now.

~@JonGorga

UPDATE 1/25/2o11:
It escaped my notice until today that the day after DC announced this news, and I wrote this post, Archie followed suit and announced that in this next month of February they too will discontinue their use of the Code's seal. And that Bongo hasn't utilized the Code or its seal for something like a year.

This was revealed to me by this excellent piece of reporting on Newsarama.com by Vaneta Rogers which posits that, in fact, the CCA is defunct in all but name and has been for a year or more!

[via @mattfraction via Newsarama]

Free speech survives. Censorship was defeated. The good guys win in the end.