Why does nobody talk about banned comics in the US

I spent $45 on a collection of old EC Comics from the 1950s, the ones that got hit hard by the Comics Code... stuff like "Tales From the Crypt" and "The Haunt of Fear." The government basically forced publishers to self-censor because they thought horror comics were making kids into criminals. After reading through a few issues, I get why parents were upset, but the artwork was super creative and raw. Has anyone else tracked down old banned comics from that era?

3 comments

3 Comments

aaron67719d ago

Feel you on that. It sucks how history keeps repeating itself with this stuff. The whole EC Comics thing was a straight up moral panic where politicians jumped on it without really understanding what they were banning. I tracked down a couple issues of "The Vault of Horror" at a flea market a few years back and man, the art was wild but it wasn't making me want to go rob a bank or anything. What gets me is how the code actually killed off whole genres and a bunch of talented artists lost their jobs over it. Makes you wonder how many good creators got buried because some group decided they knew better than everyone else. The music comparison you made is spot on too, it's just the same old story with a different coat of paint.

charles_coleman18d ago

Wait did the code really kill off whole genres though? I thought it just forced them to water it down (which obviously still hurt, don't get me wrong).

torres.jason19d ago

It's funny you mention that... I see the same pattern play out with music today, how certain albums get quietly pulled from streaming or stores because of one controversial lyric. Back then it was comics scaring parents, now it's songs getting banned from radio playlists or entire genres being blacklisted by platforms. The difference is back then they at least had a clear code you could point to, now it's all this vague shadowbanning where nobody says exactly why something disappeared.