A Brief History of Comics

Newspaper comics emerged just around the turn of the last century, with "The Yellow Kid," widely regarded as the first, debuting in 1895. Within a decade, comic "strips" were fast become a part of daly newspapers, including "dailies" as well as larger panels on Sundays. Most, true to the "comic" label, were humorous in nature, leading some to call them the "funny papers" or simply the "funnies." Some, however, grew a bit more serious, featuring tales of mystery, intrigue, or crime. It was from this strain that "comic books" emerged in the 1930's, when few other forms of entertainment for kids could be had for a mere 10 cents. Superman first appeared in 1938, with Batman following in 1939; that same year, Martin Goodman founded what would eventually become Marvel Comics.

The popularity of these action-hero oriented comics ballooned after World War II, with some of them branching out into "true crime" and "horror" genres. It was all, one would think, good clean fun -- until a German-American psychiatrist named Dr. Fredric Wertham came on the scene. Wertham was convinced that comics did active harm to young people; beginning with a 1947 article in Collier's Magazine -- "Horror in the Nursery" -- he launched a full-fledged moral panic over them. The result-- congressional hearings and hastily-passed censorship laws -- hit home here in Rhode Island, where in 1956 a commission was established "To study 'Comic' books, their Publication, Distribution, Etc., With Particular Reference to Minors." Lists of banned comics, collected by right-minded citizens patrolling corner shops, were soon drawn up, and there was little that local businesses could do but comply.  Eventually, the "Comics Code" was established to regulate the industry, and horror comics -- along with blood, death, bullet-holes and bad guys who got away unpunished -- were banned for decades.

Slowly, starting in the late 1980's and early 1990's, industry giants such as DC and Marvel began to quietly rebel. By publishing new titles in a bound-book format rather than the earlier "floppies," and selling them through bookstores rather than on magazine racks, they dodged the Code and brought back the darkness. With The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: The Killing Joke, Batman led the way, and over the years that followed, most of his fellow superheroes followed in his Bat-steps. It was this marketplace -- often sold in specialized bookshops -- that the fertile soil for the wider emergence of graphical tales of all kinds was first laid down. The "graphic novel" -- which had, in one form or another, been around since the 1970's, found a new home, and with stars such as Will Eisner and Alan Moore, came into its own in the '80's and '90's. When Art Spiegelman's Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the genre came into its own.

And the Comics Code? It died a slow and steady death as comic book publishers simply refused to use it; when Archie comics abandoned the code in 2011, it was essentially defunct. Its once-dreaded seal of approval is now the property of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which fights the censorship the code once embodied.