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The banning of the classic comic books Maus and V For Vendetta from American schools opens a number of alarming questions about censorship.
Since its removal from a Tennessee School Board’s curriculum, discussion over Art Spiegelman’s Maus has been rampant, with many worried about the implications of such overreaching censorship and Spiegelman himself expressing his concerns that it is a “harbinger of things to come.” This happens to coincide with a similar ban in Texas schools that saw Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta banned along with 850 other books (including a volume of Y: The Last Man and a graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale illustrated by Renee Nault among others).
Since their commercial peak in the 1940s and 1950s, comic books have always had to deal with censorship in one form or another. A wave of controversy over violence and sexual content in comics led to what is known as the Comics Code Authority (CCA) being formed in 1954. While the current ban may share some similarities with the moral panic that resulted in the creation of the CCA, the political and social contexts are different and seem to be rooted in something much closer to what V for Vendetta and Maus (innately anti-fascist texts) both warned about.
The History of the Comics Code Authority
The censorship of comic books has a long history and in the United States, is normally tied with concerns over their appropriateness for children. The most famous and far-reaching example of mass censorship occurred shortly around 1954, shortly after the Golden Age of comic books when the medium had reached a commercial peak and 80-100 million comics were being sold per month. Due to their popularity, the artists behind the books were able to explore different ideas and genres, and this gave rise to a wave of horror and crime comics. These comics often featured graphic content, raising concern from state and church groups and culminating in the publication of The Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham.
Wertham was a psychiatrist who worked in Harlem, treating juvenile delinquents, whom he noticed all read comic books. Despite their mainstream popularity, Wertham believed comic books to be the reason for these children’s aggressive behavior. His book made many unsubstantiated claims including an assertation that Superman encouraged violent behavior by teaching children that they could solve all their problems through violence, and that the depictions of Batman and Robin promoted homosexual relationships with children. The Seduction of the Innocent paved the way for widespread cultural hysteria, leading to citizens partaking in the public burning of comic books and Wertham to claim that comics were “more dangerous than Hitler.” This was all happening during the era of McCarthyism, and the U.S. Congress responded by pressuring comic book publishers to oversee the content in their books, leading to the creation of the Comic Code Authority.
While imposed by the publishers, the code still acted as a draconian piece of censorship that severely restricted the stories comics were allowed to tell. The rules included cracking down on nudity and violent content (leading to Catwoman and Two-Face not being used in Batman comics for a number of years), stories that only involved good triumphing over evil, authority figures that were always respected, and content that endorsed “the sanctity of marriage” (which excluded depictions of gay couples or divorce). A by-product of religious puritanism, the CCA helped to creatively dilute the medium of comic books for a number of years, regulating the medium to the superhero genre and perpetuating the idea that comics were only meant for children.
Despite the restrictions imposed by the Authority, the medium was revitalized during the Marvel Comics boom of the ‘60s. In an ironic twist, Stan Lee and Marvel were asked by the Nixon administration to produce an anti-drug comic leading to 1971’s The Amazing Spider-Man #96-97 by Lee and John Romita, which was printed without the CCA’s approval. The rise of alternative comics or “comix” also surfaced around the same time and dealt with adult themes that ignored many of the Authority’s restrictions. As the years went by, the code would undergo various relaxations of its rules before eventually being more or less abandoned altogether in 2011.
Why The Recent Bannings Are Different
While the rationale behind the recent removal of Maus from school curriculum in Tennessee and the banning of V for Vendetta and Y: The Last Man in Texas seem to bear a resemblance to the hysteria that led to the creation of the CCA, the social-political contexts in which they reside are very different. The Authority initially came about during the era of McCarthyism and was exclusively concerned with comics. The current bans seem to be far wider reaching in a cultural climate that has seen these works lumped in with other books, owing to the comics being treated as serious literature thanks to the work of creators like Moore and Spiegelman.
What is of particular interest is the fact that both Maus and V for Vendetta are innately political texts. While Maus is a genre-bending memoir about the Holocaust and V for Vendetta is a fictional tale about an anarchist revolt, both books deal with themes relating to fascism and authoritarianism. In 2014, Russia banned Maus due to it featuring the swastika on its front cover during a crackdown on anything involving Nazi paraphernalia, even though the comic is one of the most anti-fascist works in all of fiction. In 2020, China also banned the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, and although no official reason was given, the Guy Fawkes mask from the comic and film was worn by many Hong Kong protesters during the 2019-2020 unrest.
While the rationale of removing the books from Tennessee schools is due to a belief that it will make students “uncomfortable”, many of the books are written by members of the LGBTQ+ community and address issues related to race and gender. When the CCA was first introduced, comics were still in their infancy and regarded as children’s entertainment that did not address social and political issues. Since then, however, both Maus and V for Vendetta have been considered challenging literary works that deal with political topics in a mature fashion. This is an incredibly concerning development, considering how both books are anti-fascist and deliberately warn against the limitation of free speech and the curbing of artistic expression, as well as what can happen when these issues go unchallenged.
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