Pulp Empire by Paul S. Hirsch

Author:Paul S. Hirsch [Hirsch, Paul S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General, HIS036060 History / United States / 20th Century, LAN027000 Language Arts & Disciplines / Publishing
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.8 The copy of Crime SuspenStories submitted to the Senate subcommittee that investigated the comic book industry in 1954. The image of an average-looking, White American man holding a woman’s severed head outraged senators and helped end the first, freewheeling phase of the American comic book industry.

Still, the code did not solve the problem of racism in comic books. Surviving publishers responded to it not with more positive imagery but by virtually eliminating whatever non-White characters had outlasted the war. And as Bill Gaines learned, the CMAA also used the code to restrict even constructive representations of non-White characters. He submitted a story for review called “Judgment Day,” in which a human astronaut, garbed in an opaque space helmet, attempts to mediate a dispute among a society of robots segregated by color. The protagonist eventually decides that the robot society is too primitive to solve its problem and cannot join the larger group of civilized planets. In the last panel, he removes his helmet and reveals himself to be Black. He appears with beads of perspiration on his face, presumably due to his confinement in the space suit. Gaines claimed that the code reviewers rejected the story based on the beads of sweat, which they believed violated the code’s ban on “ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group.”90 It was too much. He abandoned comic book publishing to focus on his new venture: transforming one of his most successful comic books, Mad, into a magazine.

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