home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives Banned Books Week: Comics and Controversy

Banned Books Week: Comics and Controversy

Today marks the beginning of Banned Books Week, a yearly celebration of the freedom to read.  Special Collections is home to many banned books, and our extensive Comic Art Collection of more than 15,000 comic books contains some of the most-suppressed literature in the library.

Horror and Suspense

Tales from the CryptHorror, crime, and suspense comics became quite popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  EC Comics, edited by Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman, was one of the main publishers of this type of literature.  The company published several highly popular titles, including Tales from the Crypt, Frontline Combat, Panic, and Shock SuspenStories.

Sparked by the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, movements to censor these types of comics began popping up around the country after World War II.  Wertham claimed that children would be conditioned to emulate what they saw on the pages of the comics, and that an entire generation was at risk of moral and mental corruption because of their reading material. Congress held an official inquiry on comics and juvenile delinquency in 1954, and many cities throughout the country passed or considered municipal bans on comic books in general.

The Comics Code Authority

PanicFearing government regulation, the comics industry turned to self-censorship, forming the Comics Code Authority (CCA) in late 1954.  The Code set a number of content and artistic standards, including the stipulation that good must always triumph over evil, a general ban on the words “horror” and “terror” in comic book titles, and strict guidelines for the handling of crime, race, sexuality, and political issues.

Although the CCA had no legal power, most distributors refused to carry comics without the CCA seal of approval.  Some publishers adapted to the new regulations, while others went out of business.  EC Comics cancelled all of its titles except for Mad magazine (which was not subject to the Code), and was later absorbed by DC Comics.

The Comics Code remained in effect as it was written in 1954 until it was challenged by Marvel over a Spider-Man cover in 1971. The Code’s authority began to break down in the late 1980s, but it remained in force with major publishers until Marvel officially abandoned the Code in 2001, and DC dropped it in 2011.

Underground Comics

The New Adventures of JesusBy the late 1960s, artists began exploring themes banned by the Code in self-published or small-press “underground” comics.  Many were inspired directly by EC Comics, Mad, and the work of Harvey Kurtzman.

Frank Stack, an emeritus professor of art at MU, is credited with creating the first underground comic book when he published The Adventures of Jesus in 1964 under the pseudonym Foolbert Sturgeon.  Artists such as Gilbert Shelton and R. Crumb also established the genre with publications such as The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Fritz the Cat.

Crumb stated that the appeal of underground comics was their lack of censorship – and this is certainly expressed in their content.  Many underground comics offer commentary on drug use, sex, racism, the anti-war movement, and women’s rights. These were all topics that could not easily be treated by mainstream comics publishers.

Book Banning Continues

MausComics and graphic novels of all genres, particularly those for children and teens, remain reading materials often targeted by bans.  The American Library Association releases a yearly list of the top 10 most challenged books, and graphic novels often figure among them. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Genderqueer by Maia Kobabe, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and, most recently, Maus by Art Spiegelman are all graphic novels that have been banned or challenged in public and school libraries. They and many others are represented in the Comic Art Collection in Special Collections, where they are available to all.

For more information about current attempts to ban books, see Mapping Censorship from the Banned Books Week website and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

This post was originally written for Banned Books Week 2012 and was updated in January 2022.

home Resources and Services, Special Collections and Archives Index, Imprimatur, and Banned Books Week

Index, Imprimatur, and Banned Books Week

September 24 marked the beginning of Banned Books Week, a yearly celebration of the freedom to read.  Books in Special Collections are no stranger to banning and censorship – most were subject to some form of official approval, and many were banned at some point in their history.

Censorship and the License to Print

 

Imprimatur in Il maritaggio delle mvse: poema drammatico by Giovanni Giacomo Ricci (Venice, 1633).
Imprimatur in Il maritaggio delle mvse: poema drammatico by Giovanni Giacomo Ricci (Venice, 1633).
The printing press presented a new set of challenges to authorities who wanted to control the spread of ideas.  In 1485, in the birthplace of printing, the archbishop of Mainz issued a censorship decree that imposed a licensing requirement on the printing of all vernacular texts.  In 1515, Pope Leo X extended that decree to all translations to and from Latin, placing such texts subject to licensing and clerical review in order to keep the faithful from falling into error.[1]

By the seventeenth century, book publication in most European countries was regulated by a licensing board made up of Church or state officials.  Fail to get a license to print, an imprimatur, and your book was effectively banned.  Legitimately printed books featured the imprimatur prominently, often on the verso of the title page.

Title page from Nucleus historiæ ecclesiasticæ by Christopher Sandius (Amsterdam, 1676), with a false imprint.
Title page from Nucleus historiæ ecclesiasticæ by Christopher Sandius (Amsterdam, 1676), with a false imprint.

 

Of course, books were still printed without a license – and these often included a false imprint, to make it look like they had been printed somewhere else.  Printers used this bit of subterfuge to publish texts seen as subversive, heretical, or immoral.[2]

The book on the right is a work by Christopher Sandius promoting Arian and Socinian beliefs.  It was published in Amsterdam by Christoph Petzold.   However, Petzold issued it with a false imprint identifying a publisher in Köln.  The false imprint protected Petzold, and to some extent Sandius as well, and it enabled the publication of beliefs condemned by Protestant and Catholic authorities.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum

Underground publications like that of Sandius presented a challenge to religious and state officials: censorship wasn’t enough to keep dangerous ideas out of public circulation.  Authorities responded with outright bans of books already in print.

 

Title page of Philip II's edict concerning prohibted books (Antwerp, 1570)
Title page of Philip II's edict concerning prohibted books (Antwerp, 1570)
Throughout the Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, and countries ruled by Catholic monarchs, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) provided a definitive guide for what was legal reading material, and what wasn’t.  The Index was first endorsed by Pope Pius IV in 1564 during the Council of Trent (it’s sometimes called the Tridentine Index because of this).  In 1569, with the Pope’s sanction, the Duke of Alba issued a supplement to the Index, adding more titles to the list.

Special Collections has a version of the Index accompanied by an edict issued by Philip II of Spain.  This version of the Index was released in 1570 in response to an uprising in the Netherlands, a territory Spain had recently acquired.  Issued in French, Dutch, and Latin, Philip’s Index was meant to eradicate political protest and Protestantism in the Netherlands, a goal he never achieved.  It's interesting to note that this Index was printed by the renowned Christopher Plantin.  Modern scholars have discovered that Plantin himself was involved in surreptitious printing of heretical and scientific texts.

First edition of Galileo's Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Florence, 1632)
First edition of Galileo's Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Florence, 1632)

 

The Index was updated and re-issued periodically, and authors were added or removed as opinion changed.  Galileo Galilei’s heliocentric, for example, was condemned as heretical and banned shortly after its publication in 1632; by 1758, however, works dealing with heliocentrism were removed from the Index.  Pope Paul VI abolished the Index in 1966.

Book Banning Continues

Book banning was certainly not limited to the Index, and it has been practiced in the United States for hundreds of years.  In 1650, only twelve years after the first printing in North America, Puritans in Boston held the continent’s first book burning.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, United States Customs and the U.S. Post Office regularly confiscated shipments of books under the auspices of anti-obscenity legislation, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Voltaire’s Candide, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

In schools and public libraries, attempts to ban books continue.  Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been banned periodically in American schools since its publication, as have childhood favorites such as James and the Giant Peach and A Wrinkle in Time.  This summer, a high school in Republic, Missouri, drew national attention for banning Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  For more information about current attempts to ban books, see Mapping Censorship from the Banned Books Week website.

Read More

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.  New York : Cambridge University Press, 1980, c1979.

Heresy and Error: The Ecclesiastical Censorship of Books, 1400-1800.  Digital exhibit, Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, 2010.

Hans J. Hillerbrand, “On Book Burnings and Book Burners: Reflections on the Power (and Powerlessness) of Ideas.”  J Am Acad Relig (September 2006) 74 (3): 593-614. doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfj117

Joan Stack, ed., The Art of the Book: Manuscripts and Early Printing, 1000-1650.  Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri, Board of Curators, c2003.


[1] Eisenstein, 347.

 

[2] Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, printers also used false imprints to pirate popular works and turn a quick profit – but that’s another story.