Revisit the comic industry of 1971 with Multiversity’s history column, with a special focus on changes to the CCA and attention from academia.
1971 Overview
At the start of 1971, comic prices were a stable and standard fifteen cents. By the close of the year, prices would higher but nonstandard. DC raised prices to twenty five cents and bumped their page counts to compensate. Marvel matched the quarter cover price for a very brief time, then reduced prices to twenty cents at the old page count. Marvel’s market share had been rising since the mid 1960s and overtaking DC had seemed inevitable to most industry observers, but this temporary price difference accelerated the move and Marvel became the top comic publisher for the first time.
Meanwhile, despite the dominance of superheroes, it was Casper the Friendly ghost who proved popular enough with the public to become the official mascot of the Apollo 16 moon mission. Admittedly, this may have been because of the Paramount cartoons instead of the Harvey comics.
In other minor news, Marvel considered changing Black Panther’s name to Black Leopard to avoid association with the militant organization. Obviously they decided not to move forward with that plan. Fun fact: Panthers are Leopards with a pigmentation mutation. Clearly, Marvel missed a golden opportunity to raise T’Challa’s profile by adding him to the X-Men roster.
The Comics Code Authority (CCA) had ruled comic content since cover date January 1955, limiting the creativity of creators by restricting them from such basic story elements as an unrespectable authority figure or a villain with a well-thought out plan for bank robbery. Nor could they depict drug use of any kind.
That last one was a problem for Stan Lee when the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare asked him to publish a story about the dangers of drug abuse. Lee responded with a three-part story for “Amazing Spider-Man” that was naturally rejected by the CCA. When Lee pointed out that the content was specifically requested by a government agency, the answer was the same. It later came out that the CCA’s decision was a case of bad timing – the CCA administrator was on vacation and his VP didn’t want to make that kind of executive decision independently. Lee chose to publish the story anyway, a bold decision that could have blown up in his face.
For fifteen years the CCA had been viewed as the only thing that could save the comic industry from extinction. At its creation, it promised distributors that comics with the CCA seal were worthy of being distributed, and any comic without it should be returned to the publisher. There were cracks in this façade immediately – neither Dell nor Gilberton were hurt by the seal’s absence – but the fear from the 1954 senate hearings ran deep. By publishing “Amazing Spider-Man” #96-98 (cover date May-July 1971, released January-March 1971) without the seal, Lee was risking a retailer and/or distributor boycott.
Lee brought the problem to a June 1970 CMAA meeting, the association of publishers that created the CCA. There was general agreement about revising the code, but Lee’s story remained unapproved. Publishers were asked to craft suggestions for how the code could be revised. They reviewed the suggestions at a special meeting in December 1970, and some changes were ratified in January 1971, the same month “Amazing Spider-Man” #96 hit without the seal. At a special February 1971 meeting, Marvel President Charles Goodman promised his company would never publish another comic without advance CCA approval.
Despite the changes made to the code, all the moralistic hand wringing about the appropriateness of an anti-drug message prevented what could have been a more significant change for the industry. The code-free issues of “Amazing Spider-Man” received the same coverage and sales as any other, proving empirically that neither distributors nor retailers paid attention to the seal, if they even knew what it meant. If publishers had been bolder, they might have thrown off their self-imposed shackles years earlier. Instead, the CCA continued to cast a shadow over the industry for decades to come.
Comics in Academia
Continued below
Comic books had been receiving popular coverage for a while, starting with Jules Feifer’s nostalgic “The Great Comic Book Heroes” in 1965. In 1970, there were the historical books “Unembarrassed Muse, “Sterenko’s History”, and “All in Color for a Dime”. In 1971, Les Daniels published the first analytical book on comics, “Comix: The History of Comic Books in America,” covering the birth of the medium through the 1960s undergrounds.
Once his course was approved for the 1972-1973 school year, Uslan thought of a way to use it to promote himself for future opportunities – he called the Indianapolis office for the United Press International, a wire service like the Associated Press. He asked for the education desk, then yelled angry at the poor reporter who answered, demanding to know why they weren’t covering the waste of tax payer dollars that was a college course on comic books. It took a few days, but soon Uslan was receiving interview requests from so many media outlets that he couldn’t take them all.
The added attention boosted interest in the course, and the volume of requests to take it as a correspondence course led the school to ask him to offer it as such. Uslan initially declined because there wasn’t a textbook the correspondence students could refer to. IU didn’t let that stop them – they paid Uslan to write a text book. By the time the class finally started, he had received calls from both Stan Lee and Carmine Infantino offering assistance if he needed any. Every lecture was attended by the press.
