Q&A with Dr. Anna Peppard on Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero

From Superman, created in 1938, to the transmedia DC and Marvel universes of today, superheroes have always been sexy. And their sexiness has always been controversial, inspiring censorship and moral panic. Yet though it has inspired jokes and innuendos, accusations of moral depravity, and sporadic academic discourse, the topic of superhero sexuality is like superhero sexuality itself—seemingly obvious yet conspicuously absent. Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero is the first scholarly book specifically devoted to unpacking the superhero genre’s complicated relationship with sexuality.

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Exploring sexual themes and imagery within mainstream comic books, television shows, and films as well as independent and explicitly pornographic productions catering to various orientations and kinks, Supersex offers a fresh—and lascivious—perspective on the superhero genre’s historical and contemporary popularity. Across fourteen essays touching on Superman, Batman, the X-Men, and many others, Anna F. Peppard and her contributors present superhero sexuality as both dangerously exciting and excitingly dangerous, encapsulating the superhero genre’s worst impulses and its most productively rebellious ones. Supersex argues that sex is at the heart of our fascination with superheroes, even—and sometimes especially—when the capes and tights stay on.

This week, we are attending the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Meeting virtually, during which we will offer a discount on our new and award-winning film, media, and comics studies books. Apply the discount code EXSCMS during checkout on www.utexaspress.com to receive 30% off the full list price of any book, plus free domestic shipping. This offer expires April 21, 2021.

To celebrate the publication of Supersex, we asked Dr. Peppard some questions about her research.

In the introduction, you present Supersex through many examples that fit a framework of absence and presence, a tense relationship in which censorship can ultimately amplify the very thing meant to be muted. Would you describe the Batman: Damned #1 case?

In September of 2018, Batman: Damned #1 went on sale. It was the first of several scheduled releases within DC’s newly minted Black Label imprint, designed to appeal to “mature” readers. It was also the first on-panel appearance of the Dark Knight’s penis. The context isn’t sexual; the Batpenis is clearly but incidentally visible in one panel of a page where Bruce Wayne strips naked so that his computer may scan him for knife wounds. And the comic’s violence didn’t attract any significant criticism; the issue concludes with a splash page presenting the Joker’s mutilated and crucified corpse. Yet shortly after the release of Batman: Damned #1, every major pop and geek culture outlet ran something about the penis revelation. Mainstream outlets, like Vice and the Guardian, as well as talk shows like Late Night with Seth Myers, also picked up the story. The “Know Your Meme” page for “Batman’s penis controversy” covers several additional flashpoints, including a much-quoted tweet dubbing Batman’s penis “L’il Wayne.”

While much of the chatter was decidedly juvenile, female and queer fans were vocal in defending the appearance of Batman’s penis as an example of equal opportunity exploitation in a genre know for its hypersexualization of women, and as a challenge to the genre’s historical homophobia. Yet DC responded swiftly to try to put Batman’s penis back under wraps. Two weeks after the issue was released, DC co-president Jim Lee blamed the penis on “production errors,” while DC’s other co-president, Dan DiDio, bluntly stated, “It’s something we wished never happened.” Digital editions and subsequent reprintings of Batman: Damned #1 censored the Batpenis by clouding it in shadow. In some ways, however, this absence has only enhanced “L’il Wayne’s” presence. The decision to censor the original comic immediately made it a collector’s item; months later, signed copies of the original (uncensored) Batman: Damned #1 were listed on eBay for over $1,600 USD. Ironically, though, the same sealed plastic case that guarantees these signed comics’ mint-ness ensures they can never be read; as such, the visible penis that makes this comic collectible will remain invisible. But, of course, the fascination we have with superhero sexuality—whether it upsets or excites us—ensures the Batpenis will live on; it’s easily Google-able for any interested parties.

Given that we exist in what many scholars have described as a “pornified” culture, in which pictures and video of virtually any sex act imaginable are only a click away, the uproar over a single, not-overtly-sexual image of Batman’s penis does an especially good job of demonstrating the power and danger bound up in superhero sexuality. Supersex analyzes the evolution of that power and danger across decades, mediums, and moments of production and reception, unpacking why superhero sexuality matters so much, even to those who (supposedly) don’t want to see it, or even acknowledge its possibility.

Considering its global appeal and resonance, what makes the superhero a “quintessentially American (i.e., United States) phenomenon,” especially through the lens of Supersex (17)?

Scholars have often described the United States as uniquely shaped by popular myth. By popular myth, I mean the myths created by and disseminated through popular and mass culture. The American West of the 1890s was a real place, yet our understanding of it is inseparable from the pop mythologizing of it that existed alongside the reality. This example is relevant to the superhero genre because the American frontier indelibly shaped enduring notions of American heroism as supremely individualistic, stoic, and, of course, superheroic; while Supersex focuses largely on conventional superheroes (i.e, those characters following in the legacy of Superman), the building blocks of the superhero are present in the mythologizing of frontier heroes like Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and even Teddy Roosevelt as indomitable supermen reshaped (or transformed) by the experience of “conquering” the frontier. For superheroes, the frontier is modern science and the modern American city. But similar themes remain: superheroes are changed by modern science and the modern city into supremely individualistic beings capable of conquering the threats science and cities pose to conventional (American) understandings of society and subjecthood. Sexuality has always had a vexed placed within these myths. Frontier heroes typically reject sexuality, associating it with domestication (and thus, feminization). Superheroes have often functioned similarly, though in both cases, male heroes’ spurning of female companionship contributes to intense homosocial bonds that often contain elements of homoeroticism. Leslie Fiedler references this in his classic study Love and Death in the American Novel. So does psychiatrist Fredric Wertham in his infamous anti-comics diatribe Seduction of the Innocent, originally published in 1954, in which he claimed that Batman and Robin represented “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” Wertham’s book was instrumental in the creation of the Comics Code Authority, a highly strict censoring body that would effectively ban depictions of LGBTQ identities in superhero comics for over thirty years.

More generally, superheroes are an especially useful illustration of the powerful contradictions informing American sexual ideals. On the one hand, American culture intensely commodifies sexuality. On the other hand, the Wertham example—and the recent controversy about Batman’s penis—demonstrates a concurrent and similarly intense prudishness. Throughout, Supersex discusses superhero sexuality as defined by the contradiction of presence and absence. The superhero genre’s spandex costumes and bulging male muscles and female curves (not to mention the abundance of sexual metaphors communicated through various superpowers) mean that it is inescapably erotic. Yet for much of the superhero genre’s history, sexuality of any kind—let alone sexual diversity of any kind—was effectively outlawed. Supersex examines how stories and fans have negotiated these restrictions and contradictions, within specific eras and over time, in ways that should help our ongoing efforts to understand the larger cultural contradictions informing—and sometimes informed by—the superhero genre.

The sexuality of superheroes can be, as you describe, both “dangerously exciting and excitingly dangerous (17).” We often think of superheroes as invincible, and yet violence threatens many for their sexuality, orientation, identity, and so forth. How does this fantasy address or redress our reality, especially considering the sexual violence we see historically in comics and comix?

Superhero stories—in comics and all types of media—have a definite sexual violence problem. Historically, female characters have borne the brunt of this violence. This is a bit inevitable, due to the nature of female superheroes’ costumes and bodies. Because female superheroes tend to be hypersexualized, any violence they’re involved with or subjected to is inevitably going to be sexualized in a way that male superhero violence often isn’t. But this isn’t just a visual problem; it’s also a narrative one. Sexual violence perpetrated against female superheroes or other female characters within superhero stories is often used as titillation for a presumed male audience, and as a plot device furthering the character development of male superheroes. When it’s the latter, it’s known as “fridging.” The term fridging was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone in reference to a Green Lantern story from 1994, in which the title character arrives home to find his girlfriend murdered, dismembered, and stuffed in his refrigerator. While telling stories about sexual violence can, of course, be very productive, instances of fridging participate in the dehumanization of female characters by ignoring their emotional reactions to such violence; the female characters suffer to justify male emotions and violence, rather than to tell thoughtful stories about female experiences or the larger social issue of sexual violence. There are many other problematic tropes related to violence in superhero stories. For instance, several of the Supersex contributors highlight the relationship between sexual deviance and villainy; evil characters are often coded as queer.

On the other hand, the fact that the superhero genre uses violent oppositions to tell its stories can make it a very productive place to study the thinking behind such oppositions. In addition, violence can, on occasion, destabilize gender and sexual norms. Violent clashes between male heroes and villains—in which spandex-clad bodies are dramatically and almost sensually entwined—can be read as implicitly queer. The violence enacted by female superheroes can also be subversive even—and sometimes especially—when those female superheroes are hypersexualized. By combining sex with violence, female superheroes can challenge the passivity associated with femininity, or objectification more generally. Supersex’s contributors interrogate all these possibilities.

As a highly visual medium, comics communicate so much via costuming and bodies. Is there a type of coded language (in text or marketing) that resonates with Supersex?

Supersex foregrounds the superhero genre as a “body genre”—that is, a genre that’s centrally concerned with telling stories about and with bodies. And the conceit of superpowers and the technologies of comics—wherein anything that can be drawn can be believed—and CGI—which is, in some respects, a new form of cartooning—allow superhero bodies to tell particularly fascinating stories. These bodies are prone to exaggerations that make them superconductors for gender, sexual, racial, and other bodily norms; in many cases, superhero bodies are designed to represent cultural ideals, often in less-than-progressive ways. Yet the exaggeration of superhero bodies is also key to their ability to resist conservative norms. There’s always a measure of homoeroticism or queerness to the form-fitting and frequently flamboyant costumes worn by most male superheroes, which their exaggerated bodies—which are certainly meant to be admired—further showcase. Because objectifying female bodies is less unusual in our culture, the hypersexualized bodies and costumes of female superheroes are sometimes less deviant. Yet even the most stereotypical female superheroes also resist norms by being strong and violent, and even just through their ability to be treated as heroic while wearing costumes that might result in shaming in the “real world.” All genders and orientations of superheroes are also, by virtue of their superpowers, physically non-normative; superhero bodies routinely sprout sticky tentacles or fiery tendrils, merge with rock or metal, and liquify, stretch, bend, or transform into a thousand different sexed and sexless shapes.

Supersex extensively explores the inherent queerness of superheroes, and the consequences of that queerness; many contributors debate the degree to which this queerness is subversive, given its longtime “official” rejection under the Comics Code and after. It’s always important to keep in mind that the fantastic-ness of the superhero body allows it to be both inherently queer and defiantly literal; to repurpose a famous Freudianism, sometimes a flaming teenager is just a flaming teenager.

As the comics medium and superhero genre tracks across all age groups, can you describe when you first encountered comics, and how your engagement has evolved?

I first encountered superheroes through my passionate love, as a twelve-year-old girl, of the television show Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I revisited my love of Lois & Clark for my chapter in Supersex, which examines that show’s rare privileging of a female gaze in its presentation of Clark Kent/Superman as a “sensitive new age man.” I didn’t get seriously into comics until my early twenties, largely for reasons of access; I grew up in a rural area, and didn’t have many places to buy them (the gas station occasionally had an issue of Superman, but it wasn’t something you could count on). But I still managed to fall in love with superhero comics in my teen years, and it was their unique presentation of bodies that did it. I still recall my fixation on a particular panel of a particular issue of a Spider-Man comic; I’m not sure of the issue number, but I’m quite sure it was drawn by John Romita Jr. It was an image of Peter Parker waking up from a nightmare, shirtless and sweaty, in his darkened bedroom. My teenage self stared at that panel long enough to memorize it. I remember trying to understand my fixation on it in a number of different ways. I recall touching the page, as though touching the paper could get me closer to touching Peter; I wanted to know what all those lithe muscles felt like, but I also wanted to comfort him in this moment of private vulnerability, to stroke his cheek and chest and tell him it was just a dream, to urge him to come back to bed. I also acted out the scene, trying to imagine what it would feel like to have those lithe muscles, those super-senses, and the sensation of rightness and calmness that must come with those things, even (or especially) in a moment of crisis. Partly, this experience is indicative of typical teenage hormones—the stuff we all go through when we go through puberty, trying to figure out who we are, what we want, and how we fit into the world. But I also think there’s something about this experience that’s especially typical of teenage interactions with comics and superheroes. I was fixated on this image because comics allow you to do that; their presentation of stories in symbolic fragments means you control how long you look at each image, and, to an extent, how you look at it. I was also fixated because Peter Parker is a superhero; it was the combined strength and vulnerability of his hypervisible body that most attracted me.

When I rediscovered superhero comics in my early twenties (facilitated by the growth of digital comics and my moving to Toronto), I fell even more deeply in love. The same things that interested me about comics and superheroes as a teenager—namely, their unique presentation of hypervisible bodies—felt even more relevant and appealing once I started studying things like queer theory and embodiment feminism. Still, when I started my PhD in English Literature at York University, I wasn’t originally going to write about superheroes; I was going to write about representations of gender in the literary naturalism of Frank Norris. But I eventually came to realize that superhero comics were an ideal place to explore the theories and philosophies of gender, sex, and the body I cared most deeply about. I wanted to talk about how bodies tell stories; superhero bodies tell some truly fascinating stories. I’m still obsessed with these stories, both reading them, and trying to understand them. Supersex is my latest attempt to figure out what these stories mean, to me, to other fans and fan-scholars, and to our culture at large. I’m sure it won’t be my last!

Anna F. Peppard is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow in Brock University’s department of communication, popular culture, and film. She has published widely on representations of gender, race, and sexuality in popular media, including comic books, television, and sports culture. She is a regular contributor to the podcast Three Panel Contrast.

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Q&A with David William Foster on Latin American Graphic Narratives

Comic narrative traditions expand well beyond the multi-billion dollar Marvel and DC universes. Just as Christopher Pizzino has written about literary communities unfairly dismissing comics as juvenile in Arresting Development, Professor David William Foster

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has examined the role of provocative graphic narratives in Argentine and Brazilian cultures, where authors and artists are grappling with issues like modernity, globalization, and cross-cultural identity. He illuminates the different social, political, and historical conditions from which these Latin American graphic narratives emerged in his new book El Eternauta, Daytripper, and Beyond: Graphic Narrative in Argentina and Brazil. 

Dr. Foster is Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, where he also leads the Brazilian Studies Program. He is author of numerous books, including Argentine, Mexican, and Guatemalan Photography: Feminist, Queer, and Post-Masculinist Perspectives, Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema, and Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing.

We asked longtime UT Press author Dr. Foster about his latest research and how it intersects with the extensive research he's done on Latin American cultural output over the course of his career.

El Eternauta’s author Héctor Germán Oesterheld was disappeared during the so-called Dirty War in Argentina. How did this and his text’s political undertones help to solidify graphic narrative prestige in Latin America?

Although the term “graphic novel” was not in use at the time—nor is it particularly common even today in Argentina—what we recognize as such, as a more sophisticated version of the venerable comic book, was already extensively published in Argentina. And such publications had already begun to include running series and book-length plot developments. Osterheld was at his prime when he was disappeared, and that fact enhanced his reputation within the artistic community and its various circle of followers. Moreover, the fact that the science-fiction plot of El Eternauta look eerily like a parable of the military dictatorship of the 1960s through the 1980s—that is, quite avant la letter—only served to solidify the fame has to the present day, some 70 years after it was first created. 

H. G. Oesterheld and F. Solano López, El Eternauta

What do you hope readers will come to appreciate about Latin American graphic narratives?

First of all, that this format existed in Argentina quite some decades before anything like it emerged in the United States and that it exemplifies the way in Buenos Aires reaffirms, over and over again, its role as the most innovative Latin American center of cultural production. While there is today a major Brazilian production that I represent in the book, it is much more recent, although it has its own dynamic creative parameters, because São Paulo, in the Portuguese language, vies for the attention Buenos Aires merits in Spanish. Nowhere else in Latin America is there anything of the creative qualities of the production of these two countries, although promising material is beginning to come out elsewhere. Interestingly, Mexico continues to host a large mass popular inventory of a more traditional comic book nature, without out yet having anything approaching the overall artistic/intellectual tenor of the Argentine and Brazilian material.

How has globalization informed Brazil’s graphic narrative output?

Brazil is the country in Latin American that has most vigorously embraced globalization. This is for many reasons, but a principal one is in order to promote its national interests beyond what it views as having as a national language one that is spoken in only one major country of the world, unlike Spanish, which can point to a dozen major societies that use it. Thus globalization for Brazil means, among other things, showcasing its ability to compete in a world language like English. Hence, one finds in Brazil a significant cultural production in or that references English, along with many pro-American sociocultural attitudes in Brazil.

F. Moon and G. Bá, Daytripper

You’ve done extensive research on Latin American visual arts—photography, popular comics, narrative and documentary filmmaking. How does this book intersect with the research you’ve done on these other visual mediums?

When I was a university student in the late 1950s and early 1960s (my PhD is from 1964), visual culture as not a part of so-called Spanish departments. So I concentrated on what was, which was literature. But while I still work extensively with literary texts, I began to discover that my real talent was with visual culture, that I had a “knack” of quickly grasping the visual. Moreover, it was not difficult to see the continuities between the literary and the visual, beginning with the way so many films are based on literary texts or how photographs or other art work may illustrate literary texts. If there is anything original about my career, it has been the ability to sense where the profession is going and thus to be able to pioneer new research areas. I have been a pioneer in these areas of visual arts, as I have been in Latin American Jewish studies and Latin American queer and gender studies. The good fortune to work with so much material has certainly enriched immeasurably my career.

The literary text in a graphic novel is often more spare than traditional prose. Is your interest in linguistics issues heightened by the economy of language typical of this literary medium?

I am always interested in—really, quite obsessed by—language issues. Like everyone in the “Spanish” profession, I started as a language teacher and still find time to include much commentary about language in my teaching and to focus on language matters in my writing. But I must confess I haven’t really given much thought to whether the so-called spare nature of prose in the graphic novel requires particular commentary. Certainly, the semiotic burden is born by the image: one can have a graphic novel with no language, but not a graphic novel with no images. Some graphic novels have fairly extensive prose texts—Fábio Moon’s and Gabriel Bá’s work for example—but the first thing that occurs to me is that the lives of common citizens that are often featured in the graphic novel simply means that “real everyday” people speak a sparer language than so-called exceptional people might in, say, a novel of psychological development. But undoubtedly, your question goads me to be more reflective about this matter, and I will include it in the course on Latin American graphic narrative that I will be teaching in Spring 2017.

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Reading Comics Like a Grownup

The graphic novel is commonly thought to have matured from pulp infancy to literary adulthood. However, comic writers remain burdened by the stigma of literary illegitimacy. In his new book Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, Christopher Pizzino questions this idea that comics have "grown up" in the literary community's perception, arguing that the medium’s 

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history of censorship and marginalization endures in the minds of its present-day readers and, crucially, its authors. 

Christopher Pizzino is an assistant professor of contemporary US literature at the University of Georgia. We asked him to reflect on why he wrote his book.

Reading Comics Like a Grownup

By Christopher Pizzino

Some years ago, I had the interesting experience of seeing my name on a list entitled “One Hundred Arguments Against Tenure,” featured on an academic watchdog site. The reason for my inclusion on the list: I study and teach comics. The website didn’t mention which comics I studied, or the way I taught them. Apparently, teaching or studying any comics, for any reason, was out of bounds.

I wasn’t surprised or anxious to learn that someone was arguing for my intellectual worthlessness on that basis. The idea that comics don’t merit academic study is scarcely new. But over time, such experiences have made me ever more curious. Exactly how—and why—do some people continue to believe that taking comics seriously is absurd (and for the academic, something that ought to get one fired)?

The how is sometimes easy to see, and the more I’ve paid attention to it, the more stories I have to tell. A student in one of my American literature courses once stopped by my office to submit an essay. As she turned to leave, she paused in the doorway, glanced back with a strange look on her face, and blurted, “Is that a comic book?” I was, in fact, reading a volume of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s science fiction series Y: The Last Man. Flipping through its pages and quickly handing it back as if it might somehow be contaminated, the student gave me the distinct impression that she had no faith in my ability to grade her essay on Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.

This was before I became known for teaching courses on comics in my department. Many college students absorb some cultural prejudices from their parents and teachers; they assume that comics reading is something only kids do, and that to be a grownup student of literature is to leave the funnies behind. Thus, some students initially had difficulty understanding that the same professor who taught Cervantes, Austen, Woolf and Achebe in History and Theory of the Novel might, in other courses, assign books with pictures as well as words. That notion has had some time to sink in. Nowadays, for every student who seems to believe that the phrase “comics studies” is a contradiction in terms, several others are eager to study the medium, and to find out what words and pictures can do in the hands of great creators with important things to say and show.

This leads us to part of the why: often there is simply a lack of opportunity to find out that comics are not, in fact, the enemy of culture. Few adults in the US read comics—even fewer than the number who read books at all—and there aren’t many ways they can influence larger public perception of what it means for a grownup to read a comic book. This helps to explain why most adults who do read comics have stories like mine, tales of a moment when someone—a friend, teacher, fellow student, or stranger on the street—would let them know that studying comics, or just reading them in public, can be like having the word ILLITERATE tattooed on one’s forehead.

Censorship in Comics for Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week (September 27 through October 3, 2015) is the book community’s annual opportunity to celebrate the freedom to read, and draw attention to those who hinder that right. Intellectual freedom is a core value of our mission; and the freedom to read is as integral to that value as the freedom to publish. 

This year's theme is Young Adult fiction—one of the most regularly challenged categories of books in libraries and schools across the country. We don't publish young adult fiction, but we are launching a new comic book studies series called World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series with Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González as series editors. The series will include monographs and edited volumes that focus on the analysis and interpretation of comic books and graphic nonfiction from around the world. Books published in the series will bring analytical approaches from such fields as literature, art history, cultural studies, communication studies, media studies, and film studies, among others to help define the comic book studies field at a time of great vitality and growth.

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The Association of American University Presses is an official sponsor of Banned Books Week. To join the conversation, we're posting an excerpt from a recent issue of The Velvet Light Trap dealing with censorship in the comic book industry. To read Shawna Kidman's piece in full, you can access it through Project Muse, visit your local library, or purchase a single issue of The Velvet Light Trap on our website.

Contribute to the banned books conversation on social media with the hashtags #bannedbooks and #bannedbooksweek.

"Self-Regulation through Distribution: Censorship and the Comic Book Industry in 1954"
By Shawna Kidman

In the early 1950s, comic books boasted a readership of over seventy million Americans, each of whom consumed an average of six comics a month. There were two comic books published for every one book, with each copy likely passed on to more than three readers. And then, quite suddenly, the market crashed. Between 1954 and 1955, sales plummeted by 50 percent, from eighty million copies each month to just forty million. By 1956 more than half of the extant publishers had closed their doors, and two-thirds of the six hundred titles appearing monthly on newsstands had vanished.1 Just like that, comic books went from being one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America to a medium struggling for its survival.2

At the very same moment, as the comic book market was beginning its dramatic decline, the medium was undergoing a crisis in the political sphere. Psychiatrists, church officials, members of PTAs, and local politicians had for years been trying to link comic books to juvenile delinquency, illiteracy, and moral corruption. Finally, in the spring of 1954, the government got involved, and the Senate Judiciary Committee held televised hearings on the comic book industry and its alleged corruption of America’s youth. Pressured by this public relations disaster and the threat of local and state censorship, the major comic book publishers joined forces to form the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). This trade organization drafted a code of self-censorship and created an administrative body to enforce it known as the Comics Code Authority (CCA). Like the Production Code Administration (PCA) created by Hollywood twenty years earlier, the CCA would issue a seal of approval to those titles it deemed morally appropriate. Heavily promoted by the industry, this response seemed to satisfy government officials and consumers alike; within the year, interest in the controversy had faded almost entirely from public view.3 But the dramatic decline in sales was already well under way.

Most writers have characterized the anti-comics crusade and the simultaneous market crash in primarily cultural terms, drawing a causal link between these two events. The episode has been sensationalized in many journalistic accounts, which create a hero and villain respectively in the figures of EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines, an innovator responsible for “some of the best comic books ever published,” and Fredric Wertham, an “insane” psychiatrist who told “apocalyptic” lies about the dangers of mass media.4 In this version of the story, the Senate or “EC hearings” are recast as a trial on taste, Bill Gaines is understood as their “principal target,” and Wertham is accused of censoring Gaines right “out of existence.”5 Scholars meanwhile tend to point to social trends, blaming the controversy on McCarthyism; seething generational battles; culture wars rooted in class, money, religion, and politics; and fundamental struggles over “who had the right and the responsibility to shape American culture.”6 With a focus on comic book content or the cultural milieu, many of these descriptions marginalize the market crash itself, which is depicted as merely a side effect of censorship. Some have even argued that the anti-comics crusade was “almost solely responsible for the drastic decline in sales and the near death of the industry during the 1950s.”7

Figure 1. Comics Code Authority Seal, 1954. For more than three decades, this seal from the CCA would grace the cover of the majority of comic books sold in America.

Too often left out of these historical accounts is the way in which both censorship and shrinking audiences are fundamentally also industrial, economic, and political occurrences. Censorship in particular often seems like an issue that is primarily value-based and culturally contingent. However, in the context of mass media, the regulation of content necessarily involves vast and powerful infrastructures of enforcement capable of containing the inherent disorderliness of popular culture. So while we should not give up on analyzing the texts and ideologies at the center of media censorship, it is equally important to consider the material foundations that support systems of both restriction and circulation. More broadly, as Philip Napoli has noted, it is possible to use the political economy of media as a useful “foundation of knowledge for a wide range of important scholarly inquiries into the behaviors of media industries, as well as the broader political and cultural ramifications of these behaviors.”8 A better understanding of the industrial context in which most media is produced and initially circulated can lead to a more profound insight into all aspects of culture, including its active consumption, transformation, and recirculation by audiences and fans, the latter of which has been a particular interest of comic book studies.9