Stop me if you ve heard this one before: superhero media s gone woke. There s some sort of agenda
at play here, from the big companies, from DC, from Marvel, from Disney, and it s plainly
evident that this is the case, if you just look at the source material!
People say this kind of thing a lot. And it s silly, obviously, for all the reasons you
re already aware of but it s also a weird point to make for another reason, one you
might not be aware of. Because the knee-jerk reaction here might be to give a response
like, hey, it isn t the sixties anymore modern comics and adaptations can either slavishly
recreate the characters, dynamics, worldbuilding, and so on, that these characters started out
with, in a different world, or they can try to make a product for the 21st century, for
modern audiences, and doing the latter doesn t erase those origins, it just builds on them
but I think doing that kinda misses the point. Or, at least, misses a point.
There s an idea that s dormant beneath a lot of discussions like this, even among defenders
of the culture s efforts toward greater inclusivity, that superhero media, whether on-page or on-screen,
has diversified over the past few decades to match a diversifying audience, a diversifying
world (or at least, a diversifying America). There s an idea that that the mostly white,
mostly male-led, implicitly protestant, implicitly hetero status quo of the fifties and sixties,
the silver and bronze age of comics, where most of the current A-list characters were
born, or matured into their current versions, was fine for the time, but that since then?
The world s changed, and that this culture needs to reflect this. While I m sure there
is some truth to this for instance, I ve no doubt that more figures from minority groups
read comics today than did fifty years ago it s only a partial truth. Because - that
status quo? That time before Carol Danvers went feminist, before Superman was Kal-el
s bisexual son, before Wakanda was a hyper-advanced, uncolonized land? That was not a mirror to
the world outside. America was diverse African, Asian, latino-Americans,
they were already there. Of course they were! They d been there decades, centuries even!
Remember, the 50s and 60s saw the eruption of civil rights movements and the popularisation
of second-wave feminism. This was a time of tumult and social progress, the likes of which
weren t seen again for decades afterward. The assumption you may well make, if you think
about this, is that maybe these things were starting to change, but that change takes
time to organically flow into the nooks and crannies of middle-class culture. It s not
like there was some agenda that was insulating these comic-books, these worlds, these characters,
from the social and cultural forces of the day, right? Right? Oh no, it s the foreshadowing
police! You ve probably heard of the comics code authority.
A lot of people are aware that this existed, but only in vague terms. They know that it
banned comics including words like horror and terror in their titles, that it banned
nudity, but not too much more. What are they missing then? Well, for one? The context.
The CCA was an arm of the conservative moral panic that swept the nation after Joseph McCarthy
and his Red Scare crashed into public consciousness. It was based, indirectly on the Hays Code,
which Hollywood adopted around 1930 following government pressure a set of strictly-enforced
moralistic guidelines drafted mainly by Will Hayes, a Presbyterian elder and former head
of the Republican National Committee. That code was based around cleaning up Hollywood
s output, and it prohibited a lot of stuff, including inter-racial relations, offense
to the clergy, and sexual perversion, which, yes, means anything remotely non-hetero. The
Comics Code, though, was far stricter owing to the specific moral panic that children
were at risk of being perverted by deviant ideas, i.e., stuff outside of normative Christian
morality. The more things change, eh? Basically, if a book didn t meet code, it didn t get
sold. And, to begin with, at least? That meant basically anything even slightly outside of
ideal conservative mores. I m not exaggerating. One now-infamous case
saw comics publisher William Gaines attempt to reprint a pre-code story named Judgement
Day in 1956 after the CCA had been established. The story was rejected because the protagonist
was black. It didn t matter that the book actually met the code, illustrated a moral
lesson, using this character to tell an anti-discrimination story the CCA wouldn t approve. Gaines did
what countless others wouldn t have, and doubtless didn t do, in similar situations now lost
to history he called their bluff, and threatened to take this story to the press if the Judgement
Day reprint didn t get clearance, and eventually, the Code Authority did relent - this time.
Because after this, the CCA kept objecting, kept restricting Gaines comics, until this
pressure drove him out of the comic-book industry altogether.
The code s cultural chokehold extended beyond race, though. Per QualityComicx.com, one central
effort of the code was to create an industry-wide interest in the value of women in the home
and the sanctity of marriage. As a result women were kept outnumbered, outranked, and
generally on the peripheries of these worlds. Pre-code female characters weren t exactly
brilliantly-realised in the golden age, they mostly featured as little more than sex objects,
or victims of brutality, but there were exceptions, and those exceptions were enjoyed by women.
When Wonder Woman was first introduced, her readership was around 50% female! Needless
to say, as the code dominated, this changed. In the following decades, women featured mostly
as companions, allies, sometimes heroines, yes, but almost never leaders, second-best
to men. Most of Marvel s major female characters, even to this day, got their start under the
code, and their early existence was characterised by domesticity and subordinance. Sue Storm
almost immediately becomes Sue Richards. Jane Foster? Ditzy nurse and sometimes-girlfriend.
Carol Danvers started as Captain Marvel s girlfriend, her subsequent heroism is named
for and follows after the former, male, hero, and so on. It was only as the Code s influence
lessened in the following decades that a modicum of independence, any hint of a non-normative,
non-nuclear, gasp feminist conception of womanhood would be granted to these characters, paving
the way for their current iterations. While the code wasn t as explicit around non-Christian
religious practices as it was with, say, anything other than normative sexual practices, diversifying
on this front was often just as taboo. We ve touched on this a little in some previous
videos, and I ve no doubt we will again in the future, but while the largely Jewish writers
of these early stories injected their heroes with fantasies of a successful double life,
of passing and assimilation, they couldn t really go any further. The etiquette was to
leave things ambiguous, but wherever necessary, to hint that these characters were basically
Christian, and mostly protestants. Exceptions did begin to appear, but again, mostly once
the Code had loosened its grip on the industry. It s probably also worth pointing out that
while the early comic-book industry was largely male and largely Jewish thanks to, y know,
the whole medium being built by Jewish creatives in the preceding years these mostly white,
mostly male-dominated comic-book status quos aren t just the result of a fairly localised,
somewhat insular industry. The writers of that Judgement Day story were white and Jewish.
There was a segregation law on the books until 1957 that prevented Black comic writers and
illustrators from working in mainstream comic studios, for goodness sake.
So this isn t a story about comics not being diverse purely because the industry s lineage
was naturally homogenous. This is a story about systemic blocks to artistic expression
that ended up shaping our image of classic comics. This is a story about conservative
moral panic, and the codification of that panic. This is a story about an agenda and
not some speculative agenda, cooked up by conspiratorial losers fishing for cheap clicks
on the internet, but an agenda which objectively, empirically existed, and whose effects are
still being felt, and almost invisibly underpin every discussion of diversity and accuracy
in comic-book media we have today. Because of segregationist laws like the above,
because of the Comics Code Authority and the way it swaddled this nascent medium in a deceptive
blanket of McCarthy-era normative values, the upshot is this all subsequent efforts
to diversify and expand the demographics of superheroism look like overcorrection, even
if statistically - they aren t, because of what they re being compared to, subconsciously
or otherwise, this enforced white, male, protestant, hetero status quo of the 50s and 60s. And
the salient point here isn t merely that this status quo doesn t reflect the world of today
it s that it didn t reflect then, either, not accurately, not authentically.
So maybe today s comics, today s adaptations are more diverse than a lot of the material
they re ultimately based on. But maybe that basic fact isn t evidence of some modern,
far-reaching woke agenda operating in the shadows at Marvel and DC. Maybe this recent
push of inclusion is just the absence of a previous agenda whose effects you d been taking
for granted. Food for thought. And as we wrap up, I m sure some of you are
thinking it s awfully bold of me to have titled this little discussion about these codes and
agendas the superhero diversity problem. But that s not this video s title specifically.
That s the title of this video s series, a series that begins here because there is a
problem, a broad, multi-faceted, one, in the way this discourse is had and instead of trying
to address it all in one gargantuan video, I m going to chip away at it in shorter episodes
like this one every now and then, maybe every couple of weeks, maybe every couple of months,
maybe just whenever something else I m working on doesn t get done in time, and I need a
smaller video to upload. That s what happened this time I m putting together another Andor
video and I didn t manage to get it done for today. That s coming soon, though, and I think
it s some of my best work yet, so if you re new here, make sure you subscribe. You won
t want to miss it. Either way, I d love to hear some thoughts on all this below, and
special thanks as always to all my Patreon supporters especially Tig.