Text - Rhodes University

Wertham's book The Seduction of the Innocent was influential in a campaign that
pressured the comic industry into establishing a code promising morally "safer" comics.
Sex and violence had to be censored, and proper respect for authorities (including
parents and the Church) had to be shown.
Barker notes how the terminology applied to comics was influencing their development:
"... among the headlines of the time were many denouncing 'those so-called
comics'. It was not just that they were not funny; they refused to be nonserious
and harmless. Of course there was nothing wrong with producing
witty, naive, and innocent fun for children. The problem was that nothing
else was permitted. The definition of a comic had become a constraining
force, requiring publishers to abide by it." (Barker, 1989, p.9)
For nearly 10 years any concern with comics concentrated only on the threat they
presented to the youth, either through the corruption of values or by causing verbal
illiteracy.
By the late 1960s many of the children who had grown up with horror and crime comics
had become hippies. Seeking ways to attack the Establishment, inevitably they turned to
the medium that had apparently threatened their own minds and souls in childhood, and
undergrounds were born.
The artists themselves used the term komix; "underground' referred to the way these
comics were distributed. Printed in the many newsletters and magazines that were sold
in shops serving the new communities of hippies, komix flouted the conventions of the
comics code and ignored the usual comic publishers, who would have been unable to
print much of the material. Most of the artists remembered and were inspired by pre-
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