Astonishing Adventures: The Atomic Age

I'm having some trouble on my two other supporting characters right now, so I'm going to move on to the second phase of my big project just to give an idea of where I'm going in this story.

After World War II, superheroes fell out of popularity. It's hard to say exactly why, but one might imagine that superheroes became so tied to the Nazi threat that they went with it. The only superhero comics that continued to see publication were Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Publishers phased out the superheroes and replaced them with teen humor, "funny animal," horror, western, romance, and science fiction comics.

Ironically, the concept of the superhero probably never would have dominated the industry were it not for Dr. Fredric Wertham's book, Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which claimed that comic books were the primary cause of juvenile delinquency. Wertham derided "crime comics," a category which he believed included superhero and horror comics, as an "injury to the eye." He also cited the covert homosexuality of Batman and Wonder Woman as contributions to delinquency. (While most comic fans will tell you that Wertham is a raging hemorrhoid, I will agree with them with one caveat. Sure, he was a censorship loving, child-hating, conservative nut job, but many of those comics would be considered extremely unacceptable for a child even today! It doesn't surprise me that the gay innuendos we make jokes about would be the subject of censorship in the fifties.)

In part due to Wertham's book, the Comics Code Authority was formed. This was a self-policing agency requiring comic books to conform to a code of ethics. Although it was not legally required, distributors would often refuse to carry books that did not have the code thereby making it de facto censorship. Included in the CCA are rules that:

• prohibit the presentation of "policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions ... in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority."
• "in every instance good shall triumph over evil."
• discouraged "instances of law enforcement officers dying as a result of a criminal's activities."
• prohibit "excessive violence... [and] lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations."
• forbid vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and zombies.
• prohibit the words "horror" or "terror" from being used in the title (the word "crime" was restricted, but not prohibited).
• prohibit "sex perversion," "sexual abnormalities," and "illicit sexual relations," as well as seduction, rape, sadism, and masochism.
• required love stories to emphasize the "sanctity of marriage."
• required scenes portraying passion to avoid "lower and baser emotions."

Needless to say, my comic will be breaking as many of these rules as I can... 'cause I'm a jerk like that.

Many of these rules were specifically incorporated to challenge prolific horror and crime publisher EC Comics (best known for Tales From The Crypt)... and it worked (Side note: MAD actually changed to MAD Magazine in order to avoid the restrictions of the comic code.) The first comic to "break" the code was actually an EC Comic story called "Judgment Day" in Incredible Science Fiction #33 (1955).

From Wikipedia:

The story depicted a human astronaut visiting a planet inhabited by robots as a representative of the Galactic Republic. He finds the robots divided into functionally identical orange and blue races, one of which has fewer rights and privileges than the other. The astronaut decides that due to the robots' bigotry, the Galactic Republic should not admit the planet. In the final panel, he removes his helmet, revealing himself to be a black man. Murphy demanded, without any authority in the Code, that the black astronaut had to be removed. As Diehl recounted in Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives:

"This really made 'em go bananas in the Code czar's office. 'Judge Murphy was off his nut. He was really out to get us', recalls [EC editor] Feldstein. 'I went in there with this story and Murphy says, "It can't be a Black man". But ... but that's the whole point of the story!' Feldstein sputtered. When Murphy continued to insist that the Black man had to go, Feldstein put it on the line. 'Listen', he told Murphy, 'you've been riding us and making it impossible to put out anything at all because you guys just want us out of business'. [Feldstein] reported the results of his audience with the czar to Gaines, who was furious [and] immediately picked up the phone and called Murphy. 'This is ridiculous!' he bellowed. 'I'm going to call a press conference on this. You have no grounds, no basis, to do this. I'll sue you'. Murphy made what he surely thought was a gracious concession. 'All right. Just take off the beads of sweat'. At that, Gaines and Feldstein both went ballistic. 'Fuck you!' they shouted into the telephone in unison. Murphy hung up on them, but the story ran in its original form."

The next time the code was challenged was in 1971 by Stan Lee who wrote a Spider-Man story about the evils of drug use at the request of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Despite the fact that the story was clearly anti-drug, the CCA determined that context was irrelevant. In response, Marvel removed the CCA stamp from the Amazing Spider-Man for three issues. ... There were absolutely no repercussions for Marvel, but the code was soon revised to meet the less conservative (and preposterous) values of the time. In 2001, Marvel officially retired their use of the CCA stamp thus effectively ending the CCA's power over the industry, although it is still used by Archie Comics and some DC Comics.

This is the metaphorical setting for The Atomic Age.

Technically speaking, in comic book history, the fifties are considered an extension of the Golden Age, but it was a strange decade where superheroes either didn't work, weren't allowed, or both. It also represents a strange period in American history after the Great Depression and World War II. It was a time of the nuclear family, white flight, "the [blank] of tomorrow," McCarthy hearings, the Cold War, the Korean War, Beatniks (the real ones, not the parody), Elvis, and Eisenhower. It proceeded the cultural turmoil of the sixties with a culture of repression and consumerism.

The Atomic Age is going to be very different in tone from The Golden Age. Where the Golden Age is about heroes popping up and proving themselves individually before gradually gathering together, the Atomic Age is about a small group of abnormal men and women who find themselves hunted by a government who is unwilling to ever let the fate of the world fall into the hands of freaks. To this end, they have formed Majestic-12, an intelligence department tasked with keeping complete control and confidentiality over all supernormal activity.

By this point, most of the Golden Age heroes are either dead or missing. Dorothy Dale (AKA Lady Liberty) is under investigation by HUAC for Communist ties, the Mechanic [spoiler block], the Enigma is working as an international spy, and the Alchemist simply vanished at the end of the war and was never heard from again. This story will feature a new set of protagonists in order to set a completely different tone for this series. Included are a Jack Kerouac-style Beatnik, a popular lounge singer turned vessel for a voudoun loa (based loosely on Nat King Cole), the ghost of an Apache renegade and gunslinger, a traveler from the future who calls himself the Chrononaut, and his alien robot.

I want to play up the illusion of suburban bliss, the fear of monsters in the midst, and the bigotry of the period. McCarthyism and Wertham's influence over comic books will blend into the subtext of the story along with Cold War divisions. We will be seeing some Soviet mystery men who were allies in World War II become reluctant enemies. We will also be seeing early experiments in atomic power applied to superhuman mutation.

This is planned as a much darker, personal story than the epic adventure of the Golden Age. There is no glory and little honor. Like the other eras, I want the style of the book to reflect the popular comic forms at the time, which is why most of my protagonists fall into the genres of western, science fiction, and horror (I still want to develop characters who fit in with teen humor, romance, and even funny animal), but I want to use those genres to show the moral hypocrisy through the very types of storytelling techniques that were banned by the comic code.

I have always had a fascination for battles that are fought privately. This is a story of unsung and forgotten individuals, neither heroes nor villains, who didn't have the luxury of a clear enemy and the support of the free world. They fought for survival and freedom from a society that hates and fears them. If it weren't for them, the age of heroes (the Silver Age of Comics) would not have happened.