Now that the code no longer exists, a search shows the deeper truth, one which I would have supposed:  The “Comics Code Authority” has been a Zombie Organization for the past two years, unreachable (even as nobody has had any reason to try to reach them).  Or, more propertly referred to as a “Zuvembie Organization“.

But Newsarama hasn’t been able to locate any evidence that the organization was functioning since 2009. And Archie Comics has indicated that it wasn’t actually submitting comics for approval to the Comics Magazine Association of America, which oversaw the Code.

We haven’t submitted for a year or more,” said Archie Comics President Mike Pellerito.

When asked if the CMAA was even functioning anymore, Pellerito said, “I don’t think they are.”

Joe Field, president of the comics’ retailer organization ComicsPRO, said he believes that, in recent years, the ability to use the Code stamp was given to any publishers who paid dues to the CMAA, without a requirement for submittal.

“It used to be that everything had to go through the Code, be stamped and sealed, and then could be sent off to the printer,” Field said. “I think that, over the last number of years — and it’s kind of obvious, because there were things that wound up with a Code seal that would have never gotten through the code — if a company was up on their dues, they could put the Code on their book.”

The last odd bit of information I see comes about here, a telling bit on what the Authority has been up to:

Apparently a long time ago the Authority was involved in providing comics racks to retailers. That little blurb that used to be in comics in the early sixties about retailers contacting somebody about a “display allowance” was from the code. However since the code’s entire income in 2008 was only about $38,000 I doubt they’ve been doing much promotion lately. That’s barely enough to pay a part time reviewer.

Writing the history of the end of the Comics Code Authority revolves around finding the last representative doing the last item of any official business for the Code.  But there’s just two years where Archie Comics and DC Comics could have had all kinds of heads in refrigerators with the code on the cover (see nine paragraphs down here), and nobody calling them out on it:

The CMAA was formerly managed by Kellen Company, a trade organization management firm. The organization was represented by Holly Munter Koenig.
But when Newsarama contacted Koenig on Friday, she said Kellen Company has not managed the CMAA since 2009. She referred all questions about the CMAA to DC Comics.

Wertham would not be amused.  Nor would these two women.

To much fun-fare and media attention, we got this on September 8, 1954.  In reaction to, for instance, this, a million “injuries to eyes” which profligated the comic book in the late 1940s and early 1950s — and had to be wiped out due to the massive epidemic of Juveniles injuring other kids’ eyes.

The Comics Code Authority is unveiled, and Code Administrator Charles Murphy shows its impact.  The character of Sarah Harper is given wrinkle cream and an amazing dentist.  Good taste abounds from here on out.

New York Times headline for December 24, 1954:  NEW’ COMIC BOOKS TO BE OUT IN WEEK; First ‘Approved’ Issues Put More Clothing on Heroines and Tone Down Violence . 

It’s a perpetual issue, and sometimes very real.

And on to:  Charles F Murphy, Administrator of the Comics Code Authority, will receive a citation for “outstanding contributions to cleaner literature” tomorrow at the sixteenth annual communion breakfast of the Hoy Name Society of blah blah Catholic Church Brooklyn.

It is an anachronism, as evidenced here, but I like following through on the history of anachronisms to its last dying deaths.  Then again, the comic book industry is something of an anacrhonism itself, and “you would be shocked at how low the circulation is” for just about any comic book.    Comic books ceased to be a mass medium at the advent of television.  They re-adjusted to a lucrative and narrower market, focused on the superhero genre, and sales have generally declined from there, moving full scale into comic book stores and leaving the supermarket and convenience stores, before edging back into the book stores.

The Comics Code Authority was not the death knell of the industry (artform?  medium?) — television was –, but I imagine probably pulled it through one moment in history to exist on some level.  Fifty-six years later, and to no fan-fare (there is a post at a Washington Post blog, and there is nothing at the New York Times), the Comics Code Authority is no more.

After yesterday’s news that DC Comics was dropping the Comics Code, leaving Archie the last surviving member of the Comics Code Authority…comes word that Archie has also dropped the Code, starting with books on sale in February.
Thus ends the last clinging particle of darkest days in comics history, an era that did its best to choke the life out of an artform — but didn’t succeed.

When the Green Lantern opted out of the Code to tell a “relevant” story in 1971, it made the New York Times. 

I don’t know who was looking over the submissions of DC Comics and Archie Comics over the past few years, and I am finding it hard to see them underlining anything and charging back to publisher headquarters to get things back into its proper guidelines.  The first people looking them over included — as you see in that image — a “Charles Murphy”, and Archie publisher John Goldwater.  There are veiled and not veiled opinions about the role of Archie Comics in the creation and administration of the Comics Code Authority — he sure threw EC Comics out of business!  But and on that score, it is approrpriate that they are the last publisher to ascede — there for the creation, there for the burial.  Question of the day:  what will be the last comic book approved by the now defunct “Comics Code Authority”, and will someone please nit-pick some affront for outrage from out of its contents?

There are times a message comes in that lies on the knife edge between “mass produced spam” and “acceptable comment”.  It waits in the “waiting for moderation” section — tending to be with a few links that simply shifted out of the obvious “spam” filter, and I avoid approval or disapproval.  After a while, I delete and feel I did the right thing.  But then there’s… let’s pierce the unctiousness of my joking time with some more serious information post.

“Human development” wants me to know that some postings of North Korean propaganda from 2008 are lies.  The “Asian Regional Institute of the Juche Idea” runs in the same thread as “The Holy Roman Empire — neither Holy nor Roman” with its component parts of the name.

Yeah, I kind of already knew that part.  But the rest of this is quite informative.

No one’s slammed Ziggy yet.

This is a thought which has been bumping around my mind for a while now, and has an assist from — of all people — Michelle Bachman with — of all organizations — the most loathsome of the inter-connected Tea Partys, the “Tea Party Express”:

Earlier Friday, Republicans had announced that Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee, would deliver the GOP’s response to Obama after the State of the Union address is over. Bachmann’s remarks at TeaPartyExpress.org, apparently, will supplement the GOP response with a tea-party perspective.
Bachmann’s webcast will follow Ryan’s, so tea party Republicans won’t have to choose whom to watch.It’s a thought I had when I saw this item, after last November’s elections, from the Florida Whig Party.  It’s a rather meaningless message, but that’s in the eye of the beholder: if you want to develop a Whig Party, you have to state your message within the current political debate.  So, I was thinking the Whig Party really should blast everyone with a “Whig Response” at the SOTU speech, plastered live on youtube following Obama’s State of the Union address.
Regretably, there is no Natural Law Party, so we will get no Natural Law Party Response.  But I’m sure the three flavors of Libertarians will be able to compete against the three flavors of Socialist Partys for interest.

Multiple that by every Dick, Jane, and Harry political organization, and you have your multitude of choices.  For everybody to ignore.  Bachman, you understand, as a member of a affiliation of the Republican Party, will be reasonably ignored and forgotten, except as fund-raising mechanism for her party and outrage meter by Democrats — and I suppose an “Overton Window” mechanism for Republican Ryan’s benefit, but if some of the other Responses can gain some traction maybe the Window can expand.

Christie seemed to have the most fun with Diane Sare, who introduced herself as a Larouche Democrat who is planning a Congressional run in Bergen County. […]
Sare said afterward that she is currently in U.S. Rep. Steve Rothman (D-NJ09)’s district, but hopes that redistricting pits her against far-right U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ05) to the north.
At Thursday’s town hall meeting, Sare quickly listed her major criticisms of President Barack Obama – health care, bank bailouts, and space missions – then turned to Christie and politely said, “I think your policies are identical to his.”
Christie playfully called out for someone to alert the president of this development immediately.
But Sare waited for the laughs to subside, then laid out her plan to take private sector bailout funding and allocate it to state governments to get them out of the fiscal hole they’re in. She asked Christie to work with her to make the plan happen.
“You want to work with me,” he said, “after you called me Obama?”

High on a list of sentences I never thought I would ever see written:  (Alan) Moore’s the comic book version of Lyndon La Rouche.
Huh?

The thing about our political discourse, is that the only way a politician breaks through through into the news cycle and conciousness is by saying something outlandish.  I don’t know how you cure this, but it is what it is.  It’s always hard to figure if these things count as “gaffes” or something else, but they develop into a cycle of “Say something outrageous, defend, apologize for any offense”.

 Alabama’s new governor Robert Bentley is apologizing for comments he made Monday during a Martin Luther King Day celebration.
   Bentley issued an apology yesterday for stating that anyone who doesn’t share his Christian faith cannot be counted among his brothers and sisters.
   The offending comments came hours after Bentley was sworn in as governor, when he told a Montgomery Baptist church audience, quote, “Anybody who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.”  His speech spurred outrage from Jewish and civil rights groups, who said the comments were offensive and inappropriate.
I guess I should shrug and say “It’s Alabama”, but what was the point of this statement?  You can shovel any number of Christian allusions without pointedly calling out non-believers.

An auxilary to the “like Hitler did” Godwin’s Law, the Goebels reference:

Rep. Steve Cohen on Thursday stood by his remarks in which he compared Republican attacks on the health care overhaul to Nazi propaganda advanced by Joseph Goebbels. 

The Tennessee Democrat, who is Jewish, said he regrets that anyone was offended and that his comments were used to “distract from the debate about health care.” But in a detailed written statement, the congressman elaborated on and defended his analogy. 

“Taken out of context, I can understand the confusion and concern,” he said. “While I regret that anything I said has created an opportunity to distract from the debate about health care for 32 million Americans, I want to be clear that I never called Republicans Nazis. Instead, the reference I made was to the greatest propaganda master of all time.” 

Goebbels references are a bit less offensive than Hitler, in the sense that Hitler has ceased to mean a damned thing and Goebbels at least refers to specific concerns of public relations in a world where facts are transmitted but are receptibily meaningless.  Laced in Goebbels’s techniques, for instance, is gratuitous invective — see for instance, calling a bill the “Repeal Job Killing Health Care Act”.  But as always, it’s something of a conversation killer.  He could just go the Joseph Wilson route and shout “You Lie!” and received the media attention.  (Or maybe he couldn’t have — does the House have a rule against pointed references to colleagues on the floor in debate?)

In case you’re curious on the roll call vote — almost a party line vote, except for one Democratic Congress-woman who obviously couldn’t vote, and three Democratic Congress-men who voted aye — Oklahoma’s Dan Boren, North Carolina’s Mike McIntyre, and Arkansas’s Mike Ross.   Curiously, I see that some media outlets get the Oklahoma Congressman wrong — reference his father, David — but really, one member of a political lineage in Oklahoma is about the same as the next — he got in off of his father’s coat-tails.

Sigh.

At an event commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Thursday, the general counsel of the Pentagon – Jeh Johnson – said that if King were alive today he would support the war in Afghanistan.

The remarks, reported by American Forces Press Service, are an unusual claim considering King’s lifetime commitment of fighting against what King referred to in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the “three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism: …racial injustice, poverty, and war.”

Said King: “wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.”

Nonetheless, Johnson said, “I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.”

The Pentagon counsel noted that in King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech – his final one – delivered the day before his assassination at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn,, King told the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan who helped a man who had been beaten by thieves, after a priest and a Levite walked past him.

King noted that in the story of the Good Samaritan, it’s possible that “the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so … the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’

Rev. King, there to support a strike of sanitation workers, said, “that’s the question before you tonight. Not, ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?’ Not, ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?’ The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?’ The question is, ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That’s the question.”

Johnson in his speech compared US troops to the Samaritan.

“In 2011, I draw the parallel to our own servicemen and women, deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their homes,” Johnson said. “Those in today’s volunteer Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road, and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people.  Every day our servicemen and women practice that ‘dangerous unselfishness’ Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968.

“Johnson is not without his knowledge of King – he graduated from King’s alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., and attended school with Martin Luther King III.He acknowledged that Johnson acknowledged that King called violence “a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy,” and that “returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” Johnson acknowledged that King made an “impassioned plea against the war in Vietnam” and “from that point on he questioned the whole rationale for war in general.  From the gospel song ‘Down by the Riverside,’ Dr. King repeated the line: ‘I Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.’”

Which makes Johnson’s claim all the more unusual.

But the claim still seems unusual.

King in 1967 called for the US to “take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war,” and said the US should “declare a unilateral cease-fire” and “realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.”

And in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Holbrooke said he “venture(d) to suggest to all of you and all who hear and may eventually read these words, that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It is, after all, nation-states which make war, which have produced the weapons which threaten the survival of mankind, and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character….It is not enough to say “We must not wage war.” It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace.”

I think this is what you can call “Pentagon Spin”.