Tuesday, August 23, 2005

They promised they'd remove their obscene material

So we carefully followed developments. In a crime comic that came out after the code had been in existence for some time, a representative specimen of this group shows: killing a policeman knocked out with the usual smart contemptuous wisecrack: "I can't stick around to explain, copper!"; a man shot in the stomach; a woman mugged and then killed with a hammer to get her pocketbook; blood; the up-to-date ending of one murder story: "Archer Frize didn't die in the electric chair! The state psychiatrists found him to be insane!"; detailed instructions about how to hold up a big grocery store; and a brutal murder story with the murderer not caught by the law, but dying by accident. (In the story murder is called a "mistake": "I knew it! They all make mistakes!")