How Conan Conquered the Comics Code

In 1954, social psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth. It was a flashpoint for the comic book industry. Wertham had actually been speaking out for years on what he perceived to be the dangers of comics, rather unsuccessfully. He was far from the only opponent of comics in the early 50s, but his book allowed him to become the poster boy for the supposed illicit influence on kids. Comic books, he argued, would turn your kids into dope-smoking, Satan-worshipping, crime-committing homosexuals.

Now, comic books are cool, but they're unfortunately not that cool. Dr. Wertham's claims are seen by most these days as greatly exaggerated, if not outright quackery, but his voice was a part of a chorus that led the Comics Magazine Association of America adopting the Comics Code Authority in 1954. The Comics Code was a draconian list of rules that severely limited what kinds of content could appear in comics in the name of protecting the most impressionable readers from "injuring" their sensibilities and producing "wholesome" entertainment.

Only comic books approved by the code would bear the seal "Approved by the Comics Code Authority" in the corner, and wholesale distributors would not carry comic books without the seal. So while submitting your comics for Code approval was technically voluntary, it was functionally mandatory if you wanted them to sell. The seal was powerful, and as Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund puts it,

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"​Nothing inherent in the form of comics prevents comic books from telling stories for different audiences, but the perception of comic books as juvenile literature was reinforced by the Comics Code."

The Comics Code was in place for decades; I even remember seeing it on some of the books available when I started reading comics in 2001.

Looking back 70 years later, the Code is a great example of how censorship, even if it can be well-meaning, is not only restrictive, but actually anti-art. The 1954 Code was extremely confining, prohibiting lurid illustrations, scenes of violence and gore, and most depictions of sexuality. There are a few standards that I'm not necessarily against; for example, it didn't allow comics to ridicule or attack racial groups. But most of the Code was backward and puritanical. It banned using the words "horror" or "terror" in titles, stated that "respected institutions" and parents should never be questioned, and it criminalized slang and poor grammar. It famously barred comics writer Marv Wolfman from being credited, seeing as his name looked too similar to "wolf-man."

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has compiled quite a few examples of the Code modifying art which frequently changed the flow of the comic and kneecapped its impact. I love to use these as examples of the dangers of censorship when I celebrated Banned Books Week annually with my students.

​In this first example, you can see that the Code objected to this female lounge singer character's neckline, and the Code-approved re-draw brought her dress up several inches. The Code sometimes demanded art like this be redone, but sometimes also just did slipshod jobs like erasing a line denoting a woman's cleavage, leaving a somewhat awkward space in a panel.

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Here, you can see that quite a bit of the violence was taken out of this alien invasion story as part of the exclusion of scenes depicting "excessive" violence (I wonder if "excessive" violence would be identified by you the same way it would by me...). I think it's worth pointing out that not only does the word balloon at the top not really make sense with the re-drawn art---are the twelve-foot-tall aliens firing on the crowd?---but the flow of the panel is entirely changed. Instead of your eye naturally finding the word balloon, then moving to the alien and flowing downward with the ray gun blast, ultimately landing on the crowd that's running away, there's just this big emptiness where there's no movement or used space at all. Instead, there's lots of ground shown between this alien and some now-awkwardly-placed characters in the foreground. The fluid movement from the top of the panel to the bottom is eliminated entirely. And, at least for me, the re-drawn panel feels much more still and lifeless than the original. 

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This next one might be my favorite because the resulting re-draw is so phenomenally awkward. I suppose that doctors would count as respected institutions, which means they can't be disrespected by choking them out. It's permissible, however, to show someone stealing from them, apparently. The thing that really puts it over the top is the edits to the middle panels. Instead of seeing your first-person hands on the optometrist's neck, you get these impossibly-placed hands with the optometrist somehow stroking his chin as he thinks. However, his elbows look like they must be about four feet away from him as his right hand touches his chin and his left hand floats strangely high. Then in the next panel, the shot is awkwardly framed down to his chin, and he's noticeably still blue despite his airway being Code-approved unimpeded. The text of the story is now fundamentally different from the one the writer and artist submitted.

The final example I'd like to share is baffling. When I'm talking the Comics Code with my high school students, I like to show my students the pre-Code Nick Fury submission on the left and have them guess what was too salacious for the Code to allow. They usually zero in on the smoke, the disembodied lips, or the proximity of the characters when they're shown together. But, believe it or not, it's the phone being off the hook that the Comics Code would not allow. A sensual embrace is okay, as are guns, lit cigarettes in ashtrays, and swinging 60s clothing, but a phone off its hook was far too sexy for them. Your guess why is as good as mine.

When Conan the Barbarian burst onto the comic scene at the end of 1970, the Code was still in strong effect. It was revised and slightly loosened the next year, allowing for some horror, magic, and sword-and-sorcery elements to re-enter the comic landscape. Conan historian Jeffrey Shanks opines that Code administrators seeing Conan comics might have signaled to them that the comic landscape was changing, and may have helped hasten the loosening of the Code. Without those changes, it's tough to imagine that a Conan comic could really be possible. 

Whereas the 1954 Code banned most of the darker aspects of fantasy stories: the walking dead, vampires, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism, the 1971 revision of the Code allowed them when "in the classic tradition" of works like Dracula and Frankenstein. This opened the door for common Conan tropes like undead sentries protecting a treasure.

​Those classic Conan the Barbarian comics by Roy Thomas, Barry Windsor-Smith, and John Buscema are excellent, but they're definitely more buttoned-up than their source material. I wouldn't hesitate to hand one of those Conan the Barbarian issues to a 9 or 10 year-old since their fantasy violence isn't overly intense, at least not any more than a He-Man or Thundercats cartoon. They're largely bloodless. But Robert E. Howard's original, literary barbarian didn't shy away from intense depictions of violence, lurid descriptions of magic and the occult, and gratuitous sex appeal (no actual sex scenes, though). So unless you had only known Conan through the 1970s comics, something felt like it was missing.

Roy Thomas has spoken openly in recent decades about how much of a pain to deal with the Comics Code was as a writer, and how he and his artists sometimes pressed their luck in getting Code approval. He recalls how Code approval sometimes vexed him:

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"Actually, the thing that gave me the most pause was the way John [Buscema] garbed Helgi, the damsel-in-distress-of-the-month: in a short vest, open between her ample breasts. I had visions of the Comics Code insisting, after the story was all ready to go, that she be redrawn in a cardigan sweater. Fortunately, that didn't happen. Not only were comics loosening up a bit by the early '70s, but Code head Leonard Darvin once told me he allowed things to slip by in Conan that he wouldn't have in the super hero mags, because he suspected the former had a somewhat older average audience."

When putting on his writer's cap, Roy certainly wanted the freedom to tell stories in ways he thought were best. But Roy was also the editor of the book, so he knew he had to play things carefully when working around or outright pushing against the Comics Code. They sometimes acquiesced in ways that didn't make them completely happy: Roy notes how it's a little awkward that Conan's sword seems to explode off of enemies rather than cut them like on the second page of issue #1. They leave some things implied, like the character Jenna's status as a sex worker. And sometimes, they would even outright note to one another in the margins, "Hope the Comics Code doesn't cut this!"

In Conan #9, when a character is dropped into a patch of man-eating flowers, they devour the guy without any of the violence technically being shown. As the flowers eat him, their color changes from white and pink to blood red. The Code normally would have objected to violence like this seeing as they had access to the color notes on the pages: had Roy written "As the flowers eat him, they turn red with his blood," it wouldn't have flown. Lucky for the creative team, the colorist on the book was Maddy Cohen, who happened to be dating the artist, Barry Windsor-Smith. Instead of writing directions for her on the page, he was able to give her color notes verbally and the Code censors were left in the dark as to their true intentions.

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Conan #10 features a kill scene which the Robert E. Howard original specifically says involves Conan decapitating his enemies, but Roy knew that would never fly under the Code. Instead, Barry decided to have the Cimmerian deliver the killing blow out of frame and then show the evil priest of Anu's head in profile, and his obese body is conveniently not where it would be in the frame if his head were still attached to his body. An inclusion by omission, which Roy Thomas says allowed readers to draw their own conclusions. The Code didn't seem to notice. The Code did notice that Conan wasn't punished for killing a priest of all people, though. Roy countered with the fact that he would be in a dungeon at the start of the next issue (with the real start to "Rogues in the House"), but that wasn't good enough for Code administrators. Three caption boxes that previewed Conan's upcoming incarceration were added to the last few panels at the Code's behest.

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An intimate moment with Red Sonja was made to be re-drawn in Conan #24, as Conan's wandering hands brought up above the waterline to merely be cupping her waist, rather than clearly getting a handful.

"Moon of Zembabwei," the story in Conan #28, had the Cimmerian fighting an ape beast that Conan ultimately killed by stabbing it in the neck. For some odd reason, the Code cared less about blood of other colors than red, so they made the creature bleed black. The scene is pretty violent, but the Code didn't seem to mind, and it was printed as John Buscema originally drew it.

In Conan #37, Roy remembers wringing his hands as he wondered if the Code would object to one of Neal Adams' drawings of a gigantic slug monster looking a little bit like a vulva. The Code apparently didn't think it was objectionable enough to ask for changes, and I'm glad they didn't. When I read that issue, it didn't even cross my mind that someone might object to it, but I've talked to other readers who noticed it immediately.

Sometimes, Roy was worried about not only offending the Code censors, but also the general reading public as well. He knew that as he approached the "Queen of the Black Coast" storyline, he was going to have Conan split a judge's head in two, which sends Conan running from the law and onto the nearest ship, kicking off the story. But Roy was concerned that Conan would look too much like a "wanton murderer" and it would turn off readers. He decided to hide a few clues in the story (some ostentatious rings) tying the judge to a slaver seen earlier in the story, therefore making the judge also a criminal. However, Roy admits that within the story, Conan never sees the rings or connects the dots of the two men's criminal enterprise (a caption box literally says "Conan never notices a certain ring he would doubtless recognize"). He only kills the judge because he's about to be sent to prison. So Conan was still essentially wantonly murdering, but Roy wanted something in the story to point to if the Code raised any eyebrows.

The Conan creative team wasn't always successful at working around Code censors. Included below is a panel from Conan #58 which the Code rejected, and it's approved re-drawn beneath. They didn't take issue with the scantily-clad Belit's furry britches or with a "blind flood of desire," but instead found Conan's open legs objectionable. In the final drawing, Conan's legs are to one side and he looks like he's about to fall over. Elsewhere in that issue, Code censors had Roy Thomas change the "mating dance of Belit" into the "love dance of Belit." Roy pushed back a bit: aren't those the same thing? Well, "love dance," is general, they said. "Mating dance" is specific. Roy acquiesced.

It's sad to me that the Marvel staff had to either strategize around the Code, work actively to hide their true intentions, or censor their great work. Roy did occasionally censor his own stuff- he says he wasn't really out to ruffle feathers- he did so reluctantly, and got away with what he could.

Conan the Barbarian wasn't an instant success. The premiere sold pretty well, but then the next six issues lagged behind more popular books, and trended downward. It was even cancelled for about a day before the Marvel editors reversed their decision. But starting with issue 8, the series began a steady sales increase that meant it was safe from cancellation for a very long time.

Around the time that Conan the Barbarian #1 was premiering in 1970, Roy Thomas got a phone call from Stan Lee with an idea for a new book. It was a for a series he wanted to call Savage Tales, and Stan outlined to Roy an idea that he had for a new character called Man-Thing, an intensely tragic character turned into a swamp monster. While fleshing out the story idea from Stan and sending it to writer Gerry Conway to script, Roy wasn't immediately sold on it. He felt that Man-Thing seemed too similar to the existing character The Heap and that Marvel already had a popular hero named The Thing, not to mention the eventual title Giant-Size Man-Thing is hilarious in a way that would probably chafe against the Code. The aspect that was unique about the book, though, is that it would be a black-and-white magazine-sized comic, which was something Marvel didn't have at the time.

​It wasn't a completely original idea: Warren Publishing had been putting out Creepy and Eerie comic magazines since the mid-1960s. The paper size was a little bit larger, they cost more than a regular comic, and, importantly, as a magazine they were completely independent of the Comics Code Authority. Looking at early 70s comics side-by-side today, it's a little wild to think how restricted one was while the other couldn't be touched by the Code. The magazine dimensions are only about three-quarters of an inch larger than the height and width of a regular comic book. Brian Cronin at Comic Book Resources helps explain that it was essentially a stocking trick: since magazines and comic books were racked in different places at the newsstand, a non-Code magazine like Savage Tales wouldn't be sitting right next to a Code-approved Batman comic.

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A visit to the comic section at the newsstand probably in early 1972. You can see Conan #12 "The Dweller in the Dark" in the upper-left.

It makes sense that Man-Thing's origin story would need to appear in a comic outside of Comics Code approval. It's terribly sad, features less-than-glorious depictions of the government, and deals with drugs, corruption, and artist Gray Morrow draws a woman in basically transparent clothes. Essentially, it's everything the Code wasn't keen on. It's also dynamite! Those early Savage Tales stories featuring Man-Thing, Ka-Zar of the jungle, and Conan the Barbarian are all wonderful Bronze-Age nuggets of weird storytelling.

And in case the decapitated head on the cover wasn't a big enough clue, it was printed with a notice saying that "This publication is rated 'M' for the mature reader!" It's a sort of anti-Comics Code Seal.

Stan originally wanted a King Kull story instead of Conan- Stan liked how names that started with K looked on a cover better than names that started with a C, plus, they already had one Conan comic. Did they need two? For reasons unknown, Stan changed his mind and went with Conan; he and Kull are cut from the same cloth anyway.

The first chronological Conan story "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" is a good fit for the first issue. It's a simple and effective episode (surprisingly brief at only 11 pages). Brevity was always a skill both Robert E. Howard and Roy Thomas possessed, and it's one I decidedly don't have (If you think this article's long, you should see how much my next one about comic history spiraled out). Roy's dialogue and Barry Windsor-Smith's art in those 11 pages absolutely kick ass. When the adaptation was reprinted later in Conan the Barbarian #16, basically every panel had to be edited on some level due to Atali's diaphanous clothes.

​The letter they received from the CCA said that the story needed heavy re-draws to be deemed acceptable, and "the lightest goassamer draping of the female figure, wherever it is used on the female's breasts, pubic areas or buttocks must be made opaque and to cover these areas thoroughly." Just about every panel has some note from the Code administrator, and they use the word "buttock" about two-dozen times.

Unfortunately, not everyone was as much of a fan of those early Savage Tales stories as I am. Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, who had been working in comics since 1929 and had been with Marvel since the very beginning, cancelled the book after only one issue. Roy Thomas recalled the cancelling in 2008 like this:

"I never got all the inside story, but there were several things that led to Savage Tales being cancelled after that first issue. Martin Goodman had never really wanted to do a non-Code comic, probably because he didn't want any trouble with the CMAA over it. Nor did he really want to get into magazine-format comics; and Stan really did. So Goodman looked for an excuse to cancel it. I also heard we weren't able to sell the mag in Canada, which ordinarily would probably have taken maybe 10% of the print run- that somebody at the competition, DC or Warren or wherever, told the Canadians it was salacious material. But I never got any confirmation of that, and it may be an urban legend. 

At any rate, we had lots of returns of unsold copies, due to poor distribution as much as anything. For several years, there were copies in a warehouse- and also, for a time, sitting in the hallway at Marvel between Stan's office and the bullpen were hundreds of copies of #1 in little bales of fifty or whatever. We were told to take home as many as we wanted, just to clear them out. I eventually took some, as did others. In 1976 they helped finance my move to Los Angeles. By then, Savage Tales #1 had become a collector's item, primarily because of the 'Conan' story therein by Barry and me, but also because of the other features."

Roy had a second Conan story for the next Savage Tales issue already in the works, but since the book was canned, he moved it over to Conan the Barbarian. As you may have expected, the Comics Code censors made them rework a considerable amount of art drawn of female characters which Roy notes would have been "no problem" in the black-and-white pages. 

For a few years, Savage Tales lay dormant while Roy, Barry, John, and others chugged away at making the Comics Code-bound Conan the Barbarian a success. Goodman eventually backed Stan Lee when Stan wanted to publish an anti-drug Spider-Man comic which the Code denied.

Marvel published the book anyway.

​Many people have noted that Stan may have gotten a little too much credit for his work in the 60s, frequently overshadowing collaborators who deserved more recognition, but Stan definitely took some principled, measured stands against the Comics Code for which he should be lauded.

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Partially as a result of Stan's efforts, the Code began to loosen ever so slightly. Goodman retired from Marvel in 1972 and Stan assumed the role of publisher, which meant that he didn't need Goodman's approval for a certain black-and-white, magazine-sized book. Still, Stan had lots of new responsibilities as publisher and president of Marvel, so he handed the reins of Savage Tales, and the editor-in-chief role, to Roy. Most of the stories they had originally planned for the second issue had already been printed, so Roy asked if he could make Savage Tales a more Robert E. Howard-focused mag. Stan said yes.

Proudly declaring that it was "Back by popular demand," Savage Tales #2 hit stands in October of 1973, only 30 months after the first issue. This time, Conan was featured on the cover and the interior had an adaption of a top-tier Robert E. Howard story: "Red Nails." While the first issue had featured a "Conan the Barbarian starring in..." tag above the title, issue 2 now read "Savage Tales featuring Conan the Barbarian" with our Cimmerian hero's name as large as the title itself. John Buscema's painted cover already hints that this is not a Code-approved book as it has a nude woman threatened by an executioner and some conveniently-placed smoke obscuring her form.

Any comic version of "Red Nails" would have had to look very different under the Code. Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's adaption of it is extremely bloody and almost immediately features horrifying undead creatures. It's suggestively sexual: the words "throbs and pulses" appear together, in that order, and the story is very critical of power structures. The climax of the narrative has one fairly steamy lesbionic scene as well, all wrapped around an attempt at human sacrifice. "Red Nails" was already one of Robert E. Howard's best Conan stories, but Roy's dialogue and Barry's intricate art really do live up to their charming claim on the title page that they adapted it "with aplomb."

​Instead of the short 11 pages allotted for "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" in the first issue, "Red Nails" was a two-parter, spanning 21 pages for just its first installment. In addition to "Red Nails," Barry Windsor-Smith also locked in to draw an illustrated version of Howard's poem "Cimmeria" and a full-page, in-house ad. Roy convinced Robert E. Howard's agent, Glenn Lord, to write a biography of Howard for issue 2 as well.

Savage Tales continued with Conan as the headline character for a few more issues, with the Cimmerian eventually sharing cover space with Ka-Zar, Lord of the Hidden Jungle. Those first five issues feature painted covers by some of the best artists working in comics at the time, covers whose intensity really lived up to the title of the book. The mag was hugely successful.

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After issue 5, Conan was spun off into his own book which would bear his name permanently in the title: The Savage Sword of Conan. Savage Sword was also unconstrained by the Comics Code, meaning that it could live up to all the bloody promise of Robert E. Howard's original character. Whereas other Marvel characters played in the backup stories of Savage Tales, Roy Thomas saw Savage Sword as a Howard showcase and wanted to use characters like King Kull and Solomon Kane for the backups.

According to Roy Thomas, when you were assigned to write a Marvel comic in the 70s, as soon as it was given to you, it was "due yesterday, if not the day before." As such, getting assigned the first issue of Savage Sword meant a tight deadline, so he reluctantly re-purposed the next few plots he had figured out for Conan and slotted them into the new title. It's a little awkward as a first issue: Conan meets up with Red Sonja, who he clearly has a history with, but what that history is will be mostly lost on the reader if they haven't read Conan #23. I certainly hadn't when I first stumbled across Savage Sword, so I figured it was all to be left to my imagination. It is in this issue that Red Sonja acquires her signature chain-mail bikini, which was far too revealing for a Code-bound book like Conan the Barbarian, in which she wore a full-coverage, long-sleeve chainmail shirt.​

Savage Sword's first story, "The Curse of the Undead Man," would continue in Conan #43, which came out soon afterword. Roy lamented that since the black-and-white mag had a smaller readership than the color comic, some of its readers would miss the first half of the narrative, but people seem to have done okay. I think this kind of cross-pollination between books is much more acceptable in today's industry.

The book was a success, Comics Code be damned, and Savage Sword would go on to run for more than 200 issues into the mid-90s.

For many of the first 60 issues of Savage Sword of Conan, Roy adapted Howard's prose stories, but mixed in original yarns as well, jumping all over Conan's life. In addition to Roy Thomas and John Buscema, its place as uncensored playground of storytelling attracted some of the greatest talent in comics, including fantasy artist Boris Vallejo, X-Men mastermind Chris Claremont and my personal favorite Robin writer, Chuck Dixon, but Roy Thomas has always remained its greatest creator. He returned to the book in its later years after what most readers agree was a sag in quality, bringing the stories back up to their former glory for the final stretch of issues. Savage Sword is remembered as one of the peaks of the Bronze Age. While it was out of print for much of the 90s and 2000s, it's now been collected in omnibuses by Dark Horse, Marvel, and Titan Comics.

The Comics Code was again revised in 1989, this time featuring much more sweeping changes. It was now presented within the text of the Code as a sort of optional seal of approval for comics which you could feel confident giving to young kids, rather than the arbiter between wholesome quality and evil smut.​

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A size comparison between my own copies of Conan the Barbarian #19 and Savage Sword of Conan #7

The submission procedure was changed to allow more conversation between comic editors and Code administrators. This time, editors could "discuss with the administrator the concerns raised with him and reach agreement on how the comic can properly bear the Code Seal either without being revised or within a mutually-agreeable set of alternate revisions."

The standards were much more broad in the 1989 revision. They allowed for more nuance and reflected that times may change, making space for things like "contemporary styles and fashions" for character costumes. They still wanted to encourage "wholesome lifestyles" to be portrayed as desirable and for characters to be role models, but also actually acknowledged that there were comic books for adult readers.

"​The members of the Comics Magazine Association of America include publishers who elect to publish comics that are not intended to bear the Code Seal, and that therefore need not go through the approval process described above. Among the comics in this category may be titles intended for adult readers. Member publishers hereby affirm that we will distribute these publications only through distribution channels in which it is possible to notify retailers and distributors of their content, and thus help the publications reach their intended audiences. The member publishers agree to refrain from distributing these publications through those distribution channels that, like the traditional newsstand, are serviced by individuals who are unaware of the content of specific publications before placing them on display."

By this time, comic books had reached a new level of maturity. Many of the tropes that are recognizable to modern readers had their progenitors around this time: the modern "event" book like Secret Wars, the convoluting and then exploding of decades worth of continuity in Crisis on Infinite Earths, the long-form graphic novel and meta deconstruction of the superhero genre in Watchmen. It would be difficult for anyone to argue at that time that comics were only for kids, and Conan helped solidify that.

Conan had reached new heights too with two major motion pictures and a Red Sonja movie which it seems like we all agree to be the unofficial third in the trilogy. By Mitra, I don't know a single Conan fan who considers "Kalidor" to actually be a separate character from Schwarzenegger's Conan.

The Comics Code was still in effect until 2011 but with gradually diminishing influence. Marvel pulled their books from approval in 2001 in favor of giving their titles a rating in-house. Ten years later, DC pulled theirs as well, and Archie was the final publisher to withdraw later that year. It quietly disappeared, and NPR's obituary for the Code begins with the line, "I come to bury the Comics Magazine Association of America, not to praise it."

The Comics Code isn't forgotten, but it's usually the butt of the jokes these days. Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo recently had me laughing out loud by using a Comics Code Seal of Approval lookalike as the censor bars when the villain Blockbuster gets cussed out at the end of Nightwing #96.

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Every year, Banned Books Week falls somewhere in late September or early October. It's a celebration of our First Amendment right to read and an outward expression of resistance to censorship. It's celebrated by the American Library Association, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the National Council of Teachers of English (of which I am a card-carrying member), and more.

That means that every year, I teach about the Comics Code to my students. We'll dissect book bans spearheaded by anti-free speech groups like Moms for Liberty. We'll evaluate the PMRC's censorship of music and the "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" label on music. We'll make the case for kids' rights to have access to books. And if I have time, I get to bring up some great comic book creators and how they fought censorship with everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character.

Titan Comics recently revived the Savage Sword mag for a new print run which features some of the coolest writers and artists in comics today. It even throws back to classic Savage Sword artists like Joe Jusko doing painted covers again. Everyone loves it and you should check it out. Or, find the original run here.