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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6680481" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, to be fully plain regarding my opinion, I think this damns the game and not the cartoon.As for the survival of comics in the post comic book scare, I think the impact was greater than you claim and I think that its role in creating the modern superhero genera likewise greater than you claim.  With graphic violence having to be replaced by fantasy violence, and comic books having to be centered on paragon virtue, nothing was better suited for the task than the superhero - which went from being a basically dead genre to a best seller within about a year of the Comic Book Code.I also think the scare was rather predictable, the years leading up to the scare IMO really did take on the character of a race to the bottom because lurid and graphic content where becoming the main selling points in the medium.  Each publisher not only had to outdo its competitors, but it reached a point where each publisher felt it had to be more over the top than the previous issue in order to sell.  While the quality of the drawing wasn't suffering, it wasn't exactly an atmosphere that inspired good story telling.  Plenty of people in the comic industry had been warning for nearly a decade that if they didn't police themselves it would eventually make the market toxic.  Almost nobody listened because they were too eager to make a quick dime.  And the thing is, because it was a moral panic, it was unreasonable and excessive and often unjust they way moral panics always are, but ultimately much of the industry was guilty as charged.   We can be sanctimonious about it all we like, but if the modern comics book industry was churning out the exact same material that they were turning out in the late 40's and early 50's to the same readership, there would be a modern moral panic about it now.  The modern version might emphasis slightly different things in order to be politically correct within the modern prevailing morality, but most of the things that it would emphasize were additional concerns back in the 50's as well and made it into the Code and the moral panic would be successful - just as it was in the 50's - because it would be broad based and cut across the political spectrum and because I know EnWorld I know the majority here would probably support it for reasons as diverse as the posters are.  Ultimately, if the bandwagon started, almost no one here would be standing up for good girl race baiting titles with sexist jokes and rape subtexts.  And the modern version of the panic would be even more sanitized and sanctimonious about it - no book burnings of course, we have to keep up appearances - but in the end it would be just as effective.   To that extent, and also because of the differences in market penetration you mention, I don't agree that there is a close comparison between the Comic Book scare and the RPG scare other than they are both predictable moral panics in relatively new media.  In some ways the Comic Book scare has more in common with the recent Confederate Flag panic.  Sure, as a moral panic the Confederate Flag panic is unreasonable and destructive and all the rest, and ultimately results in silly things like the destruction of old TV show props and pulling Civil War themed video games from store shelves, but on the other hand you've got to be really naïve to not see it coming or at least be sympathetic to the critics.</blockquote>

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