Ding Dong The Wizards Dead! And Your Little Comic Code too!

Forgive my shoehorning two stories into Oz land:

First the end of the Comics Authority Code – reported on by Newsarama, summed up by BOing Boing:

57 years after the Comics Code Authority was created to certify that comics bearing its seal had been censored and did not contain anti-authoritarian, sexual or counterculture content, it has finally died. The CCA was formed in response to the moral panic brought on by the Seduction of the Innocents, a medical hoax perpetrated by American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham who testified that comics were a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. (Paradoxically, Wertham was also a pioneering civil rights campaigner — he apparently believed in freedom but just wasn't interested in sharing).  As of February, no major comic will bear the CCA seal any longer — February being the month that Archie drops the iconic serif A. When Archie no longer cares about your certification of squeaky cleanness, you are truly dead.

Second, the news today that Wizard is reorganizing and apparently no longer publishing a print version of Wizard World.  

I never bought or read a print anything from Wizard so I won't miss anything. But this is the same company that started a pretty good website earlier this decade — which featured a pretty great group of young writers — and for whatever reason basically erased it after a too brief period of time.

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Xaviar Xerexes

Wandering webcomic ronin. Created Comixpedia (2002-2005) and ComixTalk (2006-2012; 2016-?). Made a lot of unfinished comics and novels.