A comic-book historian Saladin Ahmed is not (#SFWApro)

My online reading for the previous post also led me to this post by Saladin Ahmed on how the Comics Code ruined the industry. Unfortunately, I think he’s wrong all the way through.
The gist of Ahmed’s post is that the Golden Age was a glorious time when comics creators would try anything. And “anything” included two-fisted female protagonists and black heroes along with the horrible racist stereotypes. After the Code, women all had to be helpless ingenues and black people were eliminated: When EC reprinted the story “Judgment Day” with a black astronaut as the protagonist, the Comics Code “made a target of them, and the company was essentially forced out of the comics business.”
Because of the Code, “all sorts of stories that didn’t fit with the compulsory patriotism and cop-worship of the 1950s, essentially vanished from comics for decades” and even after the Code faded in the 1990s, comic books saw “the retreat of self-censorship as an opportunity to revel in cheap violence and exploited female bodies” rather than challenge the status quo with stronger gay, female or nonwhite characters.
First off, I think Ahmed is painting the Golden Age as more revolutionary than it was. Spider Queen, one of the “badass” heroines he lists, only lasted for three issues; Lady Satan only made it to twenty.
•”Judgment Day” wasn’t controversial because it featured a black lead. It was controversial because it’s an SF tale that pointedly criticizes American racism (the astronaut is visiting a planet that has its own version of Jim Crow). Not that this makes trying to change it more justified, but I think there is a distinct difference.
•As for targeting EC, that was the last comic the company published so it couldn’t have triggered any vendetta. If EC was targeted (I’m inclined to think so, though I’ve heard different theories on the topic), it came earlier, when the code was drafted to eliminate vampires, werewolves and zombies—a critical blow at a company that published horror comics.
•I’m completely unconvinced that the Code is to blame for sidelining non-mainstream books. The comic book industry was really hurting at the start of the 1950s and super-heroes worst of all. Captain America’s comic folded in 1949 (after several issues as a horror anthology); he returned in 1954 for a big run of three issues. Barring some hard evidence from Ahmed, I’ll take the economy as the cause for so many comics folding.
Nor did the code mandate that you have white men star in everything. Wonder Woman survived along with Superman and Batman into the Silver Age and beyond. The Silver Age gave us Lois Lane, Supergirl and World War II resistance fighter Mademoiselle Marie. The Black Panther and Brother Voodoo were both black and both got series in the 1970s, with a slightly modified code in place. More likely the reliance on white male heroes had more to do with the default assumptions of the era: Heroes were supposed to be white men.
And while it’s a technical point, the Code is only one fragment of the anti-comics crusade of the era. To the extent the code had an effect, it was only formalizing stuff many publishers might have done anyway.
That’s not to defend the Code or the anti-comics hysteria of the age (and if you want a good account, The Ten Cent Plague is the definitive book). But Ahmed’s column is an inaccurate analysis.