Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Remember how some music CDs used to come with a

parental advisory sticker? And as a parent, that mostly meant the album had some curse words in it.

And as a kid, it meant, well, that it had some curse words in it, so it had to be cool.

Comic books used to have a similar label on them. It was called the Comics Code Authority. And as we'll hear in it, so it had to be cool. Comic books used to have a similar label on them.

It was called the Comics Code Authority, and as we'll hear about it in today's interview,

the Comics Code was in part established due to gory and violent horror comics, a selection

of which are now collected in the new book Lost Marvel's Number One Tower of Shadows.

The book's editor, Michael Dean, talked to

M.P.R.'s Ayesha Roscoe about what differentiated these comics from their superhero siblings.

It wasn't just the gore, it was also their complex attitudes about morality. That's coming up.

Comic books in the 1950s were full of superheroes swishing about in their capes and mask,

but another genre was gaining ground fast, horror.

These comics featured vampires, werewolves, axe murderers, and gory depictions of violence.

They triggered a full-blown moral panic. In response, the

Comics Code Authority, a self-regulating industry body, was forced to act.

They actually outlawed the word horror, and they forbade the use of vampires, werewolves.

It was really a strong effort to kind of make comics kind

of antiseptic. That's Michael Dean, editor of a new collection of long-forgotten Marvel horror

comics called Lost Marvel's Number One Tower of Shadows. They were first published in 1969,

by which time social attitudes had begun to shift.

I started our conversation by asking Dean how the horror band played out more than a decade earlier.

There was a big backlash against comics. Parents boycotted him. There was a book called

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