From the beginning of the 1950s there was in the USA a widespread public concern over the growing examples of comic books with increasingly more stories containing excessive violence, detailed horror scenes, sexual innuendoes, and more. This potential bonfire was fueled by psychiatrist and author Fredric Wertham who, in 1954, wrote his banning book Seduction of the Innocent, in which he took upon himself to crusade against the negative tendencies in the comic books in general and the callous effects for young readers in specific. This, in turn, sparked the forming of The Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) in the same year, an organisation founded as a tool for the comic book industry to self-regulate the contents of their products in a more responsible and healthy direction.
From now on it became increasingly more difficult for the industry to publish comic books with 'questionable' content, as concerned parents rallied to help weed out inappropriate subjects.

In those revolutionary years Carl Barks was an employee at Western Publishing (with subsidiaries such as Dell and others), a company that produced countless comic book series ranging from the most fairy taleish stories to the fiercest wartime ones (see examples under Dell HERE). Western made their own version of the official comics code (see details HERE). It is commonly known as the moral code, and was on many points clarified or toned down, as some of the original paragraphs were not applicable to Western's clientele. For instance, the publishing house EC Comics made a point of distributing stories filled with death-causing ghouls, flesh-slashing werewolves, and blood-thirsty vampires.

Below you are presented to the initial comics code from 1954 - it was revised several times in the upcoming years - enabling you to understand the mass hysteria that hit the American comic book industry and a portion of the readers in those years. Surprisingly, the code is still in effect!