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In 1954, a mounting tide of criticism, including a new book by Wertham (''[[Seduction of the Innocent]]'') and congressional hearings, spurred the formation of the ACMP's successor, the [[Comics Magazine Association of America]] (CMAA). The ACMP Publishers Code served as the template for a more detailed set of rules enforced by the CMAA's [[Comics Code Authority]].
EC comics and Mad magazine publisher, [[William M. Gaines]], in his 1983 interview with [[The Comics Journal]] revealed: "After the Senate Subcommittee hearings, and this isn’t very well known, but I can prove it again, I sent a letter to every comics publisher, invited them to a meeting and footed the bill for the hall. We took a big place somewhere, and all these people showed up and I tried to convince them that we should form an association and hire the Gleuks of Harvard or anybody else we could find who could do some sort of independent, honest research into whether comic books in truth were the horrendous things that people said they were. And since I really didn’t think they were, I figured, such a study would exonerate us.
None of these guys wanted to do that, and right away the whole thing was taken away from me, and they turned it into a situation where they wrote a Code, and the Code forbade the use of the words horror, terror, or crime — this was all my books — and weird, even weird, [laughter] so that would wipe me out. So I didn’t join the association. But then I decided to drop all those books anyway and put out the New Direction stuff. I put out the six first issues, six b-imonthlies, and they sold 10, 15 percent. You can’t believe how horrendous the sales were. And I later found out that it was because the word was passed by the wholesalers, “Get ‘im!” So they got me."
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