Ooh I love this question.

As to the 2nd part of your question, YES! There was a company called Warren Publishing. See the CCA and that Nazi rat bastard Frederic Wertham in effect banned horror comics. Which is one of the greatest pop culture tragedies in this country's history because there were dozens of amazing and innovative horror title across a dozen different publishers.

The most famous of course being the EC titles like Tales From the Crypt, Vault of Horror, and Haunt of Fear. Which are major collectors items now.

Unfortunately like the comic industry as a whole, horror comics have never fully recovered from the congressional hearings and the CCA.

But some companies like Warren found a crafty loophole, starting in 1964 they began publishing the horror anthology Creepy, which was published in standard magazine format (8 3/8" x 10 7/8") rather than standard comic book format (6 3/4" x 4"). And in doing so made them completely exempt from the Comics Code.

Creepy, along with Eerie and Vampirella were pretty subversive in the industry at the time (no surprise as Warren was employing Gloria Steinem on another of their magazines), in 1972 Creepy #43 featured the first mainstream (as in not underground comix) interracial kiss in comics history.

Another major victim of the Comics Code were war comics. While they were not completely eliminated they were neutered and featured bland pro-war pro-american sentiments. Warren once again stepped up and in 1965 published the short lived (only 4 issues) anthology Blazing Combat, which used the same magazine format to circumvent censorship. Blazing Combat proved to be wholly unique in its stark, realistic, and unabashedly anti-war depictions of the human and spiritual casualties in wars that were otherwise considered noble (such as WW2).

While they're a now defunct spark note in the history of American culture, I view Warren as one of the rebels in what was among the longest surviving forms of official censorship in US history.