Comic book nation : the transformation of youth culture in America
As American as jazz or rock and roll, comic books have been central in the nation's popular culture since Superman's 1938 debut in Action Comics #1. Selling in the millions each year for decades, comic books have figured prominently in the childhoods of most Americans alive today. The author offers a history of the comic book industry within the context of twentieth-century American society. From Batman's Depression-era battles against corrupt local politicians and Captain America's one-man war against Nazi Germany to Iron Man's Cold War exploits in Vietnam and Spider-Man's confrontations with student protestors and drug use in the early 1970s, comic books have continually reflected the national mood, as Wright's imaginative reading of thousands of titles from the 1930s to the 1980s makes clear. In every genre--superhero, war, romance, crime, and horror comic books--Wright finds that writers and illustrators used the medium to address a variety of serious issues, including racism, economic injustice, fascism, the threat of nuclear war, drug abuse, and teenage alienation. At the same time, xenophobic wartime series proved that comic books could be as reactionary as any medium. Wright's lively study also focuses on the role comic books played in transforming children and adolescents into consumers; the industry's ingenious efforts to market their products to legions of young but savvy fans; the efforts of parents, politicians, religious organizations, civic groups, and child psychologists like Dr. Fredric Wertham (whose 1954 book "Seduction of the Innocent, " a salacious expose of the medium's violence and sexual content, led to U.S. Senate hearings) to link juvenile delinquency to comic books and impose censorship on the industry; and the changing economics of comic book publishing over the course of the century. "Comic Book Nation" is at once a serious study of popular culture and an entertaining look at an enduring American art form. -- Publisher description
Print Book, English, ©2001
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, ©2001
Comics (Graphic works)
xix, 336 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm
9780801865145, 9780801874505, 080186514X, 0801874505
44573354
Superheroes for the common man : the birth of the comic book industry, 1933-1941
Race, politics, and propaganda : comic books go to war, 1939-1945
Confronting success : comic books and postwar America, 1945-1950
Youth crisis : comic books and controversy, 1947-1950
Reds, romance, and renegades : comic books and the culture of the Cold War, 1947-1954
Turning point : comic books in crisis, 1954-1955
Great power and great responsibility : superheroes in a superpower, 1956-1967
Questioning authority : comic books and cultural change, 1968-1979
Direct to the fans : the comic book industry since 1980
Death of Superman, or, must there be a comic book industry?