Ker-Splat! - social influence of comic books

Washington Monthly, June, 2001 by Jacob Heilbrunn

How comic books lost their edge

COMIC BOOKS MADE ME A SNOB. AS A child, I was riveted by Spider-Man and went on to become meticulous about my comics' condition and completing series numbers. Now they lie entombed in acid-free boxes and Mylar bags in my house, waiting for divestment.

Occasionally, I even buy one for old times' sake. Spider-Man, like me, appears to have grown up, but his marriage seems to be on the rocks. Still, it's getting harder and harder to find comics because a big cultural shift has taken place: Kids don't read them anymore.

Comic books, like paper routes and small drugstores, have become an endangered species. A series of corporate takeovers, coupled with the dilution of the product and the rise of computer games and music videos, means that the financial state of Marvel and other companies is shaky at best. Once prominently displayed at newsstands and drugstores, the main outlet for comic sales is specialty shops that cater to the cognoscenti. Not surprisingly, the disappearance of comic books means that they have become part of the national nostalgia industry. Indeed, at a time when George W. Bush's proudest initiative is to host "T-ball" at the White House in memory of his own Little League exertions, it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that comic books are attracting new attention.

Enter Bradford W. Wright. A historian at the University of Maryland. Wright is the first serious historian to tackle comics. He is a seasoned veteran of the comics world. He quips in his preface that "few works of historical scholarship can truly claim to represent a lifetime of research as this one does." Though never a serious collector--he lacked the cash Wright was an avid reader as a child. Now, he has produced a fascinating survey of the rise and fall of comics.

Unburdened by any theoretical apparatus, his Comic Book Nation is informative, humorous, and penetrating. Wright never devolves into minutiae likely to bore the non-initiate, and his narrative is extremely well-organized. His theme is simple and persuasive: Comic books provide an acute lens through which to study shifts in popular culture, from World War II to Vietnam to the Reagan era. He argues that editors, mostly Jewish and liberal, sought to challenge racism, fascism, poverty, and the threat of nuclear war. Perhaps his most provocative argument is that the dress rehearsal for today's culture wars about television and rap music took place in comic books.

According to Wright, comic books, which first appeared in the early 1930s, occupied a status just above pornography. Crude and formulaic, they were written by aspiring artists eager to see their names in print. The genre didn't take off until 1939, when Superman was published by Detective Comics (DC). Wright shows the extent to which Superman was a New Deal creation. His two young creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, cast Superman as, in their words, a "champion of the oppressed ... devoted to helping those in need." Wright notes that "in his initial episode, Superman saves a falsely accused prisoner from a lynch mob, produces evidence that frees an innocent woman on death row, and defends a woman about to be beaten by her husband." Later on, Superman destroys a conspiracy involving a senator, a lobbyist, and a munitions manufacturer who seek to foment a war in Latin America. Other DC characters would take the same line, tackling corrupt political bosses and defending the common man. The underlying message was that American society required might to make right. Renowned cartoonist Jules Feiffer has observed that "once the odds were appraised honestly it was apparent you had to be super to get on in this world? More conservative figures had their doubts about the new form. Frank Vlamos, writing in The American Mercury, complained that comics represented "the most dismaying mass of undiluted horror and prodigious impossibility ever visited on the sanity of a nation's youth."

But World War II ratified the new interest in comics. GI's whiling away time by leafing through comics became a staple of wartime propaganda. One of four magazines shipped to troops overseas was a comic book, and 35,000 copies of Superman alone went abroad each month. So enthusiastic for war were Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, who produced Captain America, that they inspired isolationist outrage by having the good captain denounce Nazism before the U.S. had entered the war. According to Wright, Captain America "came to epitomize not only the values and fighting spirit of the national war effort but also the fortunes that comic book publishers would reap from their enlistment into patriotic wartime culture."

Fascism could not have fit better into the Manichean world of comic books. Once prosperity hit the United States, publishers had to readjust. Fighting social inequality was out. Fantasy was in. No one personified the shift better than Superman. "Having launched his career as a crusading champion of social justice and a militant antifascist," says Wright, "by the end of the war Superman had assumed his befitting role as the conservative elder statesman among comic book heroes, above the political and social concerns of the day." Superman became a god-like figure, picking up new powers as well as a self-sustaining world that included a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. However, the industry's sales slumped as it produced anodyne tales of Goody-Two-Shoes who always did right.