Comic book Summary

Comic Books Comic books are an essential representation of twentieth-century American popular culture. They have entertained readers since the time of the Great Depression, indulging their audience in... Read more

In the following essay, White profiles an early history of comic books, culminating in the creation of Superman and Batman. It's a story which has grown into modern myth—a myth which ... Read more

In the following excerpt, Daniels studies the origins and development of underground comic books and surveys the major figures who published in this genre during the late 1960s and early 1970s. [Un... Read more

In the following essay, Abel interviews underground artists like Art Spiegelman, and notes when underground comic books first came to the attention of Middle America. For the great majority of Amer... Read more

In the following essay, Inge assesses the comic as an art form. The comic strip has been defined as an open-ended dramatic narrative about a recurring set of characters told in a series of drawings... Read more

In the following excerpt, Dorfman and Mattelart attack Disney's Donald Duck comics as purveyors of what they consider a perniciously capitalist ideology. It would be wrong to assume that Wal... Read more

In the following essay, Skidmore and Skidmore identify a new political consciousness instilled in comic books by the Marvel group and other mainstream publishers. To most of us who were in or appro... Read more

In the following essay, Huxley discusses Savage Tales, In-Country Nam, and other examples of post-Vietnamera war comics. Since 1980 there have been a wide range of texts in the field of American po... Read more

In the following essay, Sutton surveys autobiographical comic books for adults. Masturbation, nose picking, stupid jobs, and unsatisfying sex—the subject matter of most autobiographical adul... Read more

In the following essay, Gopnik examines Art Spiegelman's Maus, a comic book about the Holocaust, in the historical context of traditional cartoon imagery and caricature. If you ask educated ... Read more

In the following essay, Fiedler dismisses the worry over comic books as a weakness of culturally intolerant middlebrows. I am surely one of the few people pretending to intellectual respectability ... Read more

In the following essay, Barker praises the censored horror comics of the 1950s as meditations on doubt and subjective identification. In 1964 Ballantine Books produced a series of reprints in pocke... Read more

In the following essay, Siano presents a defense of comic books against a new trend of censorship reminiscent of that practiced during the 1950s. In the early 1950s, a respected psychiatrist and we... Read more