The social relevance of comicbooks - part 4

“Do superheroes provide an image of ‘friendly fascism’? Is the very idea that they know when and how to do the right thing inherently instilling a misguided sense of dependence on authority in those who partake of the fantasies? Is a society that idolizes a Superman one that will fall prey to a myth of an Aryan Übermensch? Do superheroes provide us with super-excuses?”
 -Danny Fingeroth, lectures comics at New York University

Can we learn about American society from comic books

Every piece of pop culture is a reflection and a product of the state of the USA. The action movies of the seventies had a lot of stories about inner-city inequality and drugs problems.  In the eighties, action movies usually told stories of a one-man wrecking crew against the Sovjets. The nineties featured movies about the war on drugs from South-America and Middle-America.

Before the economic crisis of 2007, MTV had a lot of shows about excessive lifestyles. The zeitgeist allowed MTV to make these partially fictional shows. During and after the crisis MTV suddenly started airing ‘real life’ stories of ordinary people with their own small and big struggles.

All disciplines of American pop culture are subject to change.  Not even comic books are immune to this.  But there is a difference. The stories in comic books often rely on characters. Characters well established decennia ago. The most popular (and best-selling) characters haven’t changed in decades. Spiderman, Superman, Batman, X-men, Fantastic Four, all of them are more or less the same as when they sprung from the creative minds of their creators. Their back-story didn’t change and their major struggles (with villains) also stayed the same.

The stories do leave room for minor tweaks in the way these heroes think, act and generally behave towards major issues. Spidermans alter-ego Peter Parker used to be that simple one-dimensional high school kid who valued nothing more than his family. As his audience matured, his character matured as well. Suddenly he had to worry about real life issues like dealing with women, dealing with the moral issues surrounding life and death and trying to make sense of the madness around him by putting it in perspective.

That is the first lesson comic books teaches us. As eternal as values seem, they’re actually as contemporary as public opinion dictates. This has a direct correlation with sales numbers. The transition periods between the different ages of comics saw sales going down but stories changing to better suit the audience.

Terry Smith, the author of ‘What is contemporary art’ defines contemporary art as ‘much more than a mindless embrace of the present.’ He positions the contemporary within art history by contrasting it with modernism’s love of categorization and grand narrative. One of the characteristics he gives contemporary art is that it’s saturated with a detailed knowledge of art history’s place within history and current events.

Comic books fit that description. The characters and their motivation are timeless in its own right but the overhauling plotlines can’t be viewed without a frame of reference consisting of modern political knowledge and a sense of history.

Take Watchmen for example. The story is set in an alternative history where Watergate never happened and Nixon is still president, yet without knowledge of the 80’s, one couldn’t understand the difficult themes writer Alan Moore struggles with. Watchmen is one end of the spectrum. It’s very open for interpretation and to this day, many discuss the actual meaning. The over-arching theme is the god complex one suffers from when in possession of a weapon of mass destruction and men’s struggle with power. Watchmen forces us to think in terms of individual retribution are sacrificing a sum for the greater good.
To summarize the answer to the reason of this writing. It’s definitely a yes. We can learn a lot about the American society by reading comic books. The opinion of the different writers can be seen as a bonus or as propaganda, depending on who’s reading.

Almost all aspects of American pop culture are sales driven and comic books are no exception. All origins of new story arcs must be compelling to readers (or costumers), following this logic, the audience indirectly decides what is written and drawn in comic books. Therefore story arcs (usually) must be a modest description of society at that time. So the story arc usually represents the ongoing themes in American society but this doesn’t mean it’s propaganda in art form.

In contrary, David Hajdu wrote ‘The ten-cent plague’, a description of how conservatism and conformism handled comic books in the fifties.  He said: "The panic over comic books falls somewhere between the Red Scare and the frenzy over UFO sightings among the pathologies of postwar America".

The clampdown reached its apotheosis in 1954, when the U.S. Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency (the acronym is less familiar than HUAC, the thrust similar) began hearings — and pilloried William Gaines, head of the legendary, subversive EC Comics.

By the end of the hearing, the Comics Code had Botoxed the subversion out of the form, and Gaines was a broken man.

As McCarthy did with communism, Hajdu suggests, Comstockian legislators from both parties saw an opportunity to make political hay by demonizing comic books, aligning with the opportunistic Wertham in calling all such work "crime comics."

As this last example shows, it’s not just the content of the comic books which can be worth discussing, the semantics behind comic books are worth delving into as well. 

Comics teach art and story writing skills by their very nature and are used by storyboard artists in making films, doing animation and more. Comics have tried to teach us that the means are as important as the ends they produce, behind a background of social consciousness. Or as Rob Gustaveson, journalist and blogger once said:

‘The Comic Industry is a metaphor for life. A cosmic drama unfolding.’

Sources

Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, by David Fingeroth and Stan lee
Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society, by David Fingeroth
The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels, by David Fingeroth
The Blackwell Philosophy, by William Irwin
Watchmen, a Rorschach test, by Mark D. White
DMZ saga, by Brian Wood
Watchmen saga, by Alan Moore
Marvel online library