Through the Eyes of History--The All-American Comic Book
By: Kaylee Chen
With the rise of comic book cinematic universes, comic book worlds have long established themselves in popular media. Most recently, Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings hit the box office, where it brought in $320.6 million. However, the origin of comic books reveals their ties to important events in American history. At its root, comic books are a method of storytelling, and they reflect the social and cultural environment of the place they are created.
Visual storytelling has been around for thousands of years. From faded cave paintings illustrating hunts to Greek terracotta vases featuring legendary heroes to emojis accompanying a viral tweet, we tend to rely on pictures to either make or complete a story. Before the 1920s, these stories were brief – most comics condensed their stories into short humorous moments, simply acting as supplements to newspapers and not often sold separately. It wasn’t until the 1930s that comics as we know them today began to take form.
The Golden Age of Comics was accompanied by the creation of Superman in 1938, and it produced a series of superheroes like Batman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash, who remain well-known to this day. During this period, Marvel and DC, as well as a number of other comic book publishers, grew in popularity. This marked a veritable cultural explosion and established the existence of the comic book as a form of media.
Although a devastating world war and colorful storytelling don’t seem compatible, the terror of World War II had a surprisingly positive effect on the comic book industry. One of the more famous superheroes today, the Nazi-punching Captain America, arose from the widespread propaganda at that time. Both soldiers and children alike garnered a sense of escapism from the suave skilled heroes during what felt like a dystopian apocalypse.
Between the Golden and Silver Ages was a period of decline and dormancy. Within the superhero genre, only more well-known heroes like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman survived, while other literary genres like romance and science fiction began to surge ahead. Even the comic book form itself was under attack by a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham, who published a book called Seduction of the Innocent in which he claimed the medium of comics induced immorality, sexuality, and violence in young children. This caused the American Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to investigate comic books, and Wertham even testified at Capitol Hill against them, resulting in heavy censorship in horror, crime, and dark fantasy comic books. There were many publishers that would rather close down than endure the heavy sanitization their books were going through. Nowadays, the Comics Code Authority (CCA) is virtually defunct, but its damage to the industry is undeniable.
The revival of the industry and the beginning of the Silver Age of Comics was headlined by DC’s Flash in the mid-1950s, but Marvel also started to surpass DC with the creation of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. During this era, Marvel’s heroes were flawed and deviant from the usual charming, gallant heroes, with more sophisticated storytelling than before. Naturally, this addition of angst led to more resonance among college students; in fact, beneath popular comics emerged numerous underground comics that reflected the counterculture of youth at the time. In the face of the Vietnam War, the growth of commercialism, and the responding formation of the hippie movement, this age marked the addition of depth, societal tension, politics, and human failings and fears to the comic book medium.
What we learn from the story of the comic book is that historical events fraught with uncertainty and change can only be accompanied by a medium like the comic book, which has depended on humor and heroes righting wrongs since its origin. Although the origin and development of American comic books throughout the 1900s were characterized by a mixture of successes and drawbacks, closely mirroring the fluctuating American spirit, the industry continued to rise with few setbacks from the 1970s onwards. Indeed, the “ever upwards” trajectory of comic books into the cultural phenomenon it is today can best be said in the words of iconic Marvel comic book creator Stan Lee: “Excelsior!”
