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American Comic Books: A Brief History and State of the Art
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20288 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
6,120 Words |
| Author
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M. Thomas Inge
M. Thomas Inge is Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of the
Humanities at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. He
is editor of Truman Capote: Conversations and Comics as
Culture, both published by the University Press of Mississippi. |
Comic strips in the daily newspapers are read and loved by millions of Americans; no one becomes concerned over them except when they engage in political satire, address a controversial issue, or violate occasional social mores--as when Walt Kelly's Pogo was often banned in the 1950s by conservative newspapers because of his liberal stances, or when Garry Traudeau's Doonesbury introduced homosexual characters and premarital sex to the pages of the funny papers in the 1970s. Comic books, however, are an entirely different matter.
The comic book has always been suspect among psychologists, educators, and moral reformers. Those concerned with the mental health of the nation have often been convinced that juvenile delinquency may be attributed to comic book reading. Teachers have believed that children's reading habits will be dulled by overexposure to the heavily illustrated stories, and they will be sidetracked from reading "real" books. Reformers have accused them of being crude, unimaginative, and ultimately corrupting and have worked to keep them out of the hands of young readers. These attitudes are effectively summed up in this statement by one of the more hostile critics of comic art:
I despise the comics . . . because they have no subtlety and certainly no beauty. They oversimplify everything. For a good description they substitute a bad drawing. They reduce the wonder of language to crude monosyllables, and narration is nothing more than a printed film. I detest their lack of style and morals, their appeal to illiteracy and their bad grammar. I execrate their tiresome harshness, their easy sensations, and their imbecilic laughter.
Whatever truth may reside in these charges, and every single one of them may be easily debated or refuted, it is true that the earliest comic books were produced rapidly with little attention to the basic principles of storytelling and with drawings that were charmingly naïve and very often crude with respect to anatomy, perspective, and layout. But to judge the comic book by its earliest examples would be like judging the art of film by the first experimental motion pictures. Like other forms of mass media, the comic book has undergone its separate development but with more carefully defined strictures than most, strictures that finally retarded its progress and arrested its artistic development for more than a decade.
Early Successes
Depending upon where one begins historically, the comic book
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