The 1950’s were a very stressful time for The United States. The country was just coming out of World War II and Korea and had to deal with a lot of issues back home as well. Many movements were becoming to take a stand such as woman’s rights and civil rights. The red scare was also a huge deal. The Russians began to become a huge super power and the idea of communism was spreading. The United States was very nervous about communism taking over the world and it put stress on the US. The government went crazy with power and began to sensor a lot of media. Part of this censorship was put on the comic book industry. Many people believed that the comic books that were being made had a bad influence on the youth of our nation. The comic book stories that were being developed were comics based on violence and horror. The idea of murder was amongst the comic book stories in great detail. The youth of America became more violent than ever before. This is what made the government put special codes on the comics being made. These codes limited what the comic book industries could produce. The nation began to see the violent comics go down and the funny, romantic, and heroism comics go up. The 1950’s were not a time of social cohesion. The issue with comics split the government from the people. People loved comics and the suspense that they possessed. When the government began to censor comics because of this silly idea that it was making the youth more violent it just added more splitting. The country was scared about communism and dealing with social movements as they were censoring the media. The country became more and more split during the 1950’s and it got worse during the 1960’s with Vietnam War. Social Cohesion is not the right word that describes the 1950’s in The United States.
To begin with, I really do like the idea of reading a comic about comics. I think it's a great idea and it's very well executed. As I was reading the first two chapters, I was surprised at how many examples there were of art in recent (and ancient, in some cases) history that are variations of "sequential visual art" and thus the foundations of modern comics. I'd never even thought about it before and it was hard to believe how many different kinds there were. I also love all the discussion about how our human brains automatically interpret certain images in a specific way, how we see others constantly but we identify ourselves when we look at cartoons, and how inanimate objects automatically becomes extensions of our bodies. The pyramid of styles was very interesting too as a way to conceptualize and almost graph or "place" a specific art style in comics. In Comic Book Nation , I enjoyed reading about the evolution of early comics from "funnies...
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