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.
Ohhh my goodness... When I decided on trying to analyze the mythological origins and references in superhero comics, I had no idea the can of worms I was opening up... On the one hand, it was awesome to see just how many connections there were between superheroes and psychology/mythology/philosophy, but all the information also made it terribly difficult to distinguish what I should be using and how to tie it all together. When I was talking to one of my sorority sisters about it she said, "Oh yeah, well, research essays are kind of like putting together puzzles..." and I think that really sums up what writing this paper was like for me. Fortunately, I was really interested throughout the whole process and I very much enjoyed writing the paper. Being a psychology major, I was especially interested in reading about the Jungian archetypes that had a lot of parallels with major modern comic books superheroes. I was also able to incorporate Joseph Campbell's "hero cycle...
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