Comics, much like music, television, and many other forms of media, have at one time or another been blamed for society's downfalls. These accusations often stem from the topics that these forms of entertainment explore, such as sex and violence. The people who hold these views think that, in this case, comics are promoting violence, glorifying crime, making sex seem casual, and putting forth ideas that are the opposite of what was culturally acceptable to do in real life at the time. Then, as soon as children or young adults started to rebel against the culturally accepted way of life, whether actually or just perceived, these people chose a particularly popular form of entertainment at the time to blame for it. In the early 1950s, it was comics. In my opinion, this is completely ridiculous. It is nothing new unfortunately, but people often blame outside forces instead of taking responsibility for their own actions. In these cases, parents, instead of being more involved in their children's lives or adjusting their parenting skills, chose to blame comics for their child's misbehavior. They believed they were easily being influenced by comics to commit crimes and not respect authority. So, to deal with it, they sought to impose restrictions upon what comic book writers could or could not write about or portray in their stories, instead of the obvious solution of not letting their child read comics anymore or monitoring which ones were acceptable for them to read. This is always the solution to these problems: censorship. But not self-censorship, these people always want censorship imposed on everyone, despite the fact that there was nothing inherently wrong with the comics and the fact that they were also popular amongst adults. There was no real reason to blame comics for societal failure, just like there's never been any reason to blame any other form of entertainment for societal failures over the years. The fact is that societal failures are on us, but most people do not want to accept that.
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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