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.
Why blame comics for societal failure? Society blamed comics for the societal failures because it was a fairly new industry, and as things seemed to go “wrong” they figured it must be comic books. When a child grew up during the war, his father was probably killing people and the military and his mother was probably making things in factories to help kill the opposition. The only things kids had to “babysit” them was comic books, and they read many different kinds. So when kids starting acting differently in this new generation the figured it must be the comic books. Society didn’t want to believe it may have been the internal and external scars war causes on the soldiers and their families. Also the fact that young unattended children are reading these comics may not be able to differentiate between fantasy and reality. When society fails it always needs a scapegoat then it was comic books next it was rock and roll. Society naturally resist change.
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