Skip to main content

Why Blame Comics for Societal Failure?

Most things that happen in our society, are the result of another action that it can be blamed upon. Whether or not something is to blame is hard to understand or predict. At the peak of the rise of comics, many events were happening in the world, causing violence and chaos, there was the war, depression and mass amounts of people moving into cities. Many fathers were away at war, and while this was going on the mothers had to go to work to support the family that was still in the United States. This left children running wild, and allowing them to do what they wanted, something along the lines of reading comic books.
Once parents saw that there children were becoming more aggressive, violent, or mean they began to look for things in there life that could cause these behaviors. What resembled their actions the closest was of course "comic books". It could not be the parenting, or the lack of it for that matter, so the parents brushed it aside and placed it upon the comics. With all of the complaints coming from families about their children and reading the comic books, the government placed controls on what could be published and what could not. This destroyed the creativity behind comics and made for a pretty boring story only to make the society feel better about the destructive children.
I do not believe that comics are to blame for how failure was shown in our society at the time, because of the events that were taking place. Families were being split apart, and comics were an escape from the real world for most children, but they were not the cause of the outburst in behavior, that was from other social issues.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why blame comics for societal failure?

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.

The 1950s are often portrayed as a period of social cohesion. Why is this misleading?

When we think of the 1950's, most people think of similar things such as "Leave it to Beaver", very conservative and cliched pop music, and high patriotism. Our view of that time is one of social conformity to conservative values, with a traditional nuclear family where the father worked and the mother stayed home, where a majority of people attended church, where crime was relatively low, where a majority of American citizens were extremely patriotic, and where entertainment media emphasized these same conservative values and were subjected to censorship if they did not conform. This is misleading because while these things were all true to a certain extent, the world was obviously not perfect and not everyone was conforming or upholding traditional values, even if it seemed like they were. The 1950's were actually a very tumultuous time period, with the end of World War II leaving Europe war torn and in debt, the outbreak of the Korean War and the clashes of opinion...

Were comics at the forefront of social transformation or lagging behind in the 1960’s?

Throughout the 60’s, comics were at the forefront of social transformation. Possibly the best example of this is through comics reflection of the public’s view of the Vietnam War. At the beginning of the war a majority of Americans fully supported the cause. The idea that communism, the most evil idea conceived, could spread first through South-East Asia and eventually to the US lead Americans to accept the need to occupy Vietnam. However as the war progressed it became more obvious that it was less to defend democracy and actually just a proxy war against Russia. As support for the war diminished, comics greatly altered their position on the war to question the causes of the war, and whether the US should actually be there. The comic Iron Man accurately represented this shift in support as he stopped dealing arms, and took a moral stand against their use. As well as Vietnam War culture, comics also accurately portrayed youth culture in the US throughout the 60’s. Comics suc...