During the late 1940s and into the early 1950s many Americans were becoming with the turn that comic books were taking. Previously comic books mainly contained superheroes and positive messages, but now since there was less of a need for superheroes the industry looked for a different genre and stories to tell through comic books. The most successful genres that the industry came out with were the new type of crime comics and horror comics. These new crime comics were not the same as earlier crime comics, these comics depicted detailed crime scenarios and people getting shot on more than half of every picture in the book, and the criminals would not be punished until sometimes the very last frame of the book, giving the impression that punishment was so important to the story. Not unlike the crime comics the new genre of horror comics were just what they sound like a variety of horror stories told through the comic book medium. These stories were very gruesome showing people getting killed in a number of different ways. In one story a man killed his with and then ate her in order to get rid of the evidence. Due to these types of stories many people were becoming worried that they were having negative effect on their children and society as a whole, including Dr. Frederic Wertham. Dr. Wertham was very adamant about this subject and blamed comics for the numerous troubled youth that were his patients. In his article The Comics… Very Funny he directly blamed comics for the crimes and atrocities that children and teenagers committed, he found that the common factor between all of these cases was that all of these children read several comic books a day. Although he was a very well respected psychologist, I think that Dr. Wertham may have blown this whole blaming comic books for societal failures out of proportion. Reading crime and horror comics wouldn’t make anybody want to go out to murder and pillage any more than watching Bugs Bunny hit Daffy Duck over the head with a bat would make a child go out and do the same to his siblings.
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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