To a lot of people comics come off at a big sexist industry, in my opinion I think they are inadvertently sexist. I think a lot of the writing and male domination in the industry had a lot to do with the time period in which the comic was written. In the 1930’s into the late 1940’s when comics were in their golden age, women didn’t have a big role in society. They started to work jobs during the war, but after the war their jobs were given to returning service men and the women returned to take care of the house and kids. This transferred to the comics, the writers wrote about current times and events and women had no significant role or power during this time. There were no dominant women roles in comics until Wonder Women was created. The man who created Wonder Women, William Marston, was a psychologist who had strong feelings towards feminism, he thought women were equal to men and even better fit than them in certain positions. Without Marston it could have taken years before a woman was given a leading role in a comic book. As time progressed more and more women were seen in comics and given more important roles. I think comic book writers knew what readers wanted to see and read and they molded their stories around that. They made stories with characters that would sell comics and those characters happen to be men. Yes I think comics are sexist but the writers did and will continue to make comics that are popular and sell, and weather that is with male or female characters is up to the consumer.
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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