Comic books in the 1960’s were certainly at the forefront of social transformation. Comics in the 60’s used many topics and events that were around during that time period. They used currents events in their stories to keep their readers interested and active in reading their comics. The cold war and Vietnam War were common topic written about in comics during the 60’s. These common topics kept comic book in completion with the television and radio which had taken over the media outlet. Another thing comic book writers did to keep comics progressing going was to recreate some of the comic book characters. The writers made the characters more realistic and humanized and seem like an average person when he not fighting crime, this allowed readers to better connect with the characters and understand them. Spider man was a one of the bigger characters that was recreated. He was Made into and nerdy college kid with an average life who gained powers after he was bitten by a radioactive spider. At first he didn’t try and stop crime, but tried to use his power for personal gain like any average person would do. Only when tragedy strikes does he realize he needs to use his power for the safety of the people. Many stories were revamped on this sort of manner. With the new themes and characters I think comic books were towards the top of social transformation.
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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