Comics in the 1960’s dealt with social issues and changes significantly. The sixties in the United States were full of change. There were civil rights movements, women’s rights movements, and issues going on with the Vietnam War. Women and blacks were done with being less than white men and started to act upon it. In the media, women and blacks were not depicted as equal to white men, blacks especially. The African Americans were depicted in a very racist view. Luke Cage for example, gained his powers in prison and is very strong and violent, a typical racist view on blacks. A long with these media problems, comic underground began to emerge. This was a company that made comics on whatever they wanted. It was usually about doing drugs and showing how wrong our government was. These people were laid back and just living their life during the sixties. They decided to make a comic company that wrote whatever they wanted too. For once they could be free without the comic codes. Comic Underground dealt with a lot of social norms and showed how they were happening during the time. Since the government at the time was dealing with a huge drug crackdown, the Comic Underground wrote mostly about that. They showed how characters would react if they were taking drugs. The comics were very amusing and were REAL. There were no codes enforced and the comic underground showed reality in comics during the 1960’s.
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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