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.
To begin with, I really do like the idea of reading a comic about comics. I think it's a great idea and it's very well executed. As I was reading the first two chapters, I was surprised at how many examples there were of art in recent (and ancient, in some cases) history that are variations of "sequential visual art" and thus the foundations of modern comics. I'd never even thought about it before and it was hard to believe how many different kinds there were. I also love all the discussion about how our human brains automatically interpret certain images in a specific way, how we see others constantly but we identify ourselves when we look at cartoons, and how inanimate objects automatically becomes extensions of our bodies. The pyramid of styles was very interesting too as a way to conceptualize and almost graph or "place" a specific art style in comics. In Comic Book Nation , I enjoyed reading about the evolution of early comics from "funnies...
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