The 1960's was a rough and confusing time for the United States. During the late 1960's, the main event or social issue that was taking
place and was the topic of everyday life in America was the war in
Vietnam. Because the war was so heavily opposed, people rioting and
protesting were common in city streets and college campuses. This sparked
a whole new era in America. This era in america was filled with protest and outrage. These protestors were the ones who formed the hippy movement in the
United States. These times were all about peace and war was far from
what any one wanted. Drugs became extremely popular during the hippy
movement. This can be seen in the comic books of the late 1960s. Comic
books became a big hit and were now created at an underground level.
These comic books were not required to be checked by the comic code and this sparked a new generation of comic books.These underground comic books were very representative of the rebellious
times. Also the comic book The Amazing Spider-Man featured drugs in
them as Peter Parker's best friend begins taking drugs in order to ease
the pain of his girlfriend Mary Jane coming on to Peter. This is
another aspect that had not yet been featured in comic books that is
socially relevant in the 1960s.
There
were also stories that confronted feminism and female empowerment with
female versions of male characters like Spider-Woman, Ms. Marvel, and
She-Hulk. The growing popularity of socially relevant comics during the
1960s gave way for the comic writer’s of the 1970s to be free to talk
about more personal and realistic social problems that people face
everyday.
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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