During the 1960s, the United States was involved in conflicts in Vietnam. On United States soil, protestors flooded common areas of colleges and city streets. 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 comics such as Fritz the Cat featured sex that had not been featured before in 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.
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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