Comics have been around since the cave paintings of the cavemen. The paintings told stories without any words. They would draw pictures of previous hunts or seasons that had dramatic influences on their society. This is one fact that I never knew. I always thought that comics were invented about 100 years ago not during the cavemen era. Reading this in “Understanding Comics” blew my mind. When Scott McCloud mentioned the Egyptians and comics, I was in awe. I thought that this was pretty cool. As time went on, so did the definition of comics. Stories told by pictures stayed but the use of words soon came to be. During the colonial period, comics began to have words. The words weren’t “comic words” that we would think of now, they were full sentences with a picture. The use of these words, such as “BAM” and “ZAM”, weren’t used until about the 1940’s. The first comic during the 1800’s was the yellow kid. It was just a kid that had a yellow shirt on with writing on his shirt. The comic would tell the story by writing different sentences on his shirt. The colonial period’s comics on the picture plane would be very far left towards reality. They were very accurate pictures with only sentences. They were nothing compared to the comics we read today. Towards the 1920’s, comic books that we think of now were coming around. In 1938, superman came to be and people were a little sketched out by a man that could lift up cars. No one had ever seen something like this before but people warmed up to it. From the caveman drawings to the first “real” comic, superman, the comic definition changed completely. The picture plane went from far left to far right to in the middle. Recently, in the New York Times it was announced that the comic companies are going to be changing up the characters and stories a little. So what does that mean for the picture plane? Guess we will have to wait and see.
Why blame comics for societal failure? Society blamed comics for the societal failures because it was a fairly new industry, and as things seemed to go “wrong” they figured it must be comic books. When a child grew up during the war, his father was probably killing people and the military and his mother was probably making things in factories to help kill the opposition. The only things kids had to “babysit” them was comic books, and they read many different kinds. So when kids starting acting differently in this new generation the figured it must be the comic books. Society didn’t want to believe it may have been the internal and external scars war causes on the soldiers and their families. Also the fact that young unattended children are reading these comics may not be able to differentiate between fantasy and reality. When society fails it always needs a scapegoat then it was comic books next it was rock and roll. Society naturally resist change.
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