During WWII, Comics were used to fire everyone up for war. People loved seeing the countries enemies being punished in the comics. The best example of this is Captain America’s first comic book cover. It is a picture of him punching Adolf Hitler in the face. Everyone began to love Captain America because of this. But after WWII there was no need for these types of comics. No more heroes were saving America from its enemies. The comic world needed to turn to something new. This is where the comics became responsible for societal failure. The comic book writers began to implore violence into their comics. The comics were very dark. Filled with horror and violence, the kids reading these comics became attached to violence. Kids love looking up to role models and when your role model is violent, the kid becomes violent. The youth is always the future and when the youth is becoming more violent, there is a problem. The government believed that the comics were making the children more violent so they came up with codes for the comic book writers. These codes limited what the comic book writers could write about. The censorship of comics hurt the comic book industry, but the government was in control. I really don’t believe that comics are the reason for societal failure at all. At the time of this incident, the economy was booming. Coming out of a war that we won and being done with the depression, America was in a good place. The comic book world did not ruin the society by any means.
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.
Comments