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.
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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