To a lot of people comics come off at a big sexist industry, in my opinion I think they are inadvertently sexist. I think a lot of the writing and male domination in the industry had a lot to do with the time period in which the comic was written. In the 1930’s into the late 1940’s when comics were in their golden age, women didn’t have a big role in society. They started to work jobs during the war, but after the war their jobs were given to returning service men and the women returned to take care of the house and kids. This transferred to the comics, the writers wrote about current times and events and women had no significant role or power during this time. There were no dominant women roles in comics until Wonder Women was created. The man who created Wonder Women, William Marston, was a psychologist who had strong feelings towards feminism, he thought women were equal to men and even better fit than them in certain positions. Without Marston it could have taken years before a woman was given a leading role in a comic book. As time progressed more and more women were seen in comics and given more important roles. I think comic book writers knew what readers wanted to see and read and they molded their stories around that. They made stories with characters that would sell comics and those characters happen to be men. Yes I think comics are sexist but the writers did and will continue to make comics that are popular and sell, and weather that is with male or female characters is up to the consumer.
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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