In my opinion, anything that goes into the public media could and have a possibility of being forefront of social reform. Comics were somewhat forefront of the social reform in the 1960s. However, comics have clear differences compare to Television and other media. Although, comics deal with many social issues, and cultural problems they did not tell directly to the public. Mega comics company like Marvel comics talked about social issue, but their comics were consistent with what was going on during 1960's with their own way of provide messages to the public. Also, they focus on creativity and the storytelling other than social issues and other problems in the society. There were some comics deal with real world problems at that time. For example; fantastic four was one of the great comic that was dealing and talking about real world problems. Comics at that time were nearly similar, because comic industries were getting their idea from each other, they shared and received ideas from each others. Comics in 1960's also deal with reality verses fantasy. When you look at some of the characters that time you can easily say that comics loved to talk about escaping from the reality. Such as Spider man is just average guy who works at the company, and when he turns into the Spider man he loves being Spiderman and sometime he feels downside, but still he feels great thrill while he is being Spider man. Therefore, comics is mix between reality and fantasy. However, I would not say that comics did not had any effect on social transformation, but they were more of a reflection of social transformation.
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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