Comic Book Nation Response

Through our study of masculinity in American comics, we've drawn out parts of an evolving national consciousness beginning in the last years of the depression, through world war two, the fifties, Vietnam, and ultimately leading into contemporary modes of national consciousness.

The trajectory of comics is not simply a reflection or reactive critique of American society, rather it seems to be a manifestation of identity. We can conclude then, that comics are not static fixtures of a monolithic narrative, as mythologies such as Superman are prone to engendering such notions, rather they are as influential as actors on cultural consciousness as Steinbeck, or Horatio Alger, spanning all shades of cultural awareness.

As Wright points out, circulation by the end of WW2 was staggeringly high among children (95% boys, and 81% of girls) but more shockingly among an equally surprising number of adults (41% of men, and 28% of women). Such figures cannot be ignored as the circulation figures might indicate a huge contribution on the part of comics to the socialization of national identity within gendered narratives.

I will be as bold as to assert that in addition to other influences regarding labor and income access during the depression among women, including the loss of access and emasculation of men, as Wright points out we see the emergence of an albeit primitive proto-femenist figure in Louis Lane, alongside the ultra-masculine Superman.

Through the Second World War, Wright also points to the introduction of female artists, and an appropriation of both sexes to the war effort in an arguably gender-neutral (by the standards of the context) national consciousness. Wright goes on to say that even the ultra-masculine superheroes put aside their idealized sexual identities in deference to the larger war effort.

I say that comics are active participants in part because of the aforementioned examples, but also because of the the very unique birth of the first great successes of the golden age, namely the likes of Superman, Captain America, etc. who would form the core of DC and Marvel, America's flagship publishers. The lower-middle-class/working class "everyman" ethos adopted by the creators of these comics responded directly to the anxieties of depression, and as war loomed on the horizon, the predominantly Jewish industry would take up arms in their fictional narratives, some even taking up America's call to arms.

The war saw comics become a key component in the socialization and accultrization of national identity in WW2 era youth, perhaps even acting in some ways as an address to the absence of fathers during wartime, as we have seen in the paternalistic depictions of Captain AMerica's realtionship with Bucky.

Through the fifties, comics once again become an embodiement of national identity, almost serving as fossilized remains of the predominant social standards of the period. Wright writes that in some ways, comic writers and publishers bought into the post-war national euphoria that would ultimately serve as the seeds for American hegemony. At the same time, we see more popular comics shift with the physical structural changes of society- from rural to urban to suburbanization, which mean surviellance and domestication. We see this in the emergence and popularity of such vapid and repressed works such as Archie comics. However, we also see the resurgence of a very seedy visceral language of abjection emerge. These crime-comics grew in circulation to the point that there was a considerable national-even international response- indicating the base of influence we mgith assume. Furthermore, these comics grew alongside a cinematic tradition that also rebelled against the domestication of gender-roles in the depiction of the sexes in the film counterpart of the crime genre, as well as manifesting itself in other ways.

The language of abjection looks to the urban centers in attempting to re-appropriate sexuality, specifically male sexuality. Much in the same way as Davey Crockett's myth operated during a similar period of gender-role compartmentalization (the second great awakening), these crime comics sought to violently reacquire otherwise subverted/supressed/domesticated access to sexuality through lurid tales of femmes fatale', etc.

As before, we can draw out a greater mood of a period, but now with Wright's account, we see that issues of gender, class and national identity are as deeply embedded and acted upon by comics as any other popular cultural medium, perhaps even more so by the status of comic books as a largely less regulated low-artform. We can draw out a very specific and central theme to discussing gender narratives in America, and that is gender roles, and access. With the depression we see an attempt to gain access in an emasculating environment, a response to poverty. Through the FDR years to the end of WW2 we see a much more gender neutral mode of dsicourse in comics, heavily influenced by nationalized programs and a near-total war state within the confines of FDRs ultimately material critiques and methods of addressing social problems, thus access and gender roles become less prominent as access is not being addressed through a compartmentalized appropriation of gender as specific forms of force/power. In the fifties we finally see a heavily compartmentalized and thus access-restricted evironment. The limit of access can thus lead us into the germination of counterculture, and the emergence of the independent comic.

Within this greater framework of national identity, comics, and gender narratives, I want to explore contemporary comics under a hypothesis that following a period of domestication or supression, in addition to the added circumstances of the shift from materially based to information based economies, masculinity is undergoing another cycle of re-appropriation, as it did in the late fifties, thus opening possibilites, much in the same way that possibilities were opened for conunterculture in a similar environment.