The "Menace" of Comic Books

I'll admit I have no expereince first-hand with comic books. It may be just a fact of growing up with sisters or perhaps my parents were more cagey about censoring our reading than I knew. The most relateable resource I can come up with was "Garbage Pail Kids." These trading cards were a big deal when I was growing up in the 80's and I do vaguely remember hiding them from my parent's view. Just like the horror comics of the 40's and 50's these cards depicted kids in various disgusting portraits. Often they were vomit or snot-covered and I remember the visceral gross-ness of each character I was lucky enough to get my hands on. I think they appealed to both boys and girls and I was surprised to find them alive and well on:

http://www.garbagepailkidsworld.com/.

A new incarnation of these ghoulish kids is now in the form of Hollywood Zombies. http://www.hollywoodzombies.com/

There's a wretched Paris Hilton with her skeleton Chihuahua and a rotting corpse version of Michael Jackson...wait maybe that's just Michael Jackson. Tobey Maguire (Spiderman) is depicted as an almost decapitated upside down corpse. Maybe that's a great example of how pop culture regurgitates itself in so many ways. Spiderman started as a comic, became a blockbuster movie and is now redepicted and defaced in a new comic.

In David Hajdu's article, "The Ten-Cent Plague" he talks about the main appeal of comics to to youth being their goriness and violence. It doesn't surprise me that parents, teachers, and senators alike went after comics citing their immoral, obscene, and offensive nature. In some ways it may be hard to understand what the big deal was considering the amount of violence on television and in video games today, but then again the same parents, teachers, and senators are concerned about these mediums today. My guess is the appeal of comics or any medium intended for youth using gore and violence is only heightened by the fact that "elders" want to take them away. I think the problem with taking such issue with the gore aspect denies the creativity and real story behind most of these comics.

Hadju writes, "In New Orleans, for instance, the mayor and the city council commissioned a report on the comics controversy, which, within its forty-nine pages, noted that comics 'rank with jazz music as being one of the few truly American art forms.' In its conclusion, the report argued, 'The wholesale condemnation of all comics magazines is one of the worst mistakes of some of the critics. The fact is both side are right. The books are not all bad, as the more extreme critics say; nor all good as some of their publishers and defenders contend. Like all other creative products they must be judged individually."

The comic book panic in the 40's and 50's was a precursor to what Laura Miller says was "neither the first nor the last occasion when anxieties about children's exposure to American pop culture got out of hand."

I agree with Miller and even though I have a limited knowledge of comics, I see them not as the first issue that caused a a generation gap, but certainly one of the first pop culture objects that caused a rift between parents and children.