Ker-Splat!(social influence of comic books)

• Author: HEILBRUNN, JACOB

How comic books lost their edge

COMIC BOOKS MADE ME A SNOB. AS A child, I was riveted by Spider-Man and went on to become meticulous about my comics' condition and completing series numbers. Now they lie entombed in acid-free boxes and Mylar bags in my house, waiting for divestment.

Occasionally, I even buy one for old times' sake. Spider-Man, like me, appears to have grown up, but his marriage seems to be on the rocks. Still, it's getting harder and harder to find comics because a big cultural shift has taken place: Kids don't read them anymore.

Comic books, like paper routes and small drugstores, have become an endangered species. A series of corporate takeovers, coupled with the dilution of the product and the rise of computer games and music videos, means that the financial state of Marvel and other companies is shaky at best. Once prominently displayed at newsstands and drugstores, the main outlet for comic sales is specialty shops that cater to the cognoscenti. Not surprisingly, the disappearance of comic books means that they have become part of the national nostalgia industry. Indeed, at a time when George W. Bush's proudest initiative is to host "T-ball" at the White House in memory of his own Little League exertions, it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that comic books are attracting new attention.

Enter Bradford W. Wright. A historian at the University of Maryland. Wright is the first serious historian to tackle comics. He is a seasoned veteran of the comics world. He quips in his preface that "few works of historical scholarship can truly claim to represent a lifetime of research as this one does." Though never a serious collector--he lacked the cash Wright was an avid reader as a child. Now, he has produced a fascinating survey of the rise and fall of comics.

Unburdened by any theoretical apparatus, his Comic Book Nation is informative, humorous, and penetrating. Wright never devolves into minutiae likely to bore the non-initiate, and his narrative is extremely well-organized. His theme is simple and persuasive: Comic books provide an acute lens through which to study shifts in popular culture, from World War II to Vietnam to the Reagan era. He argues that editors, mostly Jewish and liberal, sought to challenge racism, fascism, poverty, and the threat of nuclear war. Perhaps his most provocative argument is that the dress rehearsal for today's culture wars about television and rap music took place in comic books.

According to Wright, comic books, which first appeared in the early 1930s, occupied a status just above pornography. Crude and formulaic, they were written by aspiring artists eager to see their names in print. The genre didn't take off until 1939, when Superman was published by Detective Comics (DC). Wright shows the extent to which Superman was a New Deal creation. His two young creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, cast Superman as, in their words, a "champion of the oppressed ... devoted to...