SOURCE: "Introduction: The Rise and Decline of Escapism, 1929-1945" and "Terminus Ad Quem," in Comic Books and America, 1945-1954, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990, pp. 3-13, 111-20.

[In the following essay, Savage places the comic book hero in a historical context, from World War II to the Vietnam era.]

During the 1930s, purveyors of popular culture offered escape to the American people. Perhaps they were simply trying to ease Americans through a difficult time by making no offensive reference to the extent of economic calamity wrought by the Depression. If so, the tactic led them conveniently away from the arena of social commentary and thus from the taint of controversy. Concern over Communist activity (the legacy of the Red Scare of the 1920s), distrust of some labor unions, and reaction to even the vaguest of utterances suggestive of socialist sentiment in response to the perceived collapse of capitalism—easy enough to imagine in the 1930s—had all worked toward the kind of consensus that made most social (and necessarily, political and economic) criticism suspect. So, whether the Depression was too dangerous to contemplate or merely too unpleasant, popular culture tended to focus on either the past or the future. Rarely did it examine the present in any relevant manner.

In films—and they are the sole consistently recurring evidence of the era, thanks to the recycling of television and related technologies—the unemployed, if they were revealed at all, were cast as buffoons (the brothers Marx, the Three Stooges, and variations thereon), and their comedic misadventures pointed to the strong prospect of their utter unemployability, even in flush times. Most of the children of Our Gang seemed oblivious to the poverty in which they were mired, relishing instead the striking range of possibilities for innovation it offered to enterprising youngsters. The poor, in short, were usually hilarious; and if poverty could be treated so obliquely, so could a great many other issues. The ramifications of such notions as class distinction were confronted only indirectly, customarily through the genre of romantic comedy, a la Frank Capra. Otherwise, hard-boiled detectives and an array of oriental sleuths, singing cowboys, and gymnastic lords of the jungle, athletic interstellar heroes and high-stepping gold diggers, and a regular posse of man-made monsters, migrating vampires, and enormous apes carried the day. Such fanciful things were matinee fare at everyone's Bijou or Rialto; and they bore little relationship to the real world.

And thus it was with the comics medium. Before 1929, newspaper strips and Sunday comic sections, important cultural transmitters since the turn of the century, were known as "funnies," a term implying humorous intent. Funnies offered slices of life, situation comedies of brief duration and generally domestic in their orientation. After 1929, however, they seemed something less than funny to increasing numbers of readers who failed to find amusing prospects in the framework of daily life. The world was in turmoil, the economy was in serious trouble, and the antics of assorted flappers, high rollers, and down-and-out immigrants could not relieve, even for the moment, the gloomy aspect of the rest of the newspaper. Hard times had blunted the appeal of the so-called funnies.

On January, 7, 1929, the adventures of "Tarzan" and "Buck Rogers" first appeared on newspaper comic pages, heralding the advent of what would become known as the "adventure strip." Following "Tarzan" in the 1930s were "Dick Tracy," "Jungle Jim," "The Phantom," "Terry and the Pirates," and dozens of others. All of them featured continuing stories, exotic locales and/or characters, virtually nonstop action, and little if any humor. They served to transport readers elsewhere—to a jungle, a desert, the Far East, a distant planet or some other atypical environment where heroes struggled against tall odds or fabulous creatures, and where nothing had any real bearing on the problems of the day. As the decade progressed, adventure strips grew in popularity, fueling escapist fantasies for the economically distressed. Because comic books developed from comic strips, they reflected the same shifting emphases.

The comic book emerged as a discrete medium of American cultural expression early in the 1930s. In its initial form, it contained only reprints of newspaper comic strips and was offered by publishers in bulk to companies in search of premiums and giveaways to increase their sales of everything from breakfast cereal to children's shoes. So popular was the comic book in this entrepreneurial venue that some publishers were led to believe it could be marketed directly to youngsters through news dealers, drugstores, and other retail outlets for a dime per copy. Early comic books—Funnies on Parade (1933) and Famous Funnies (1934) were two of the first-bore titles that belied the newspaper trend toward adventure comics, although they did reprint some of the post-1929 adventure strips. But by the end of the decade, such publications as Detective Comics (1937) and Super Comics (1938) bespoke a significant thematic change, as comic books began to offer more and more original material prepared specifically for the new medium. These items were among the precursors of the vaunted "golden age" of comic books, which began during the summer of 1938 with the debut of Superman in the first issue of Action Comics.

The impact of the Superman character upon the subsequent development of the comic book would be difficult to overestimate. Here was a seemingly human being who possessed a number of superhuman powers, a costumed hero with a secret identity, an alien from a dying planet who embraced American ideals and Judeo-Christian values—a kind of spectacular immigrant, as it were, come from afar to participate in the American dream. He had speed and strength and was invulnerable to manmade weaponry. He could not fly, but he could jump well enough to sustain the illusion. He was the nemesis of criminals, extracting confessions of their misdeeds by displaying his awesome powers; but, withal, he did not kill, or at least not more than was absolutely necessary—and there was an index of his healthy psyche and whole-some persona. As a cultural artifact, Superman gained an enormous audience in fairly short order, passed from comic books into a variety of media including animated cartoons and radio, and endured in his basic format, though further translated by television and motion pictures, for half a century. If imitation is, as Charles Caleb Colton said, the most sincere flattery, then Superman was the most flattered of all comic-book creations, spawning a host of look-alike, act-alike costumed heroes, all owing their existence to the norms and conventions his character established.

The appearance of Batman in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics marked the emergence of another kind of heroic prototype. In this instance, a man of means (he had millions), when summoned by police, donned a bizarre costume (intended both to conceal his real identity and to terrify crooks) and swung into action (literally on the end of a rope, in most cases, even though the other end of it did not appear to be attached to anything). Batman possessed no superhuman powers. The skills he offered in behalf of law and order were merely those of the superior athlete and the brilliant scientist, and that was probably as close to reality as the story line came—which is to say that it missed by quite some distance. Like their adversary, Batman's criminal opponents were peculiar characters, altogether unusual in appearance and demeanor; and they contributed much to the surreal, nearly gothic aura of the Batman comic books.

Batman, too, was widely imitated, especially after the appearance of Robin as his adolescent sidekick in the April 1940 issue of Detective Comics. Within a matter of weeks, the duo appeared in the first issue of Batman Comics. Batman and Robin established the comic-book precedent for heroic partnerships between grown men and young boys, and their success made such pairings very nearly de rigueur in the medium during the 1940s. Here, after all, was a telling point of identification for an eager juvenile readership with dimes to spend.

Superman, Batman, and their numerous cultural clones were wholly fantastic constructs, in keeping with the escapist thrust of Depression-era popular culture. Arguably, they owed much to the renditions of other media. If, for example, radio's Lone Ranger and Tonto (no kid, granted, but clearly possessed of limited talents and abilities and thus kidlike) had been demonstrating since 1933 that a hero and a half were better than one, Batman and Robin merely offered further evidence. And if audiences appreciated the costumed flummery of, say, Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon movie serials, then perhaps Superman succeeded no less from a growing general interest in science fiction as an entertainment genre than from his exhibition of hybrid qualities revealed onscreen by Flash's friends as well as his enemies—strong men with wings, and all of that. But comic books could carry heroes beyond the limits of possibility imposed by radio (sounds without pictures and thus without depth or significant personification) and film (sounds with pictures, but constrained by technology). Radio, short on data, gave the consumer's imagination too much latitude, while film, rife with data, refused to give it enough. Comic books, however accidentally, managed to split the difference. They could show whatever the artist could draw, their lines and colors directing imagination, their balloon-held texts defining time and space. Comic-book artists and writers could produce that which could be conceived, which was more than the creators of motion pictures and radio programs could claim. Moreover, comic books escaped consideration according to aesthetic criteria established by adults for the evaluation of media offerings intended for the grown-up world. They were for children, and they enjoyed a certain freedom.

As the 1940s began, comic books were being published in larger and larger quantities, and new characters were appearing every month. Heroes proliferated. The Green Lantern, Captain Marvel, and the Atom led the parade in 1940—respectively, an ordinary mortal endowed with alien powers, a boy who could become a man at will, and an extremely small fellow to whom size, or rather his lack of it, was no handicap in a world of frequently malicious larger folk. By 1941, The Justice Society of America had made its appearance as the first consortium of comic-book heroes: Green Lantern, the Atom, the Flash, Hawkman, Hourman, Sandman, the Spectre, and Dr. Fate collaborated against criminals in a continuing alliance, a unique association that would establish yet another trend within the comic-book industry. Captain America, Plastic Man, Daredevil, and Fighting Yank were among the other heroes who first appeared in 1941. Their very names revealed their unreality.

The presence of so many colorfully-clad strongmen in comic books suggested to some observers that young female readers were being ignored. The masked and caped crime fighters seemed ideally structured to serve as role models for boys, so why should there not be a corresponding model for girls? In response, psychologist William Moulton Marston, in collaboration with artist Harry G. Peter, developed a costumed heroine he named Wonder Woman. She first appeared in the November 1941 issue of All-Star Comics as yet another prototype, albeit one who lived for years in the shadow of the male protagonists.

All these new heroes had plenty besides crime with which to contend, since, by 1940, war raged in Europe and Japanese militarists were having their way in the Far East. International politics had replaced economics as the major public preoccupation in the United States, and comic-book publishers, seeing fresh opportunities, began paying editorial attention to the real world for the first time. Their heroes, who had been unable to grapple with the complex issues of the Depression, could now set sights on the political arena, at first fighting fascism as a form of international crime in a limited involvement that came several months before America's entry into World War II.

It may have been an appropriate cultural response in the context of the time, given the burgeoning nationalism of the Axis powers; but in any case, impelled by world affairs and the public mood, the comic-book industry fashioned a number of patriotic heroes for popular consumption. These included Fighting Yank, descendent of a Revolutionary War soldier who received his powers from that long-dead ancestor; Captain America, a chemically enhanced human being created by the military as the first member of a proposed army of super-soldiers; and perhaps the most peculiar—and peculiarly American—hero of all, Uncle Sam, who first appeared in the aptly named National Comics in July 1940. Once these and other such characters were in place, it was a relatively simple matter to match them against Axis villains, anticipating the day when the United States surely would have to join the conflict in an official capacity.

Many in the comic-book industry seemed to believe that American involvement in the war was inevitable. The attitude led to intense speculation and some rather loud rattling of cultural sabers. In that regard, it was less surprising than it might now seem that the eighteenth issue of National Comics, on newsstands early in November 1941, depicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that would not happen until a month later. Viewed in retrospect, the comic book's striking cover does not suggest the prescience of the medium; rather it indicates that when a single medium explores enough dramatic possibilities proceeding from a given set of circumstances, one or two such explorations are likely to be right on the money. It was simply that a year and a half of guessing on the part of National Comics staff had paid expected dividends, since from the perspective of comic books American participation was a foregone conclusion.

If rumors of war hinted at the end of escapism in American comic books, the fact of war presented empirical evidence of it. The questions at hand concerned national survival and the ability of the individual American to cope with the inevitable stress of awaiting an outcome. Comic-book heroes had new roles to play. Whereas crime fighting may have qualified as escapist fare during the 1930s (to the extent that crime was not a thing that touched every life), war was a different matter. Even the Depression had not affected the entire population, which may help to explain why popular culture could have afforded to ignore it. Moreover, crime had been the dilemma of local, state, and federal agencies, and the Depression had been widely viewed as a problem depending upon national political leadership for satisfactory resolution. In contrast, war concerned all Americans, and the cooperation of all would be required to insure a successful conclusion. It was not, as a rule, a time for cultural fun.

Comic books brought much to the American cause. In addition to lending support to such necessary activities as bond drives and paper drives, comic books became an integral part of the Allied propaganda machine, emphasizing the need for a maximum war effort by portraying the enemy as the inhuman offspring of a vast and pernicious evil. Writers coined epithets like "ratzi" and "Japanazi," and artists drew rodentlike Japanese and bloated, sneering Germans. Japanese troops wore thick glasses and displayed prominent teeth, while German officers possessed monocles and dueling scars, much as they did in the wartime renditions of Hollywood filmmakers—although comic-book illustrators took greater liberties than Hollywood could, and to greater effect, given the nature of caricature. Comic books of the war years often bore dramatic covers—the full-color strangling of Hitler by a costumed hero, for example—which suggested an intensity of feeling but nevertheless frequently belied the contents of the issue. While the details of Hitler's agonized death might not (and probably would not) be recounted on the inside, comic-book heroes still could be relied upon to do something grand for the war effort and to wave the flag at regular intervals. Once the cover had stirred the blood, the slightest thing should serve well enough to keep it circulating, such books suggested.

Once America entered the war, the prevalence of heroes with superhuman powers created problems for comic-book publishers. Were the United States to unleash these impervious patriots upon the Axis, the war could reasonably be expected to end in an hour or less. Some explanation of why that would not happen had to be forthcoming if the credibility, and ultimately the utility, of the heroes were to be maintained, even among unsophisticated juvenile audiences. Publishers responded according to the characteristics of their heroes. Some risked having their less-powerful creations travel abroad, where protracted struggle could indicate that the enemy was altogether tougher than anyone had expected and explain why the war would not end quickly. Others allowed their heroes only indirect participation in the war, lest the plausibility of the characters be lost. On the one hand, Superman might indeed have asserted that "our boys" could handle the nasty business of war without his help; but on the other hand, it was also true that Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, had managed to fail his preinduction physical, which had conveniently kept the "man of steel" from any involvement in a foreign theatre. While Superman did eliminate the occasional spy or saboteur at home, he did not routinely have the chance to strangle Hitler. Nor did Captain Marvel, who also stayed home and fought saboteurs, although in one story his creators did opt for allegory, allowing their hero to encounter a pair of malevolent trolls who closely resembled the leaders of Germany and Italy. They, it seemed, were ruining the lives of the rest of the trolls, who were ordinary, though small and subterranean, folk desiring only a return to peace in their time. And so forth and so on, in as many permutations and variations as there were costumed and powerful characters.

War stimulated the comic-book industry, not only by providing much of the editorial matter but also by expanding the audience for comic books. Hundreds of thousands of comic books were shipped to American service personnel around the world. True, the books were inexpensive and portable and thus logical fare for troops in transit; but, as well, they satisfied the requirement which dictates that popular culture appeal to the lowest common denominator, in this case the individual with limited language skills and the capacity to respond to only a narrow range of cultural symbols. The mobilization of a total of some 16 million Americans by war's end suggested a number of possibilities to comic-book publishers, and they made every effort to capitalize on them. The quality of their product was of no concern in that economic environment.

Sending comic books to military personnel testified to the utility of the medium in raising morale through patriotic fervor, even if it should be achieved through appeals to racism. Laden as they were with unlikely heroic models, comic books could still inform about unity on the home front and indicate the extent to which American soldiers were glorified in a predominantly domestic medium. Even an illiterate could discern from comic books the virtue of the American cause and the sterling qualities of the American fighting man. Comic books served up a four-color version of a war in which the issues were black and white; they questioned nothing; and they dealt almost exclusively in happy—which is to say, victorious—endings. If this were indeed the "last good war," the comic books of the period bear witness to the accuracy of the label.

The war changed the appearance of comic books, probably because so many servicemen read them. By 1945, their art-work had developed a sexual orientation remarkable in a medium ostensibly still intended for juvenile audiences. A typical wartime cover might reveal in the foreground a scantily clad woman, tied with ropes or chains, at the mercy of some leering Axis villain, while in the background an American hero struggled forward, intent upon her rescue. The woman's clothing inevitably was torn to reveal ample cleavage and thigh, her muscular definition enhanced by forced contortion into some anatomically impossible position. Sometimes, her clothing was completely ripped away, leaving her to face her tormentor clad only in her unmentionables—which, presumably, gave added incentive to that struggling hero back there. The stories inside rarely if ever fulfilled the promises of such a cover, but they usually paid sufficient attention to female secondary sex characteristics to warrant a fellow's perusal.

World War II may have ended in 1945, but in comic books it raged on for another year or two, until publishers had exhausted their backlogs of war-related stories. But by then, they had created a serious problem for themselves. By 1946 or 1947 readers, whether they were children or belonged to the older audience built by the war, were jaded by the redundant deeds of redundant heroes. The costumed types, pale copies of Superman and Batman to begin with, had exhausted the dramatic possibilities of the medium as well as of their individual personae by having done, in four action-packed years, everything that anyone could imagine them doing. By the end of the war, comic-book heroes had been pushed to all manner of improbable pastimes, including tearing Axis tanks in half and leaping from one aircraft to another in the middle of a dogfight. Such foolishness continued for awhile, thanks to those backlogs, but it was simply too much for readers to bear, and comic-book sales plummeted.

Once the backlogs were exhausted, heroes had to return to crime fighting to make their contributions to society—and thus to earn their keep, for what good is a hero who does not practice his trade? But in the wake of a world war, that was nothing if not anti-climactic. Any number of heroes fell by the way, unable to pull their weight on an issue-to-issue basis. The survivors retained a loyal following, but a small one by comparison to what once had been. The very survival of comic books may well have been problematical in the minds of some publishers after 1945.

But of course the medium did survive, and it did so by adapting to a new socio-cultural climate with a radically different psychological construct. The war had brought current affairs into the comic pages, and there could scarcely be retreat from that, owing to the circumstances of war's end. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had rather emphatically illustrated the futility of the kind of escapist fantasy prevalent before 1940. Comic books, like other entertainment media, could not ignore what the world had become, nor could they effect a return to simpler times. Who needed a superman when we, with our atomic bombs, had become supermen? Comic-book publishers were willing to change, to adjust their focus, because they supposed that there was plenty of money still to be made. But first, they had to relearn their constituency. Like most other Americans, they had to discover what the nation had become, in consequence of victory.

I have referred throughout to the postwar decade, the period 1945-1954. And yet the chronology is unhandy. Our brackets (the end of the war and the end of a certain kind of comic books) defy convention. Customarily, one may discuss a thing "since 1945," suggesting that the text will bring us to the day before yesterday; or one may deal with "the Fifties," by which is usually meant Dwight Eisenhower's two-term presidency. Either approach will lead to a pause at 1952 to assess what followed: those were culturally sterile years, some historians think, though lately others have argued otherwise. As a child of "the Fifties," I find it all condescending in the extreme. In my family, Ike was a savior of sorts, presiding over the end to the foolishness that made Harry S. Truman try planting (figuratively, but with literal possibilities) my older brother in Korea. That aside, and at work in the liberal academy, I once tried to discover what was the matter with Eisenhower, the old soldier from Kansas whose critics said he spent too much time indulging himself in popular culture, notably paperback westerns. There was Nixon, of course, and John Foster Dulles's nuclear brinkmanship, and other unpleasantries like those. But, undeniably, Ike had more on the ball than most. Indeed, he was our last president to write his own English; and that means more to me with each new administration. But even that aside, how could he be linked with the nation's culture and roundly damned because some thought the culture did not come up to snuff? As a boy, I reveled in that culture, or at least the part with which I had anything to do: Saturday matinees, radio drama, television in its infancy (when I could watch it), bubble-gum trading cards, comic books, pulp magazines, and more.

Decades later, I acknowledged that a good bit of it had been sheer drivel; but I noticed also that what had replaced it represented no significant improvement. There were better technologies, better delivery systems for transmitting culture to kids, but content had deteriorated beyond belief. Except perhaps in the realm of popular music, the Sixties and Seventies seemed drab by comparison—and productive of considerably less cultural documentation to assist subsequent students of those periods. De gustibus and all of that, but for me the indicators of what we had become all dated from earlier times—from the Thirties, which linked culture with economy to help us cope; from the Forties, when politics resolved economic problems in some deadly ways and offered the misdirection of a "good" war; and from the Fifties, wherein we began learning to adjust to what we had wrought beneath Stagg Field and at Los Alamos, while examining ourselves, our society, and our enemies (who were, as Pogo wisely reminded, sometimes "us") with particular intensity. There were issues aplenty in those three decades. It seemed to me, first through nostalgic recollection and then in consequence of formal research, that comic books had touched them all. The trouble was, few historians had touched comic books, despite the corresponding (however coincidental) chronology of the medium.

The content of comic books from 1945 to 1954 mirrored the concerns, preoccupations, and beliefs of American society during the post-World War II decade. Occasionally, the mirror may have been concave, convex, or convex-concave, in the manner generally associated with reflections in the carnival fun house; but never was the distortion so great as to obscure the proper identification of the object at hand. As a mirror, the medium was sufficient and effective. It was not without flaws, but no mirror is.

Comic books from 1945 to 1954 reflected a society attempting to adjust to profound changes. America had won its war against the Axis in what its allies termed deplorable fashion, and Americans had been made to realize that they had more in common with their enemies than their national myths had led them to believe. Therefore, the postwar comic books took no delight in recounting the horrible fate of the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although they did rejoice in America's great technological achievement. When the Soviet Union developed its own nuclear weaponry, comic books followed the federal government's lead in declaring that such devices, even in enemy hands, threatened only America's enemies, and in demonstrating a strong belief in the survivability of atomic war.

Comic books pertaining to the Korean War were pessimistic exercises, reflecting the difficulty Americans had in working up enthusiasm for the sort of limited conflict that the Bomb had supposedly rendered obsolete. As well, the Korean War was not that at all, but an undeclared conflict, a protracted and deadly police action against minions (North Koreans) of stooges (Chinese) of Russians, who themselves had been America's allies not long before, in the war against Hitler. The comic books mirrored the political confusion of the day, the uncertainty of events, the concern over the pernicious nature of monolithic Communism. They suggested that spies and counterspies were more effective than soldiers in meeting and dealing with the Red Menace; and the notion made sense to the extent that the Korean War was news (and the pessimism was thus inescapable), whereas the doings of spies and counterspies were classified (permitting optimism as a function of literary license).

In times of stress, some sort of positive constant is always helpful to the national psyche; and if Communist insurgency, the Bomb, and Korea all pointed to the irrelevance of costumed superheroes, then more traditional types might be refurbished to respond more believably to new socio-political situations. Thus it was that Roy Rogers could become an anti-Communist cowboy in the early 1950s. Like those costumed superheroes, he was originally a product of the Depression, and he dressed almost as strangely as they did. But, perhaps because he was supposed to be a mere mortal with at least a modicum of contact with historical reality, he was better qualified than creations whose antecedents lay in somebody's recollection of Mount Olympus or the Old Testament to rally America toward resolution of a few geopolitical problems.

Blacks and women were second-class citizens in comic books of the postwar decade—blacks, because they were either seldom seen or servile; women, because they depended so frequently upon the good offices of men. Blacks and women shared defects of intellectual capacity, according to comic books, or perhaps it was simply that they tended to be ruled by their emotions. Comic books revealed a world owned and operated by white men, wherein avenues to power were closed against all who were not white men. The unfortunates dispossessed by gender or ethnicity roamed, for the most part, the side streets and alleys and frequently the cul-de-sacs of that world. Within the structure of the story, they were generally props, those women and blacks (and Indians, Mexicans, and Chinese), supporting the scenery, or serving as handy victims, or providing comic relief. Again, comic books were mirrors, this time for a racist, sexist society which, at the time, took racism and sexism as part of the normal state of affairs.

It was an ageist society, too, although the word means more now than it did then. One might suppose that a medium for youngsters would advocate a degree of juvenile autonomy—or that it might even encourage a bit of playful anarchy. But comic books reinforced popular perceptions of traditional roles within the family: mother in the kitchen or cleaning the house; father at the office or other place of business; and both (but especially father) largely oblivious to their children, who nevertheless developed normally on account of school, peer interaction, or some innate desire for the approbation of adults in positions of authority. Even in comic books of the "teenage" genre, where the normal authority figures (parents, teachers, principals, police) were customarily buffoons, kids still managed to learn in school, obey the law, fulfill the expectations of parents, and otherwise demonstrate traits characteristic of good citizens. In ordinary family or school situations, children were creatures clearly superior to the adults with whom they had to deal; but they were also subordinate to them, in comic-book deference to the social system the medium served. In action-oriented comic books, heroes were the superior characters, and children—even those who were the heroes' sidekicks—had much to learn. Heroes, we note, were role models. Parents and teachers were not. Heroes were adults younger than parents and teachers and thus closer in age to their little companions, and to their audience. Indeed, the older the comic-book character, the more negative his or her image was likely to be. Whether villain or fool, the senior citizen was no object of veneration.

Comic books of the postwar decade reflected something of the moral equivocation associated with a society in crisis—or with a society that imagines itself in crisis. Normality is always a statistical proposition, and awareness of changes in numbers that pertain to something considered important will generally fuel commentary. Why the increase in the divorce rate? Did it foreshadow the end of the family as a basic national institution? Did that have anything to do with perceived growth of the homosexual population? Were we becoming a nation of sissies? How were these things related to the performance of American troops in Korea? Were juvenile delinquents (whose numbers were increasing) the products of broken homes? Did a broken home mean that Mom had too much influence on youngsters, or that Dad did not have enough? In view of the prevalence of such questions in the popular press, might one anticipate the imminent moral collapse of the United States? Comic books belonging to the horror/science-fiction genre regularly responded in the affirmative—but not so much, one gathers, from pessimism about the future of the nation as from a basic philosophical commitment to the proposition that human nature was sufficiently perverse to destroy the most stable of social institutions.

By 1954, of course, comic books were viewed by increasing numbers of critics not as mere symptoms of social malaise but as root causes of it—or at least of that portion affecting the nation's youth. Beset by all who sought convenient solutions to complex problems, the medium barely survived onslaughts by the civic minded. Comic books comprised a four-color scapegoat for ills that even their virtual extermination could not cure. Once the fact that no cure could be easily found became clear, the concerned public lost interest; but by then it was too late for the many publishers already driven from the field by single-minded critics. If nothing else, the mortality rate among comic-book publishing houses, circa 1954, indicated the undercapitalized status of the industry. Corporate giants were abundant in other branches of the entertainment business, but among comic-book publishers they were few and far between. So were the survivors of 1954.

That comic books were the sole components of the comic/cartoon spectrum selected for criticism in the early 1950s owed more to their manner of presentation than to their content. Racism and sexism were not uncommon in the animated cartoons of the day, for example; and animated cartoons were viewed by millions each week in the nation's movie theaters. As well, lurid and unseemly material occasionally made its way into comic strips, staples of the daily newspaper and thus regular visitors in the American home. Comic books enjoyed a smaller audience than either comic strips or animated cartoons, but theirs was a targeted audience—children, teenagers, young adults—and their presentations to it were made largely without restraint. Graphic violence brought most of the complaints; and here, in fact, was the one area in which comic-book producers took greater liberty than cartoon studios or comic-strip syndicates could dare to permit. Evisceration, disfigurement, torture—comic books showed it all, and a great deal more. The argument that some of them were textbooks for aberrant behaviors resulting in extensive tissue trauma may be casually dismissed nowadays, owing to the ubiquity of exploitative "splatter flics" (the various Halloween and Friday the 13th films) as the prevalent pastime of many youthful consumers of popular culture; but the fact remains that examination of certain pre-1954 comic books can be a stomach-turning experience. Such books, though relatively few in number in comparison to the hundreds of titles produced in the postwar decade, must persuade the skeptic that the concerns of some critics—especially parents and teachers—were sincerely motivated by a desire to remove unpleasant impressions from the purview of the impressionable. Whether comic strips and animated cartoons were psychologically healthier amusements is perhaps problematical, but the strips dealt in a gentler way with human issues, and the cartoons were usually anthropomorphic and always absurd. Their content could not have initiated or sustained a broadly based critical assault.

Would that we had some sort of viable, statistical measure of the effect of comic books upon juvenile readers—not to apply to Fredric Wertham's interpretation, but to evaluate the medium's influence in shaping subsequent attitudes and opinions. What views in adulthood may be attributed to childhood readings of comic books?

We have more testimony about the impact of television proceeding from the postwar decade than we do about any other medium; and that is so, in my judgment, largely because of the pervasiveness of the medium and thus its perceived potential for causing harm to youngsters. But, while one medium did indeed supplant the other, there is nothing empirical to indicate that television's images entirely replaced those of comic books or rendered their recollection any less potent.

When I was eleven years old, I acquired, at a school rummage sale, a coverless copy of what, years later, proved to be the fortieth and penultimate issue of Two-Fisted Tales (December 1954—January, 1955). Its opening story was entitled "Dien Bien Phu!" and concerned the failed French defense of that outpost in what was then known only as Indo-China. Told in the first person, the story ended with a panel showing the narrator's own blood spreading over discarded pin up pictures on the floor of the last French bunker, "even as the Red tide is spreading over Indo-China," for goodness' sake. It was a troubling story, and I read it many times.

I cannot say that the politics of "Dien Bien Phu!" disturbed me. By then, the "police action" in Korea had ended, my big brother was safe, and at school we were ducking and covering as per federal instructions—that is, we were diving beneath our wooden desks whenever a teacher flipped the light switch, persuading ourselves and the adults responsible for us that we could handle an atomic blast. Indeed, we would emerge from under our desks unscathed. This was in Chicago; and if we needed further evidence of our own security, we had only to ride the Illinois Central up to the Loop and observe the antiaircraft implacements and the Nike missile installations on the greensward along the Outer Drive. But there were no Commies overhead, and none in our neighborhood, that we knew of, anyway. And for most of us, the Red tide had ebbed—if, in our cowboy-and-Superman-soaked consciousnesses, it had ever really flowed in the first place.

Somehow, I never managed to forget "Dien Bien Phu!" Long after that ragged copy of Two-Fisted Tales and I had parted company, the story would rise to the surface of my memory, drawn there most often by current events. Indo-China became Vietnam, and Kennedy committed us to it, Johnson made a fetish of it, and those of us in college developed a keen interest in the Selective Service classification system. Occasionally, some journalist would reprise the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, but for the most part it was overshadowed by outrageous political rhetoric, up to and including Lyndon Johnson's promise to "nail the coonskin to the wall" in celebration of an American victory. At such times, I remembered that old comic-book story. I could see the French officers drinking a final toast to flag and country and going out to die, and I could see the blood spreading across the bunker floor. I realized that repeated readings of "Dien Bien Phu!" a decade before had led me to conclude that the United States did not have a ghost of a chance to win a war—any war—in Vietnam.

Some thirty years after my first encounter with the fortieth issue of Two-Fisted Tales, I acquired another copy and reread "Dien Bien Phu!" This time around, it seemed to me that the story contained a warning, not about the futility of a land-war in Asia (after the advice of Douglas MacArthur), but about the importance of halting the spread of Communism. In fact, it was as much an early plea for American involvement in Indo-China as it was an antiwar tract. At age eleven, I had ignored that, noting only the massacre of French soldiers who, despite their formidable skill and training, were nevertheless outgunned by determined Commies in pith helmets. Not much of a nationalist in the mid-1950s (despite the best efforts of my teachers, I suppose), I did not assume automatically that American troops would succeed where elite French paratroopers had failed. Nor did I have any real idea why the people in the pith helmets fought with such vigor and determination. From the perusal of hundreds of Korean-era war comics, I was well aware of the shortcomings of the American soldier; but I could not account for the tenacity of the various Communist minions who were our enemies—at least not beyond the standard good-versus-evil dichotomy offered by popular culture in those days. At age eleven, though, I knew that it was difficult to be seriously and consistently bad, unless you happened also to be demented. And yet, comic books did not preach the existence of entire nations of demented people—or, as I discovered much later, they had not done it since the end of World War II.

During the Vietnam years, I often wondered how so many people could be so optimistic about the prospects for American victory. Not the politicians or the Joint Chiefs of Staff or veterans of earlier wars or right-wing clergy, all of whom had different axes to grind, but the people who were, or were to become, the soldiers who would do the fighting—how could they maintain the hope that a bit of trivia like "Dien Bien Phu!" had long since snatched from me? I have never met a veteran of Vietnam who recalled having read the story, or Two-Fisted Tales, or very many comic books of any kind, and yet we all belonged to a generation supposedly threatened by the sheer ubiquity of the comic-book medium and its messages.

Since American withdrawal from Vietnam, there have been millions of words written by former soldiers recounting their experiences during the conflict; and not a few of the memoirs proceeding from service in Vietnam have accepted the chore of explaining the preenlistment mentality of American troops. Almost without exception, the accounts stress the influence of motion pictures and television in establishing the norms of patriotic, masculine, American behavior. Middle-aged veterans now confess to early seduction by John Wayne, Audie Murphy, and even Hopalong Cassidy. We must assume that the impact of screens, whether large or small, pushed other images aside, so that, even if these veterans ever contemplated comic books in the first place, the visuals wrought by New York and Hollywood were finally more pervasive and more easily recalled.

We have no similar body of memoirs from the people who opposed the war at home, especially in the late 1960s. If we did, perhaps we would learn who had been reading all those comic books that depicted war as something less than a blessed event. All we know with any degree of certainty is that millions read them—although we can say so only because we know that many millions of copies were printed and sold. Perhaps, as some have said, it was television, not Wertham, that caused the departure of comic books from the cultural marketplace. Perhaps the only children who read them in the early 1950s were, like me, those whose parents foreswore television until the middle of the decade or until they were prepared to accept the inevitability of the medium, whichever came last. But, that aside, there were so many comic books in the postwar decade, they must have meant something, and academics have taken a little too long in finding out what that is. Now that we have some idea of the lessons, perhaps it would be well to know who learned them.