“For a bulky segment of a century, I have been an avid follower of comic strips — all comic strips,” Parker wrote. “This is a statement made with approximately the same amount of pride with which one would say, ‘I’ve been shooting cocaine into my arm for the past 25 years.’”
...

Writing in The New Republic in 1948, Marya Mannes referred to the form as “intellectual marijuana.”

“Every hour spent in reading comics,” she asserted, “is an hour in which all inner growth has stopped.”

By the 1960s, the groundwork for a new and ongoing appreciation of comics had been laid by McLuhan and other intellectuals, notably the literary critic Leslie Fiedler and the soon-to-be-famous novelist Umberto Eco. Drawing on theories from psychology and sociology, Fiedler and Eco studied comics as an example of social myth — popular stories that illustrated the dream life of the common person. For Fiedler, the superhero was an example of urban folklore, in which the dark forest of the fairytales became the urban jungle of Batman.

Meanwhile, Eco believed that the serialized nature of comics — where the adventure is always continued tomorrow or next week — reflected the anxious, provisional rhythm of modern life.

Since then, we’ve seen an ever-deepening appreciation of the form. Comics are now studied in the academy, archived in research libraries and lavishly reprinted in expensive collector volumes. In one Toronto high school, they have been used for the past three years as part of a successful program to boost literacy. And the recent rise of the graphic novel and manga (Japanese comic books), not to mention the recent massive success of Hollywood films based on comics (Spiderman, Spiderman 2, Hulk, Ghost World), has only strengthened the form’s cultural importance.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:09 AM  |