For the past forty years the content of comic books has been governed by an industry self-regulatory code adopted by publishers in 1954 in response to public and governmental pressure.

This book examines why comic books were the subject of controversy, beginning with objections that surfaced shortly after the introduction of modern comic books in the mid-1930s, when parents and teachers accused comic books of contaminating children's culture and luring children away from more appropriate reading material.

It traces how, in the years following World War II, the criticism of comic books...

The comic strip Gordo was published in U.S. newspapers for forty-four years (1941-1985). For almost all of this run its creator Gus Arriola was the most visible American of Mexican descent working as a syndicated cartoonist. At its peak Gordo appeared in 270 newspapers and was the more widely circulated and longer-running of only two American comic strips set in Mexico.

Gordo recounted the humorous adventures and amorous preoccupations of a portly Mexican bean farmer, whose name, Gordo, means -fat.- Among the supporting cast were his perspicacious nephew, the...

-The early history of New York is obscured in myth, - observed the pseudonymous author of -The Story of Manhattankind- in the first issue of The New Yorker (21 February 1925), -and to separate the purely historical from the purely hysterical is no easy task.-

The same must be said of the magazine itself. The purely historical remained hidden until The New Yorker's archives were opened to scholars in the mid-nineties, although the hysterical--pure and otherwise--dominates the anecdotes in memoirs of some of the magazine's original staff members.

Late in 1924 Harold Ross...

What are super-devoted fans of comic books really like? What draws them together and energizes their zeal? What do the denizens of this pop-culture world have in common?

This book provides good answers as it scrutinizes the fans whose profiles can be traced at their conventions, in pages of fanzines, on websites, in chat-rooms, on electronic bulletin boards, and before the racks in comic-book stores. They are a singular breed, and an absorbing interest in comic books (sometimes life-consuming) unites them.

Studies have shows that the clustering, die-hard disciples of Star Trek...

What do the comic book figures Static, Hardware, and Icon all have in common?

Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans gives an answer that goes far beyond "tights and capes," an answer that lies within the mission Milestone Media, Inc., assumed in comic book culture. Milestone was the brainchild of four young black creators who wanted to part from the mainstream and do their stories their own way. This history of Milestone, a "creator-owned" publishing company, tells how success came to these mavericks in the 1990s and how comics culture was expanded and enriched as...

How midcentury periodicals that fostered an indelible middle-class ideal for American women also confronted the happy homemaker stereotype

Read by millions of women each month, such mainstream periodicals as Ladies' Home Journal and McCall's delivered powerful messages about women's roles and behavior. In 1963 Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique accused the genre of helping to create what Friedan termed -the problem that has no name- -- that is, presenting women as stereotypical happy homemakers with limited interests and abilities.

But this ideal of contented,...

With essays by Jan Baetens, David A. Berona, Frank L. Cioffi, N. C. Christopher Couch, Robert C. Harvey, Gene Kannenberg, Jr., Catherine Khordoc, David Kunzle, Marion D. Perret, and Todd Taylor.

In our culture, which depends increasingly on images for instruction and recreation, it is important to ask how words and images make meaning when they are combined. Comics, one of the most widely read media of the twentieth century, serves as an ideal for focusing an investigation on the word-and-image question.

This collection of essays attempts to give an answer. The first six see words and...

When Art Spiegelman's Maus-a two-part graphic novel about the Holocaust-won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, comics scholarship grew increasingly popular and notable. The rise of -serious- comics has generated growing levels of interest as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals continue to explore the history, aesthetics, and semiotics of the comics medium.

Yet those who write about the comics often assume analysis of the medium didn't begin until the cultural studies movement was underway. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium brings together nearly two...