26 April 2009
Meanjin and comics
Posted by Greg under: Writing .
Meanjin volume 68, number 1 has an article on Australian comics that contains a number of insightful and entertaining observations on the local scene and the comics form by some of the best comics artists in the country. The rest of the article is sadly a bit of a misfire.
The article starts well enough with quotes from a local comics creator and her editor, though the author himself writes in a tone that is both defensive and dismissive of comics in whiplash-inducing mid-paragraph shifts. Things start to go really south when the author, for reasons best known to himself, begins a digression on the subject of the US comic book panic of the late 40s and early 50s. His history is a little confused.
… an active movement led by US educationalist Frederic Wertham calling for them to be burnt.
Comic books were burnt in some protests in the US. Fredric Wertham – a German-born psychiatrist who emigrated to the US in 1922 – wrote a book and several articles on what he saw as the dangers of comic books on the young. Readers of Wertham’s book may well have been connected to the various protests, but Wertham himself was not the leader of a movement and never called for book-burnings.
Much of the fear was about so-called “horror” comics, which came about as publishers chased an older readership after the explosion among teens of superhero titles during the Second World War.
Why “so-called”? What else would you call this?
Wertham himself tended to refer to “crime comics” more often than horror comics – he uses the phrase “horror comic” three times in Seduction of the Innocent, “crime comic” appears thirty times. Action Comics, the title that started the superhero boom, was published in April 1938. more than three years before the US entered the Second World War. Bart Beaty, writing in Fredric Wertham and the critique of mass culture, argues that the EC range of horror and crime comics was clearly aimed at children and adolescents rather than adults.
I’m afraid I don’t know enough about comics censorship in Australia to comment on the next section of the article, except to say that it is well known that Australia was one of the most censorious Western nations in the mid-1900s, so while I imagine it quite likely some censorship of comics was occurring as was censorship of books, movies and television.
Hey! We’re off to Japan!
Tezuka created Tetsuwan Atomu (Mighty Atom) in the 1960s…
Actually, it was 1952.
Ok, back to the US (with guest appearances by the UK). Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton turn up for a second, in a non-sequitur introduction to a paragraph on Will Eisner and Raymond Briggs. And then, Watchmen.
Watchmen … was one of the first comic books in which superheroes developed self-doubt, had relationship issues or faced their own mortality.
Ok, so the last one isn’t Superman facing his own mortality.
There you go. Watchmen is a favourite book of mine, and I’d discuss what makes it so in greater detail if I hadn’t just read this sentence:
‘Sock!’ and ‘Biff!’ were replaced with ‘Hmm…’ and ‘I may have erectile dysfunction’
I really don’t think it would be worth the effort.
4 Comments so far...
Anthony Says:
26 April 2009 at 10:55 pm.
great review of a review. Loved the MSword hack 
Greg Says:
26 April 2009 at 11:31 pm.
Thanks! There was actually meant to be a conclusion, but I was writing this very late at night! I might finished it tomorrow…
The article is very good for what Nicki, Ord, Queenie and the others say, and the chance to see some Hamlet pre-publication.
Can you imagine an article in Meanjin interspersing interviews of a group of key Australian literary authors with half-truths and myths about the history of the novel, a schoolboy’s history of the trial of DH Lawrence, trivia such as the Japanese reading novels on mobile phones, and repeated statements that novels aren’t just comedies of manners anymore?
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