Synopses & Reviews
As American as jazz or rock and roll, comic books have been central in the nation's popular culture since Superman's 1938 debut in
Action Comics #1. Selling in the millions each year for the past six decades, comic books have figured prominently in the childhoods of most Americans alive today. In
Comic Book Nation, Bradford W. Wright offers an engaging, illuminating, and often provocative history of the comic book industry within the context of twentieth-century American society.
From Batman's Depression-era battles against corrupt local politicians and Captain America's one-man war against Nazi Germany to Iron Man's Cold War exploits in Vietnam and Spider-Man's confrontations with student protestors and drug use in the early 1970s, comic books have continually reflected the national mood, as Wright's imaginative reading of thousands of titles from the 1930s to the 1980s makes clear. In every genre -- superhero, war, romance, crime, and horror comic books -- Wright finds that writers and illustrators used the medium to address a variety of serious issues, including racism, economic injustice, fascism, the threat of nuclear war, drug abuse, and teenage alienation. At the same time, xenophobic wartime series proved that comic books could be as reactionary as any medium.
Wright's lively study also focuses on the role comic books played in transforming children and adolescents into consumers; the industry's ingenious efforts to market their products to legions of young but savvy fans; the efforts of parents, politicians, religious organizations, civic groups, and child psychologists like Dr. Fredric Wertham (whose 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, a salacious exposé of the medium's violence and sexual content, led to U.S. Senate hearings) to link juvenile delinquency to comic books and impose censorship on the industry; and the changing economics of comic book publishing over the course of the century. Comic Book Nation is at once a serious study of popular culture and an entertaining look at an enduring American art form.
Review
"Congratulations to Bradford W. Wright for penning one of the most comprehensive and readable accounts of the pervasive effect that comic books have had upon generations of readers throughout America, and indeed -- the world."
-- Stan Lee, co-creator of Spider-Man and The X-Men
Review
"Pow! Bam! Crash! Analysis! This insightful and highly entertaining political and cultural history [offers] an intelligent study not only of comics but of shifting attitudes toward popular culture, children, violence, patriotism, and America itself."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
"A winner... a book that is trenchant, crisply written and absolutely jargon-free, with plenty of enthusiasm but no idolatry -- and great fun to read... There should be a place for Comic Book Nation on the bookshelf of anyone who ever read comics for fun as a kid or has taken them seriously as an adult."
-- Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World
Review
"At last, a substantive book studying the effect of comic books on American culture and vice versa... [This] extremely well-organized book traces the genre's birth, expansions, and retractions from the 1930s to the present. The fascinating result highlights the increasingly intriguing interaction between pressing events in American society and what was written and published on colorfully paneled pages... A truly worthwhile study of comics as part of American culture."
-- Library Journal (starred review)
Review
"Solid... A well-documented comics-industry chronicle."
-- Booklist