Comics, Comics Everywhere at Mid-century

Abstract

Chapter 2 discusses the high sales of comic books in the 1940s and early 1950s, a boom that started with superhero comics and would go on to include crime and romance comics. In the mid-1950s, publishers responded to the pressure exerted by the anti-comics movement and established a regulatory body to censor America’s comic books (crime and horror comics were especially vilified). Comic book sales in the second half of the 1950s went into decline, though industry self-censorship was not the sole reason: market saturation and competition from other media were also factors. But before this, in 1950, St John Publications and Fawcett Publications released a small number of crime comics as paperback books. Elsewhere in the comics world, newspaper strips might be reprinted in narrative chunks in book form, such as Walt Kelly’s strip featuring the character Pogo the Possum: Kelly’s satire of the 1952 presidential election was captured in the book I Go Pogo. Most book-length comics of the period came from artists who otherwise produced work for advertising agencies, animation studios, magazines, and publishing houses. These books were usually released by New York-based trade presses and attacked the glamorisation of war.