Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book. By Paul Lopes. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. xxvi, 232 pp. Cloth, $69.50, ISBN 978-1-59213-442-7. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-59213-443-4.)

Abstract

This work is a concise history of the American comic book industry from the 1930s to the present. Paul Lopes divides the period into two ages: the Industrial Age (from the 1930s to the late 1970s) and the Heroic Age (from the 1980s onward). The concept of a heroic age is borrowed from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argued that late nineteenth-century French literary writers achieved a sort of independence from the commercial market by “forming their own ‘restricted subfield’” (p. xiii). By creating this periodization of comic books, Lopes moves away from a fan concept of Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Modern ages, but the story he tells is familiar enough. Printers of newspaper comic strips created comic books in the 1930s as advertising premiums for businesses such as Proctor and Gamble, Wheatena, and Kinney Shoe Corporation. The books' popularity caused publishers to create saleable versions that, in turn, prompted them to seek original comic material. The medium received a boost from the enormous popularity of Superman, who first appeared in print in 1938. Publishers aimed numerous genres of comic books at diverse audiences ranging from children to adults, but critics depicted comic books as childish and therefore defined the primary audience as children. In the 1950s an anti-comic book campaign, led by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, all but killed off a comic industry that was already feeling the effects of a post-World War II decline in sales and the rise of television. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s dc Comics and Marvel Comics, the two major publishers of superhero characters, revamped their content; this action gave comic books a new life. During the 1960s, cultural and political radicals produced a range of underground “comix” that addressed taboo themes such as sex and drugs. By the late 1970s, a period Lopes calls the late Industrial Age and fans call the Bronze Age, comics artists began to lobby for creative rights in their work contract rather than work for hire. New distribution methods via speciality comic book stores, the independence of mind generated by the underground comix moment, and fans' investment in the comic culture allowed artists to gain more autonomy over and take ownership of their work. In the 1980s and since, a variety of publishers began to market comic books as graphic novels and although superhero comics were almost all that remained of the pamphlet-style comic book, the art form found a new respectability among adult audiences.