Evolution and Impact of Comic Book Art

Evolution and Impact of Comic Book Art

From the early days of yellow dog comics featuring "The Yellow Kid" at the fin de siecle, to Will Eisner's innovative use of angles and white space in "The Spirit," to the genius Carl Barks and his Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck and Gyro Gearloose characters, to Frank Frazetta's masterpiece covers of "Creepy" and "Eerie," to more modern colorful depictions of big-breasted women replete in futuristic armor, comic book art has been the source of interest for sociologists and the art community alike. To determine the evolution of comic book art and its impact on society, this paper provides a review of the relevant peer-reviewed and scholarly literature, followed by a summary of the research and important findings concerning these issues in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

According to Mellegaard (2012), in recent years, "Comics have been used as propaganda to promote messages from political ideology, religion, and racial stereotyping to sexual behavior, drugs, and gun control" (p. 192). At some points in U.S. history, the impact of comic book art on American society has been profound and drew on patriotic themes. For example, Mellegaard points out that, "Most American comics readers are probably familiar with World War II propaganda enlisting superheroes such as Captain America and Superman to fight totalitarian regimes in the early 1940s" (2012, p. 192). Certainly, everyone is probably familiar with the highly iconic cover of the first "Action Comics," now worth a gajillion dollars, that featured Superman as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Cover art for first "Action Comics" featuring Superman, 1938

Source: http://static.neatorama.com/images/2006-09/action-comics-superman-1.jpg

The introduction of superheroes into the American panoply is perhaps a reflection of the larger social forces that are at work at a given point in history, with the two foregoing examples being salient. This assertion is congruent with the observation by Behlman (2004) that, "Superhero comic books present a form of fantasy that resolutely avoids the real, for it seeks to resolve history either by overcoming it through neat, miraculous reversals or by escaping its terms completely" (p. 56). As America entered the Space Race and the Cold War dragged on, comic book art reflected these overarching themes and used superheroes to help solve the world's problems (Behlman, 2004).

These more recent comic books have been in response to what Miller (2011) terms "a reaction against the publishing context of comic art at that time, more concerned with entertainment than critical reflection" (p. 106). Moreover, more recent comic book art has transcended the pixilated large dots that were used to color earlier versions, and more modern printing methods have allowed comic book artists to create solid-color art that was not possible just a few years ago. Indeed, comic books are now referred to as "graphic novels," reflecting this shift in printing quality and overall increased sophistication in content (Baskind, 2011). Despite these advances, one unfortunate trend in comic book art in recent years has been an overreliance on art to the exclusion of interpretive text. During the Golden Era of comic book art during the early to mid-20th century, comic book art was a careful mix of words and pictures. According to Witek (2004), "A measure of a comic strip's excellence is the extent to which the sense of the words is dependent on the pictures and vice versa; works that rely on mostly pictures or words alone are thus less successful than those which blend them both inextricably together" (p. 138). This trend may account for the popularity of comic book reprints from the Golden Era (pers. obs.).