Ideology and Power in Pre-Code Comic Books. Struggles for Cultural Space, Audience, and Meaning

      Аннотация: Drawing on the theories of cultural studies, this book delivers a wide range of new and surprising insights into the Golden Age of American Comic Books. It traces the medium’s cultural roots, its rise to popularity, and its persistent struggles for meanings, cultural space, and an audience. Characters, genres, stereotypes, myths, and many other narrative elements are discussed as encodings of ideology, thereby exposing underlying assumptions of class, race, nationalism, sexism, and ageism. Some pre-Code comic books point to themselves as textual constructs, demystifying the fictional sphere by foregrounding their intertextual relationships, as well as their own production or reception. This study pioneers the systematic analysis of comic-book reflexivity. It investigates within a matrix of historical factors the commercial, social, and cultural functions of reflexive devices - an enterprise that reveals deep cultural ambivalences toward the medium and its assumed effects on readers. Combining a solid theoretical frame with in-depth research, the book provides an insightful and entertaining examination of the most popular and influential comic books of the Golden Age.

Ключевые слова: Ageism, Art, Censorship, Comics, crime, cultural studies, Gender, genre, golden age, history, Horror, Ideology, Image, nationalism, patriotism, popular culture, power, Propaganda, racism, Reflexivity, romance, stereotype, style, war, Western, comic book, comic strip, pre-Code comic books, visual culture, superhero, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Spirit, Plastic Man, Mad Magazine, teen, jungle, textuality, fandom, sexism, classism, Comics Code