Word: comic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Sinclair Lewis, whose new Cass Timberlane is a very best seller, took a look around and happily noted a "growth of literary consciousness," countered with the gloomy observation that "the best seller of today has little influence compared with the comic strip...
...famed general, Bayan of the Hundred Eyes, and forgets the haughty girl at home in favor of the harem slave, Maryam, daughter of a fraternizing English crusader and his Grecian love. Author Costain's romantic actors are hardly more three-dimensional than characters in a high-grade comic strip, but the elaborate 13th-Century stage sets are well painted...
...civilization of the new [comic book] order is in great part a herdist phenomenon. Its subjects are . . . standardized men, men en bloc. . . . Everything is centered on one man-the leader, the hero, the duce, the Führer. Herd responses not being on the rational level, this hero does not appeal by argument. ('I was just realizing how much better it is to reason with these poor wayward fellows,' Plastic Man observes as he drives a left to the jaw.) He builds on the herd's dreams: he hypnotizes. Thus did Hitler and Mussolini. . . . The Superman...
Bull-Necked Males. "The creature familiar as Superman is the leader of a swarm of satellites separated from him only by a copyright. Scores of comic books feature similar characters-for example, Catman, Bullet Man, The Human Torch, Captain Midnight, Captain Marvel, Black Terror, Blue Beetle, Green Lama, Yankee Boy, Bogey Man-which follow the Superman pattern of a 'hero' who overcomes all obstacles with machine-like precision. Often, victory comes from frankly preternatural powers . . . propulsion and X-ray vision: these heroes' bull necks are often a pretty fair index of their intellectual prowess...
...quarrel with the old-style comic like Mr. & Mrs., The Gumps, Gasoline Alley, and he seems to have a sneak ing admiration for Li'l Abner ("sexy and synthetic pastoralism" done with "manifest cleverness.") But, he says, "there seems to be nothing in the good comics which keeps readers from liking the others." He saves his sharpest slings for Superman's female counterpart, a four-year-old character named Wonder Woman, who is described by her creator as "the girl from Paradise Isle, beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules and swifter than Mercury." Wonder Woman...