Word: comical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Escape. More than ever, in the stress & strain of war, people were reading to be entertained, to escape from their everyday worries. Reprints, marketed at 25? by newsstands and drugstores, remained the prime phenomenon of the boom. Mystery stories bulked steadily larger in the reprint publishers' output. And comic books far outsold the mysteries...
...readers-or whatever you call them-now buy nearly a quarter-billion comic books a year. The avid addicts are not just kids, either; they include an estimated one out of every five U.S. grownups. At Army post exchanges, comic books outsell LIFE, Reader's Digest and Satevepost combined...
...Comic books, the Journal points out, are so readable that" they become grand-scale teaching aids...
...Bible stories in comic-book form are conned in some 2,000 Sunday schools...
Recent tests show that facts presented in picture strips are (at first reading) grasped 10% to 30% more thoroughly than the same facts presented in words alone. And even the comic strips which offer only fantasy and adventure are not without their cultural value, argues Psychiatrist Lauretta Bender of New York City's Bellevue Hospital. At any rate, there is evidence that comic books do not debase young literary tastes forever. Children who read comics read "good" books too, and juvenile reading generally ap pears to be on the increase...