The Literature of Comic Books

Trace the rise of comic books from "disposable entertainment for children" to graphic novels telling the most important stories of our time.

- DON VAUGHAN

Comic books today are a revered and often fanatically collected medium, but that wasn't always the case. In fact, almost from the beginning, the popular four-color magazines gave parents, teachers, and church leaders fits.

The most common lament: Comic books put dangerous ideas in children's heads and turned them away from more respectable forms of literature. By the mid-1950s, the outcry had become so vociferous that the industry created its own self-censoring body, the Comics Magazine Association of America, and with it a lengthy list of what comic books could and could not contain, known as the Comics Code Authority (CCA).

Writers were hobbled by the restrictions of the CCAit even banned the words horror and terror-so their stories became trite, repetitious, and boring. The situation changed dramatically in the early 1970s when the CCA finally loosened its chokehold, freeing comics to tackle the issues of the day, including drug addiction, racial disparity, political corruption, and poverty.

In the decades that followed, comic books experienced a remarkable transformation. Superheroes still dominated sales, but talented writers such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Brian K. Vaughan, Ed Brubaker, Garth Ennis, Brian Azzarello, Alison Bechdel, Colleen Doran, and many others eagerly took comic books to an exciting new level in terms of story and storytelling.