Another response-post, this time to a thread dealing with the extent to which newsstand comics of the Golden Age (such as the Prize title of the late forties, BABE DARLING OF THE HILLS) aimed their content at older readers.
_____________
I don't dispute any of this, but would add that young adult readers read comics on the sly, because there was still a sense that comics were meant for kids, and for an adult to read them suggested naivete at best, like Gomer Pyle with his eternal "Shazam."
And comics were dominantly bought by kids. In the late forties a lot of titles, including the aforementioned BABE, cut back their page count in order to keep the cover price at ten cents. Even in the sixties and seventies slight changes to that expected price had consequences for whatever company tried to boost the price.
This discussion does throw some light on a comment Frederic Wertham made in SEDUCTION. He wanted comics prohibited from kids under a certain age, and I've always thought that was a cynical way of wanting to expunge the entire medium from existence. I still think that *would* have happened, had his totalitarian desires been enacted. But he may have TOLD himself that there was an audience of older teens who might support the medium-- which he viewed as irredeemable due to the corruption of the companies-- and that comic books would be given the chance to flourish or perish like any other media aimed at adults.
It's possible that the publishers of BABE, just to keep to that example, were hoping to draw in the kid-audience with silly hijinks without their actually being aware of the fetish-connotations, while getting a little sales boost from older readers "in the know." A fair number of horror comics exploited such content as well, naturally,
No comments:
Post a Comment