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Popular Culture Review
than, say, Teresa of Avila’s fundamentalist p r o s e , f o r they include characters
and conflicts; in other words, they present the coherent organization of
imaginary paradigms in a narrative syntagm, unlike, for instance, Pascal’s
Pensees, which, as a theological essay rather than a work of literature, is mostly
devoted to convince us that the vast majority of human beings are predestined to
suffer in the flames of hell for all eternity.
These fairly straightforward considerations have not yet been acknowledged
by our field, and in spite of all appearances, the genre of comic books is in a
paradoxical situation when it comes to its importance within our new corpus of
study. When comic books or graphic novels find their way into our university
certified syllabi, they are generally part of a Popular Culture class which
addresses them as one narrative phenomenon among others, or which presents a
historical or sociological view of the genre. The corpus of comic books studies
remains a vast nebula without any clear contours nor other specific features
other than that they are illustrated narrations and that it is becoming somewhat
trendy to study them. Naturally, since the inclusion of comic books in any given
syllabus or scholarly inquiry is already perceived as a daring move, they have
not been evaluated from a canonical point of view; we are still to make the
difference between what is artistically significant and what is not, that is
between “good” and “bad” comic books. This reluctance on the part of popular
culture scholars to articulate the value judgments that necessarily participate in
the canonical process is easily understandable given the ambiguous status the
genre holds within academia, for in order to distinguish between “good” and
“bad,” we must be convinced that there is some good at all to start with. Cultural
scholars, eager to claim at all cost the cultural value of a typically
underestimated narrative medium, are generally inclined to abstain from
denigrating the very corpus that they are attempting to rehabilitate and therefore
are hesitant to begin the selective process of canonization. However, by now, we
can safely assume that comic books are here to stay as an legitimate area of
scholarly research, and it appears naturally justified to start evaluating them in
an impartial, prejudice-free manner; if it is understood that comic books are not
undeserving of critical attention simply because they are comic books, the
opposite is equally true: it is not because they are comic books that they are
artistically significant.
In the United States, the persistent assimilation of comic books to youth or
children’s literature, albeit without the aura of “real” children’s literature, has
been facilitated by one specific historical event: the 1954 Senate Subcommittee
on Juvenile Delinquency hearings on comic books, where Fredric Wertham,
author of Seduction o f the Innocent, testified at length regarding the pernicious
effects comic books had on children. As a consequence, in order to prevent
financial doom, most major names of the comic book industry adopted a
preventive measure, namely “the comic book code,” a set of rules and
regulations that warranted the wholesome content of comic books and made
them “safe” for the general population. The result of such self-imposed