I’m going to talk today on both the development of the American comic book and why we should care. Now, you’ll notice that I said the American comic book. That was deliberate, as the Comic book is really one of the very few art forms that can be said to have originated exclusively in America. It has been argued that the Comic book and Jazz are America's primary contribution to the arts.

Now, when I say comic books, most of you probably have a pretty definite picture that pops into your head. That may be Spider-Man or Batman or it may even be Archie. While these are some very strong characters that people throughout the world know, they really represent only a fraction of what you can find in comic books. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and some of the other superheroes have become so identifiable that they have become America's modern version of mythology. Instead of Atlas, Mercury, Zeus or Leprechauns, we have the X-Men. When you think about it, it really makes sense that we would turn to more modern, usually science based characters in a more modern medium to replace the folklore of old.

The birth of the comic book began in the newspapers around the turn of the 20th century. In the days before the internet and television, newspapers were hugely important. They were not only the primary source of news for virtually the entire nation, but they were also the primary source of casual entertainment. In their competition for readers, many newspapers discovered that featuring comic strips actually boosted their circulation. In 1897 Hearst New York American published a collection of Yellow Kid strips. Yellow Kid was one of the first and most successful of the early comic strips. After that there were a number of occasional strip collections and this continued until the 1930s.

The 1930s was where the comic book as we know it really came into being and it did so fairly quickly. In 1933 Max Gaines was a salesman at the Eastern Color Printing Company. He came up with the idea of reprinting Sunday comic strips in a magazine and using it as a promotional giveaway. This was "Funnies on Parade" and it was so successful that it convinced publishers that people would actually buy magazines with nothing but comics in them. It took just a few years for this to evolve into the comic book as we know it. And then in 1938 the bombshell dropped. DC Comics published a book called Action Comics and it featured a character that had been rejected by several newspaper syndicates and was floating around, desperate for a home. This was Superman, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Comic books exploded throughout the end of the 1930's and into the 1940's. Superman was quickly followed by Batman, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, Captain America and dozens of other costumed crime fighters. This has come to be known as the Golden Age of comics. Comics were being read by virtually every kid who could scrap the ten cents to buy one. There were comic books aimed at both young and old audiences. They were especially popular with servicemen serving in the military in World War II. Ironically, this indirectly led to comic’s later perception as nothing more than "kids stuff." You see, these servicemen came home after the war and many of them continued to read comics, but now they wanted something other than patriotic superheroes. By the early 50’s, Crime and Horror comics were the rage. Of course, no successful trend goes unnoticed by parental watch groups and this one was no different. In 1954 a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Fredric Wertham published a book called "Seduction of the Innocent." He linked reading comics to juvenile delinquency with some pretty tenuous research findings, but that was all it took. The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency investigated comics and ultimately the major comic book publishers got together and adopted the Comics Code Authority. This code was so restrictive that comic books were scrubbed free of anything that might not be appropriate for anyone over the age of three.

So for decades comic books were now part of the kiddie section. For a lot of people, this was where they belonged. After all, weren’t comic books nothing more that simple books with pictures, inferior to "real" books? This started to change in bits and pieces through the 70’s and 80’s. Comic books began addressing social issues and were now being writen and drawn by creators who had grown up reading comics and loved the medium. By the 1980's comics were now being sold at shops that specialized in comic books. For the first time since the Golden Age, a number of new publishers entered the field and people started taking comic books more seriously. In the middle of the decade DC published both Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. These two books were revolutionary and gave the tired superhero genre new life. These books, along with a number of independantly published comics spearheaded the new trend towards attracting a much more sophisticated audiences.

Ironically, many of you, probably most, know the more famous comic book characters not from having read any of their comics. More likely, you have seen Batman Begins, one of the X-Men or Spider-Man movies. Maybe somebody even told you that Men in Black or Ghostworld or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was based on a comic book. Movies and television are now drawing from the vast reserve of comic book stories and concepts. Comic books and their characters are no longer seen as "inferior" entertainment. They have finally gained a degree of respect, even as people read less and less of them. Like Jazz, that other uniquely American art form, comics have arguably found their greatest acceptance overseas. In Europe, comic creators are often viewed with the same respect as novelist, painters and other creators of the arts. In Japan, comics, or Manga, have become such a pervasive medium that it accounts for the largest segment of their entire publishing industry. English translations of Manga have found a tremendous audience here in America and have become the fastest growth segment of the American book industry.

So why should we care about comic books? Because comic books are not simply books with pictures in them. The sequential nature of comics forces the reader to place most of the action between the panels. There is a wonderful thing that happens when you read a comic book: static images come to life and you’re drawn into a story in a much more active way than you would simply by viewing a movie or television program. Like Jazz, comics have a rich, if often unappreciated, history. It is a vibrant art form now being kept alive by creators who passionately believe that it is the best medium for them to tell their stories. Ultimately we should care because they are fun and they open up whole new worlds for us. Just as any great art should do.