Superman versus Uncle Sam: Free speech in the balance

In commemoration of Constitution Day, VCU and the Society of Professional Journalists will be hosting three of the most esteemed researchers in the field of comics. They will be discussing the effects of censorship on the comic industry and how the model of demonizing emerging art forms has repeated itself throughout history.

The discussion will be held at the Grace E. Harris Hall Auditorium Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

David Hajdu is an associate professor of journalism at Columbia University, a columnist for The New Republic and author of the book “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America.”

M. Thomas Inge is a professor of English and humanities at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va, editor of “The Handbook of American Popular Culture,” and author of “Anything Can Happen in a Comic Strip.”

The event will be moderated by Tom De Haven, an English professor at VCU and author of “It’s Superman!” and “Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies.”

THE COMMONWEALTH TIMES: Dr. Inge, how did you become such an essential component in the research and documentation of comic books at VCU and how do you feel about their censorship starting in the late 40s?

M. THOMAS INGE: I’m certainly not in favor of the censorship of comic books. I write about and do research on comic books and comic strips in their defense. My comic art collection down at VCU has formed the basis for a big research center on comics. I was at VCU a year after the university opened and taught there for 11 years, also giving them my whole comic art collection in general. None of us are representing the point of view that they should be banned or censored.

Most of my material tends to be secondary information – biological, critical, historical – material about comic art, comic strips and comic books. I’ve been writing about comics since 1970. What I’ve been trying do is establish their importance as part of the cultural heritage of this country. A lot of local dealers and collectors have contributed their collections to VCU too. We’re slowly but surely building one of the largest collections of comic books in the country. Michigan State has more than we do, but we’re getting up there in terms of numbers of comic books.

THE CT: Mr. Hadju, what has it been like witnessing the censorship of comic books and how their renaissance has affected the American people?

DAVID HAJDU: It’s a glorious and a bittersweet thing to behold-glorious because I’m watching this wonderfully original American art form flourish, find its audience, and achieve respect and esteem without losing its bite. Comics are wilder than ever but smarter than ever. The basic thing that I know from all the research I did for my book, “The 10-Cent Plague,” – I interviewed a couple hundred people – is that I know that there were comic artists and writers that were working decades ago who were devoted to comics, took comics seriously and did great work, but who didn’t live to see this renaissance. That’s kind of sad to know that these pioneers who established not just the grammar for comics, but the sensibilities for comics and set them on their way, left us before their children grew up to achieve great things.
The CT: Dr. Inge, do you see any modern-day parallels with what the comic industry was going through in terms of censorship decades ago?

MTI: The film code, although it doesn’t really prohibit anybody, it does limit the audiences in certain cases in that if you’re of a certain age you might not be able to buy a ticket to a certain film. That’s about the only area where we see that.

There are lots of groups and institutions that would like to prohibit, ban or develop classification systems for just about everything we do-television, video games, literature. There are groups that would like to prohibit our access to certain novels and we’re living in a society now that seems more inclined that way, partly because of the conservative caste of the whole nation that we’ve been through in the last ten years or so. It’s been a very strongly conservative period of time. Depending on the outcome of the election, it may be maintained, not to mention the secrecy behind what the president and his people are doing-listening in on conversations, collecting information about people and so on.

So we’re living in a time when we’re being closely watched, in effect, more closely than ever before. I think there’s a kind of a mindset that suggests lots of things should be banned, removed or made inaccessible to people-so nothing surprises me.

I think there’s been a lot of effort to go after the video games in particular. One of the things I want to say Thursday evening is this: every time a new art form comes along, it is blamed for whatever societal problems exist at that time. When the novel came along in the 18th century, people thought reading novels were bad for you and should be banned. It happened with drama in England during the Puritan period. All drama was banned from the stage for a period of time. When a new film comes along, it gets blamed for juvenile delinquency, along with comic books. Television, computers and video games are now being blamed.
The thing is rather than address the root causes of the social problems, what society tends to do is look for some easy reason for the problems and tries to ban whatever it is they think that causes it.
The two major things that cause crime are poverty and discrimination. If we could find a way to get rid of poverty and discrimination, we might find that objectionable human behavior might disappear or, we might have fewer criminals. Of course, this doesn’t take into account man’s natural tendency towards degeneracy, which he very often seems to demonstrate. It’s a complex issue. There is no easy answer. But I think simply banning something is not the way to solve the problem.

The CT: Mr Hajdu, is there still a looming threat to comic books in this day and age?

DH: Yeah, there is a looming threat
to comic books. I say that metaphorically. There’s always a threat to what comics represented in the early post-war years in the late 40s’ and 50s’. Comics don’t represent that anymore. There’s always a threat to subversion and insurgency and the daring that comics represented back then.

It takes place, not in the pages of comics, but elsewhere like video game screens. It takes place in Grand Theft Auto 4 now. It’s the same thing. What we see in GTA is a form of art entertainment not just meant for young people, but also meant to be a way for young people to challenge the conventions and standards of nicety, moral values, and these aesthetic values of their parents’ generation. They’re assimilated and this is the pattern that goes on in radical forms of culture over and over again. There’s shock value. It alienates the status quo and in time becomes assimilated by the status quo and then something else has to come along that is radical in a different way. You saw it with rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and the graphic arts. Comics themselves are highly unlikely to fall under attack by parents or watchdogs of the moral code today. But, the parallel to the comics, of video games, whatever will be invented next, about 20 years from now will continue to serve that same societal function.
I have a 5-year-old. He’s a little too young for GTA. But, in about 25 years, his kids will be doing something beyond our comprehension. I don’t know. Their kids will be giving each other actual pain or going into each other’s brains or changing their DNA. There’s no way to imagine what they’ll be capable of by then. One thing we know from history is that whatever comes next will be beyond our comprehension and it will be demonized and assimilated. Then we’ll look back and say ‘Oh, wasn’t that sweet?’

CT: Gentlemen, how do you think the comic arts will fare against the convergence of different forms of media with the Internet?

MTI: The graphic novel is the next important art form. It’s not necessarily going to replace fiction, drama and poetry. They will exist alongside one another and graphic novels will flourish as it already is. We already have almost classic works that everybody agrees are worthwhile products of the movement. That’s going to persist for a long time.
The thing the graphic novel depends on is the way that it is printed on paper and the layout on the page. If you’ve ever tried to read a textbook on the computer, you know it’s not the same experience at all. I don’t see how you could take a two-page layout of a graphic novel, for example, put it up on a computer screen and respond to it in the same way when it’s in print in front of you. I don’t think that the computer text is going to replace the printed book at all. We’ve got mega bookstores like Barnes & Noble selling books like crazy online. Someone must be buying them and there must be something in that tangible, physical reading experience that makes it different for people. I know it does for me.
Whether the newspaper is going to survive is another question. I’m not so sanguine about that. If anything goes under because of the computer, I think it will be the newspaper. I think comic strips will find another place to exist and the graphic novel will be around for a long time to come.

DH: Some of my students are in their early 20s and even they started their early life with print. You really have to get down to an 8-, 9- or 10-year-old to find anybody who wasn’t originally raised on print. It’s a real danger for us to implant our frame of reference on another generation. It’s hard for me to imagine anybody taking in books on the web or cell phone. But, why not? We’re wired for it. Culture is not a static thing and it changes. Another generation is going to come up and it will take in information in a completely different way than we do.

I think it’s enormously promising and exciting that the web can deliver text, John Ford films, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, the Clash or all the art forms that existed before it.

But, more than that, it has a potential that has not even begun to be tapped yet. We can only presume, using the model of the past that the web is going to find its voice and some new kinds of art are going to come out of the web that fully tap its potential. It’s going to be an extraordinary thing to watch. We’re really lucky to be born at this time. I’m not a doom-and-gloom fatalist about the web. I just think its cool.