Classic Comics

Although comic books had long been proud of their "nonfiction" titles, the educational wing of the industry never turned much of a profit. After only ten issues, Picture News died in 1947. Air Ace succumbed the same year. True Comics did not last beyond 1948. Real Fact expired in 1949. Although Classic Comics continues today, industry leaders quickly realized that the comic book functioned far better as a source of entertainment than as a means of instruction. 

Karl Marx applied the dialectic to more conventionally historical subjects than the representation of mascnhnity. However, Marx was no film critic his lifespan precluded that possibihty. Even so, he perhaps foreshadows Abbott and Costello s classic shtick, Who s on First in his bouncy, probably inadvertently comical exposition of the dialectical process. Marx starts with Hegel s Critique of Pure Reason ... 

Since the 1940s Poe stories have also been a favorite subject of comic books, a genre between or outside the realms of classic adult and children s editions. Thomas Inge, in an on-going project, has already identified over... 

The more traditional type of comic books exhibit many of the same traits as the Classics Illnstrated. For example, the adaptation of William Wilson published by Eternity Comics turns the tale into a moral lesson. In the last panel, the dying Wilson exclaims, Not real Perhaps you suggest Wilson-the-Other was... not... real Oh yes Wilson the Other was real - real as my wretched dead conscience. In contrast to Classics Illustrated, however, the Eternity Comics versions tend to play up some of the gruesome aspects... 

To protect itself, the industry (Dell and Classics excepted) established a self-regulatory body, the Comics Code Authority, which is still in effectA They hastily terminated the worst offenders of the day— crime and horror books—and after 1954 few retailers would carry any comic that did not bear the proper seal. This self-censorship lasted until the emergence of "underground comix" in the mid-1960s and the accompanying shift in mainstream public tolerance that arrived a decade or so later. 

Bill Blackboard and Martin Williams, eds., The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (Washington, DC Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), 13. Crumb, quoted in James Dankey and Denis Kitchen, Underground Classics The Transformation of Comics into Comix (New York Abrams Comic Arts in association with the Chazen Museum of Art, 2009), 45. The Spiegelman quotation comes from New York Jewish Week 215 (May 31, 2002) 35. 

Fred Kida s Valkyrie From the Pages of Air Fighters and Airboy Comics (Park Forest, IL Ken Pierce, 1982), esp. 2, 16, 30, 58. Air Fighters Classics 3 (December 1942) (Hillman Periodicals). Airfig/iters Classics 4 (December 1943) (Hillman Periodicals). 

Danky, James, and Denis Kitchen. Underground Classics The Transformation of Comics into Comix. New York Abrams Comic Arts, in association with the Chazen Museum of Art, 2009. 

Wright, Nicky. The Classic Era of American Comics. Chicago Contemporary Books, 2000. 

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