Super Hero Comics and Art
I took my two sons (ages six and nine) off to the Montclair NJ Art Museum Thursday afternoon for an exhibition with the unwieldy title Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes. (The picture at the top is the free giveaway comic that MAM has in lieu of a catalog or list of exhibits.)
The materials on exhibit are a roughly even mixture of original art and published comics, ranging from a 1906 Little Nemo in Slumberland page to an issue of Marvel’s recent Civil War. The focus, though, is on the major superhero comics characters, from the Golden Age through today. So there’s a lot of Superman and Batman in the earlier sections, and then a lot of Marvel heroes once the exhibit gets into the 1960s. The original art tends to be by major names – I remember seeing work by Dave Cockrum, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, and Dave Gibbons – including some very well-known interior pages and covers.
The exhibition is organized around real-world trends and events: World War II, the Wertham years of the ‘50s, the “relevance” years of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and so on up to a display case of 9/11 comics. The small size of the exhibition and tight focus on superheroes doesn’t always work in its favor – their Wertham area contains no EC horror comics, and I didn’t even see any reference to Wertham’s claim that Batman and Robin’s relationship was essentially homosexual. There also doesn’t seem to be a guiding philosophy other than “comics reflected their world,” which is applied very simplistically and obviously. (There’s all the covers you expect from the late ‘60s, for example – the “Speedy is a junkie,” the “black Green Lantern,” the “why do you always help the purple people,” and the Nehru-jacketed depowered Wonder Woman.) (more…)
Department of “Shoulda Seen That Coming”: in the UK, a government minister issues a stern warning that a particular book, Tintin in the Congo, contains “hideous racial prejudice,” and that no right-thinking Briton should ever, ever read it henceforward. Result? 
