Some Final Paper Resources, Part 3: Cultural Significance of Comics

For those of you interested in exploring the cultural significance of comics, there are many articles and discussions about how comics both mirrored and challenged the ideas of race, gender, and equality that were present throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. We discussed this a bit in class, and looked at how a comic like Lois Lane: Superman's Girlfriend tried to explore the issue of race and romance, or how the X-Men tried to embrace ethnic and sexual difference via the metaphor of mutants. Using the EBSCO search bar on our library's website, I found some great articles about superhero comics and gender, notably the one below, which shows how a specific comic, during its 20-year run, reflected the changing ideas of gender in the 20th century.

The article is entitled "Superman Believes That a Wife's Place is in the Home" by Michael Goodrum, and it's a more complicated discussion that you might think. While the comic book started out as pretty stereotypical, it graduated to tackling some heavier issues, especially since it wasn't strictly canonical, so whatever story lines the comic tackled didn't have to affect Superman's master narrative. You can find the article here: https://0-eds-p-ebscohost-com.library.ecok.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=12&sid=b506a6c7-5a02-4e2d-99b2-5ee5720cdb3c%40redis (you'll have to log into ECU if you're off campus). 

You can find a lot more like this if you search around, so if this doesn't work for you, keep looking! Good luck!