by Eileen Gonzalez
“Sometimes, it’s nice to watch something simplistic,” a relative of mine remarked after we had rewatched The Harvey Girls, a 1946 movie musical starring Judy Garland. This comment caught me by surprise, because I didn’t view The Harvey Girls as simplistic at all. Its emphasis on marriage as a (good) woman’s ultimate goal, its villainous depiction of women who are not as devout and virginal as the Harvey Girls, and its reverse Grease ending all promote a particular kind of message that was sanitized and approved by a particular kind of person for a particular kind of audience.
I could go on about the social messages in classic Hollywood musicals, but since this is Book Riot and not Movie Riot (for the record, I would totally write for Movie Riot, too), let’s shift the conversation to another medium that people often think of as “simplistic.”
In some ways, comic books have gotten progressively more complex since they first assumed modern form in the late 1930s. They learned to tackle more serious subject matter and built up an ever larger, ever more convoluted continuity. In the ’60s, if I said I read X-Men comics, you’d know immediately which book I meant: X-Men. Now, I could mean X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force, X-Men Gold, X-Men Blue, New Mutants, and probably some other teams I’m forgetting. Meanwhile, if I try to find a particular Hawkeye comic, I am confronted with Hawkeye, All-New Hawkeye, the other All-New Hawkeye, the other Hawkeye…you get the picture.
So, yes, the comic book industry was more straightforward back then. So were the comics. But they are simplistic in the same way The Harvey Girls is: lots of bright colors and fluff to make the social norms go down.
Whenever a hero meets an alien race, that race is generally either monstrous or white people. The Skrulls and the Kree, Marvel’s best-known alien rivalry, exemplify this. The Skrulls are lizard-like creatures with pointed ears and green skin; the Kree look like suburban dads in Star Trek cosplay. Earth’s future was depicted in the same way: when Superboy travels to the far future with the Legion of Super-Heroes for the first time, they meet nothing but white people and generally act like this is an episode of Leave It to Beaver. They even take him to an easily recognizable ice cream parlor, for crying out loud.
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