Hong Kong Comics: Mass Culture?

In Understanding Comics, McCloud defines comics as, “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud, 1993, p. 9).

“Comic is a magazine or book that contains a set of stories told in pictures with a small amount of writing” (Cambridge Dictionaries, n.d.). Once as the entertainment for the lower class, comic books are now widely considered to be capable of expressing complex and profound information by using both literary and visual art forms. In the book “Seduction of the Innocent,” Dr. Frederic Wertham warned the parents to keep their children away from the comic books so their minds will not be wrapped with the fantasy of the stories as they grow up; yet, nowadays, many commentators are studying the myth and exploring the world of comics, such as Spiderman, Captain America, and Uncle Scrooge. Comic shows the psychological impact of gestures, visual styles,

Jenkins argues that American popular culture will be redefined by the struggles over convergence and media. With the idea of profit in mind,

Why are comics not appreciated as much as the dry narratives of novels in the literary world? A comic is composed of symbols to express concepts shared by all people in their own social environment, and provide more tools than conventional art to truly show artistic intention.

Comics, a medium used to express ideas via images and pictures, can be traced back to the cave period when humans communicated ideas and thoughts using paintings and pictures. However, as humans began to use words to communicate with one another, paintings and pictures as a mode of communication took a backseat. They began to be used only for visual impact whenever needed. In course of time, other than oral communication, written communication and print media were considered effective means of communication. Various genre like novels, poems, short stories, essays were all realized and accepted by scholars as resources to be used when educating children and adults. Inspite of the many famous comics – be it

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. It appreciates popular culture, or also called “material culture.” It does not criticize the consequences of materialism and consumerism; it merely recognizes its universal presence as a accepted fact. Obtaining consumer goods, responding to ingenious advertisements and erecting more effectual forms of mass communication (back then: movies, television, newspapers and magazines) stimulated energy amongst young people. Pop Art celebrated the United Generation of Shopping. It employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and ordinary cultural objects as well as including imagery from

A main literary element in Eisner’s Theory of Comics and Sequential Art is imagery. “‘Comics’ deal with two major communicating devices, words and images”

Comic book industries have been the main establishers for the new American youth culture. This has also been well used to settle a cultural representation for communism, wartime-propaganda, and, to those adults who thought their child acting rude was caused by comics, a sign of the decline of comic books, thus making the industry fall into consensus and conformity. Ever since the first comic book was created in the 1930’s, Americans have been greatly influenced because of its vast enjoyment. Whether from romance to war or justice to crime, comic books have forever changed popular culture and can definitely portray how, at different times in U.S. history, people understood and interpreted events around the globe. This becomes apparent in the film Comic Book Superheroes: Unmasked when the

“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer is a pivotal article in history that changed the way in which many communications scholars viewed media. Both authors were members of the Frankfurt School, a school of thought which looked further into Karl Marx’s theories about capitalism and the issues of mass production. Published in 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer revealed their beliefs that the media, much like the economy, is becoming mass produced, and is therefore turning people in society into media-consuming robots. Industrialization created work lives for people in which they would work on only one part of a larger machine. As a result, they felt less involved in the completion of the project as a whole, and therefore felt less pride in their jobs and their lives in general. Instead, these people turned to media and pop culture so that they would feel more fulfillment within their lives. Adorno and Horkheimer believed that these people had a reduced capacity for original thought because media is now force feeding them the ideas of what they can think and feel. This essay will prove that although Adorno and Horkeimer’s points were justified through the eyes of authors George Lipsitz, Lev Manovich, and Susan J. Douglas, there are still exceptions to their theories that they do not account for.

North American mass culture is continuing to evolve, causing debate about the quality of media being exposed to the public. The debate of mass culture can be perceived in many different ways. Fiedler and Shils suggest that mass culture can be broken down into three categories; Refined, Brutal, and Mediocre. The “Refined” category focuses on excellence, the “Brutal” category focuses on vulgar subject matter, and the mediocre category focuses on both.(Shils 1978)(Fiedler 1957) The shift from Refined Culture to Brutal and Mediocre Culture can be seen as the beginning of a “Mass Culture.”

But Marvel and DC made their reign with super heroes, there were many comics about dragons and already film comics about universes like Star Wars, Alien, Predator, these specific few were obtained by Dark Horse Comics. Image comics were popular in the 1990’s but lost steam after infighting and arguments, they to were another “Superhero, Supervillain” genre industry, similar to Marvel and DC yet on a much smaller scale. In fact Marvel and DC practically invented and revolutionized the superhero archetype, before the 1930s superheroes and supervillains were practically unheard of, and it’s thanks to this burst in popularity from the 1930s to circa 1950s that superheroes came about. As for American society, comics were a newform of media, cheap and easy to acquire, you could practically go to any store and bu a few comicds for 10xc a piece and read them for as long and as many times as you wanted, this raised the overall standard of like, oepeing up new jobs as plushi publishing companies comic compaines artissts and excetcre

Its appearance almost always accompanies the strategic and parodic veiling of the human. The illustrative style of such comics has much to do with the way this process of defamiliarization works, and we must not forget that the primary mode of representation in them is never simply language—with its conceptual relations between signifer and signified—but pictures, which bear an indexical or perceptual relation to the things they represent. (130)

a space for the magic and treachery seen in ancient myths to live. The creation of superheroes and the powers they posses offers an outsider a look into our culture and values. Although not specific to America, comic books are a driving force in our daily culture and play an important role with contemporary storytelling. Comics aren’t specific to any ‘era’ they’re easy to digest, and very expressive. The over arching artistic style and subtle sophistication hold the same simple charm that

This article examines influence of cultural globalization within the United States in the 1970s and 1980s based on its popularity. The first half focuses on Animes from that time period, describing characteristics that was both Japanese and contained Western racial and gender hierarchies, letting it be accepted

In 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, members of the Frankfurt School who fled from the Nazi Germany to the USA, were publishing their seminal essay ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. Political critique, their thesis about the ideological domination of capitalism on cultural production is one that persists today and is regularly renewed (Mukerji & Schudson, 1991). Yet, since the first half of the twentieth century, evolutions have occurred within the ‘Culture Industry’, and while the theory – focusing primarily on the music and cinema industries – is still applicable to some features of contemporary ‘cultural industries’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2007), these changes require a contemporary reconsideration of it.