Hong Kong Comics: Mass Culture?

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

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).

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

“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.

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”

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

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.”

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

"Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” is one of the chapters of “Dialectic of Enlightment” which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer ’s wrote. This important essay was published in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. Designs the culture industry as a factory producing homogenous, standardized works of art, painting, literature, and cinema. The culture industry does not create values and encourage spiritual growth, but it makes consumer products for the masses.

“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,

According to Theodor W. Adorno in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, the culture industry is the entertainment business. “The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry” (1113). While people are consuming products from the entertainment manufacturers “with alertness even when the customer is distraught,” real life is not becoming indistinguishable from the movies (1113). The majority of consumers are able to distinguish products from the entertainment manufacturers such as movies, TV shows, radio and books from reality.

The question I have posed is a very contentious one, which has been debated by scholars and graduates for some time, with many arguing that popular culture and mass media are ways of brainwashing the 'masses' into the ways of a dominant social order. Others believe that popular culture is a type of 'folk' culture which encompasses the idea of an 'alternative' culture incorporating minority groups, perhaps with subversive values sometimes challenging the dominant control groups, as was scene with the advent of the 'Indie' music scene in the mid nineteen nineties. In this dissertation I aim to uncover whether aforementioned 'subversive values' can be uncovered in popular culture or whether popular culture is really a means by which the masses can direct dominant controlling forces.

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.