Of Comics and Men by Gabilliet Jean-Paul; Beaty Bart; Nguyen Nick

Author:Gabilliet, Jean-Paul; Beaty, Bart; Nguyen, Nick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2010-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

Television’s Victory

In 1950, the sudden emergence of television sets among American households constituted a new variable in the evaluation of cultural practices. The Dayton study accounted for this novelty by stating that comic book reading was clearly stronger in families with children who also had televisions in their home: 46.9 percent of individuals with a television set had read comics over the previous four months against 35.4 percent of individuals without a television. At the same time, the intensity of comic book reading was inversely proportional: the new tele-spectators read an average of 13.9 comics per month compared to the 15.4 comics read by those who did not view television.29 Naturally, it was impossible for the statisticians of 1950 to look into the future but a gap between the two rival cultural practices was beginning to be established: one was moving toward a stunning expansion, the other toward a slow collapse.

The study of the evolution of comic book readership over the 1950s is complicated by the fact that only fragmentary data exist which results in an incomplete image. Consequently, it is difficult to know how the habit of comic book reading evolved during this decade. The number of titles available and the number sold reached their zenith in 1952 before beginning a long decline.30 The year 1954 coincided with the culmination of the public opinion campaign against comic books that had begun in the second half of the 1940s and which led to the creation of the Comics Magazine Association of America. Since that time, a variety of factors worked to progressively erode the audience for comic books, chief among them, television. The retreat of comic books from the everyday life of young readers seemed obvious. In 1960, 41 percent of boys in the fourth grade in San Francisco read at least nine comics a month;31 by comparison, ten years earlier, a study based on a sampling of over fourteen hundred young students in Des Moines, Iowa, showed that 75 percent of children of the same age read similar quantities.32 A 1961 study had also examined the differences between two Canadian cities, one with television, one without, respectively referred to as Teletown and Radiotown (at the start of the 1960s it was no longer possible to find an American city without television): a third of the sixth-grade students read more than ten comics a month in Teletown as opposed to 87 percent in Radiotown; for high school students, the gap was 6 percent at Teletown against 49 percent in Radiotown. Clearly, television consumption among children seemed to be inversely proportional to comic book reading, confirming the tendencies indicated by the Dayton investigators ten years earlier.

The movement seemed inexorable. In 1970, a study surveying fifteen hundred schoolchildren in southern California showed that two-thirds (64 percent) of sixth-graders read comic books against one third (34 percent) of high school students. The “big” readers (over nine comic books a month) represented 19 percent of the first category and 4 percent of the second.

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