Comic history

[dickens]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0325/p13s02-bogn.html

A review of "The 10 cent plague" about the 1950s panic that led to hundreds of comics being cancelled/closed.

Oddly, the reviewer fails to mention the comic code; but makes the book sound fairly interesting. I'll probably order it from the library just for the appendix (listing the people, including women and minorities who vanished from the comics industry after the 50s)

It would be interesting to see the types of comics produced in an alternate universe where this never happened.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is my problem with a lot of alternate histories: the things I'm interested in as alternate universes aren't usually things like the South winning the Civil War (although good authors can carry off books where the turning point was something pretty mainstream -- witness papersky) but rather odd shifts in comics history or radio history or whatever obscure and fascinating thing the author came upon that week.

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

What about the type of alternate universe fiction would be written in an alternate universe?

Or is that too meta?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well...one of my annoyances in SF is future-of-our-universe SF where no one in it seems to have read/seen/heard of any SF. I suppose I can believe that there will be people in the future for whom the phrase "warp drive" or "nanotech" would come as a complete surprise, but I don't think they're going to be the people who have all the interesting stories.

Alternate history doesn't work quite like that, but still, I suspect that in a lot of alternate universes, someone has thought of alternate universes. Maybe most of the ones that future humans, even.

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

Yeah, just once I want a character in an SF book or show to say "Wait a sec! Something just like this happened in a Heinlein juvie!"