COMICS SCHOLARSHIP 111
the important political movements of the 1960s and 1970s and rendering them largely
irrelevant to real-world political issues.
Th e code began to loosen its hold on the industry in the 1970s. In 1971, Marvel,
at the request of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, published
an anti-drug sequence of Th e Amazing Spider-Man, which had to be printed without
the Seal of Approval of the Comics Code, which forbade the use of drug-related mate-
rial in comics. Politically engaged comics such as Neal Adams’s a nd Dennis O’Neil’s
Green Lantern/Green Arrow also appeared in the 1970s. By the 1980s, new marketing
and distribution techniques made it possible for comics to be successful without code
approval; new, darker, and grittier works such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank
Miller’s Th e Dark Knight Returns proved the potential for comics that defi ed the code,
and the power of the code was eff ectively broken. Th e code itself was signifi cantly modi-
fi ed over the years, but could not keep up. By the early 21st century, DC was the only
major publisher still submitting comics for code approval, and even then on a piecemeal
basis.
M. Keith Booker
COMICS SCHOLARSHIP. Th e emergence of scholarly literature on comics dates to
the 1960s and 1970s, when historians, art historians, communication arts specialists,
and literature specialists began applying a range of analytic frameworks to pop-cultural
artifacts, including comic strips and comic books. Pioneering comics scholars in the
United States, such as Donald Ault, Arthur Asa Berger, Th omas Inge, and the British-
born David Kunzle, paid close attention to the symbolic and textual elements of com-
ics, and in particular, their storytelling conventions, visual iconography, and narrative
devices. Scholarly activity exploded in the 1980s and more particularly the 1990s, as
a new generation of academics (many of them long-time fans) pursued multiple lines
of inquiry, from business history, cultural history, and oral history, to gender theory,
poststructuralist theory, and the recovery of primary texts. A newfound emphasis on
the formal dimensions of comics inspired some of the most important work from this
period and continues to attract sustained attention. Th e fi eld also benefi ted from the
construction of a scholarly infrastructure, as exemplifi ed by the founding of the Comic
Art and Comics area of the Popular Culture Association in 1992; the establishment of
the International Comics Art Forum in 1995; and the launching of the International
Journal of Comic Art in 1999.
Comics scholarship continues to make inroads across the humanities. When the
University Press of Mississippi started publishing comics-related titles by R. C. Harvey,
Joseph Witek, and others in the mid-1980s, they had the fi eld pretty much to them-
selves, at least in North America. In the past few years, the Yale, Harvard, Chicago,
Michigan and Toronto university presses have all released books on cartoon history
and theory. At the same time, the Internet has facilitated cross-national networks as
well as online journals such as Image and Narrative, ImageText, and Signs: Studies in
Graphical Narratives. Th e forward march of comics studies is similarly suggested by
