Comic books: a brief history

Comic books are rich in history. Many superhero's are created  as a response to real world events. Captain America for instance was created as a response to the second world war and could be argued that his early existence was purely as a tool of propaganda. Many of Captain America's adventures involved defeating Nazi in various guises. Weiner (2009) agrees and writes "Captain America has often been proposed as an example of nationalist propaganda and given his wartime origins as a Nazi-smashing, flag-waving, drug-enhanced super-soldier, this is not a hard argument to make." (p17). However his adventures soon became more than simple propaganda and troops would take the comic books with them almost into the very trenches as an example of the true nature of comic-books and that is escapism.

The effectiveness of a comic books as escapism meant that many comic books were created and often depicted the darkest parts of human history. Several comics dealt with the atrocities of the holocaust. A great example of this is the Pulitzer Prize winning 'Maus' by Art Spiegelmen.

Comic books boomed in the early 90's and then crashed with many large companies such as Marvel skirting close to bankruptcy, it seemed they had hit their maximun gross load and most comics had 7 optional covers or holo-covers.  This comic book crash of the 90's along with a lot of disillusionment led to a lot of comic-book artists and writers setting up independant studios. People like Todd MacFarlane who went on to produce 'Spawn' and 'Haunt'.

Although there had been a small number of comic book adaptations to film before 2000 such as Tim Burton's 'Batman' and Richard Donner's 'Superman', it wasn't until 2000's 'X-men' and 2002's 'Spider-man' that hollywood had began to see comic books as the true untapped resource that they are. And in recent times' it's hard to think of a prime comic book character that hasn't been adapted to the big or small screen.