Indrid Cold wrote:I'm not sure if cliched plot devices like "it was all a dream" makes comics more sophisticated...
The sexy depictions of Black Cat and Jo-Jo seem a bit provocative to have been targeted at 9 to 13-year-olds! And really, unless it aroused his hormones, what boy that age would want to read about a female hero? (The only way I would have touched a Wonder Woman or Supergirl comic at that age, would have been to ogle their bodies!) Girls still have cooties when we are that age!
Indrid, I won't ask how old you are, but I will say how nearly impossible it is
for today's under-sixty adults to visualize how utterly different the '40s were
from the present, how limited the access to media was compared to today
and how utterly different that media was. ("Captain Midnight" and "Jack
Armstrong the All-American Boy" on the radio; Roy Rogers and Hop-a-long
Cassidy Saturday matinee westerns when you were lucky There was no
adult media - even for adults. In another thread I alluded to the uproar over
the word "damn'" in "Gone With the Wind.")
I grew up on the cusp of Greenwich Village on Manhattan's lower west side -
far from being a sheltered environment by the standards of the day. Yet my
ten-year-old granddaughter, who lives in a semi-rural, upper-middleclass CT
neighborhood is incredibly more sophisticated and knowledgeable than I was
at her age.
Yes, girls had cooties! …er, at least that's what we told each other in public.
Private thoughts were a different matter. A hell of lot more nine-year-old ogling
went on than you might imaging. My first remembered ogling experience (at age
eight or nine) was during a school assembly program when older girls appeared
in abbreviated, satin majorette costumes and marched around to the music of
John Philip Susa. WHAT A TURN ON! Unsophisticated we might have been,
but you can't keep a good hormone down.
Al