Violence in Graphic Novels
Violence in graphic novels refers to the inclusion of physical and psychological force within storylines, often depicted through the actions of characters with superhuman abilities or fantastical elements. Historically, the portrayal of violence in this medium has evolved significantly, influenced by cultural perceptions and societal norms. From the Golden Age in the 1930s, where violence was often righteous and intended to teach moral lessons, to the Comics Code of 1954 that imposed strict censorship, the depiction of violence has faced considerable scrutiny. In contrast, the Bronze and Modern Ages witnessed a resurgence of violent imagery as the industry adapted to changing audience expectations, reflecting themes of moral ambiguity and social critique.
While many adults express concern over the potential impact of graphic novel violence on youth, research suggests that children can differentiate between fantasy and reality, using these narratives to process emotions and explore complex societal issues. Graphic novels today often tackle serious subjects, including historical events like the Holocaust, allowing for engagement with difficult themes through an accessible format. As such, the violence depicted in graphic novels can serve both as a reflection of societal anxieties and as a tool for catharsis and understanding, contributing to the discourse on youth development and media consumption.
Violence in Graphic Novels
Definition
Violence can be described as using physical force to cause injury, damage, or destruction to individuals, the environment, or surrounding objects. In graphic novels, this force may not necessarily be physical in the traditional sense. This is because characters such as superheroes, monsters, aliens, and other creatures can have special powers and abilities, such as mental capabilities, that can lead to violent results.
Introduction
Adults in American culture feel responsible for protecting young children, boys and girls alike, from the outside world's harsher realities. Since the Victorian period, childhood has been idealized and sentimentalized, transforming the general viewpoint of children as "little adults" into the sweeping belief that the young are innocent and naturally good and must be guarded against society's evil nature through education. Victorians had no qualms about exposing children to violent and fantastical tales for instructional purposes or amusement. Americans in the twenty-first century, however, see such entertainment as celebrating the dark, horrific, and brutal underbelly of humanity. Many would prefer to banish these themes from reality—whether that means removing video-game gore, editing out violent lyrics and images from rap music videos, or confiscating graphic novels in which vigilante superheroes take justice into their own hands.
Largely more empathetic and literalistic than children, adults tend to become paranoid, automatically assuming that young people will emulate the violence shown in media such as comic books. Many fail to understand that as widespread opinion changes throughout history, new generations of children have different needs and developmental rates. As research with children, parents, educators, and psychologists has demonstrated, young people's cravings for the elements of fantasy violence do not make them mere passive recipients of aggressive media trends. Instead, they are consumers and users of popular culture, developmentally quite capable of distinguishing between fantasy violence and reality at a young age with proper adult guidance. Instead of regarding the violence in graphic novels as a cause of real-world violence, American society must take note of the historically negative impact of censoring violent content and acknowledge the underlying benefits children and adolescents receive when reading about such violence. Easing cultural anxiety and disapproval will allow young people to find the freedom to contemplate graphic novel violence for its actual and intended effect.
Golden and Silver Age Violence
The history of comic books and graphic novels is, essentially, a history of violence. From the Golden Age, beginning in the 1930s, up until the institution of the infamous Comics Code in 1954, popular superheroes such as Superman used righteous violence to aid oppressed citizens and those in need. Although these heroes often damaged or destroyed the environment and property, they exhibited an esteem for human life, no matter how corrupt or evil that life may be, that prevented them from killing. The perpetrators were, therefore, taught a lesson through either thrashings and beatings or witty, nonviolent means. As the superhero genre became supersaturated and comics became extremely popular with younger readers, creators moved to other subjects, including tales of adventure, crime, horror, and lust. Since comic books at the time were viewed as innocent, harmless reading material for children, these low expectations and the lack of any monitoring system allowed the industry to turn out increasingly violent stories. Accurate crime titles such as Crime Does Not Pay (1942-1955) featured graphic depictions of beheadings, stabbings, torture, shootings, and dismemberment. This trend toward luridly violent content outraged parents, as comics had surpassed what was considered socially acceptable even for adult amusement.
Based upon commentary from experts such as psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who claimed that comic books were harmful to impressionable young people, schools, churches, and other community organizations held campaigns against comics and demanded legislative action. Accordingly, states banned or regulated titles, and eventually, Congress put the comic book industry on trial. These hearings resulted in the creation of the Comics Code Authority, which enforced rigid restrictions on comic book content and artistic depictions, especially about violencefor example, details and methods of a crime could not be addressed, and no gore, horror, depravity, excessive bloodshed, sadism, or masochism could be depicted. The code ushered in the Silver Age of comics, forbidding various conflicts and limiting production to innocent titles meant only for young children. The only plausible option for comic creators was to revise their superheroes, creating unambiguous figures who were socially moral, never questioned authority, remained in control, and used brainpower and sciencerather than physical violenceto defeat villains.
Bronze and Modern Age Violence
During the Bronze Age, which lasted from the 1970s to the mid-1980s, the Comics Code underwent significant revisions in terms of violence. The industry worked for more relevance by exploring timely social issues in the wake of a decade consumed by the controversial Vietnam War, a push for civil rights, and general youth rebellion against authority. Rather than simply pushing traditional values of the American adult populace onto young readers, publishers began to allow for the depiction of moral ambiguity, monsters, and corrupt government figures and police officers. Almost any situation that was not too provocative, obscene, or grisly was now permitted under the newly revised code—including instances of violence, as long as they were not extreme. Popular superheroes of the period still largely rejected violent responses to problems. Still, these changes to the code were a step toward acknowledging that children and adolescents already encountered real-life violent situations on the daily news and that by idealizing comic book storylines, society was insulting the general awareness of youths.
The Modern Age1980s to the presenttruly began to bring the comic book industry up to speed, matching the levels of violence already depicted in television and films. Seeking to appease the tastes of their young readers, who demanded more cynicism, violence, and moral ambiguity, and now able to sidestep the Comics Code through direct-market distribution, graphic novels finally lived up to the "graphic" portion of their name, introducing brutal storylines and characters. Vigilante superheroes, or more accurately antiheroes, who preferred taking the law into their own hands and exacting merciless punishment became the norm. Even mild superheroes who survived the Comics Code's harsh censorship now pursued revenge occasionally. Most notably, aggressive crusades for justice were depicted as reasonable alternatives since social institutions frequently failed to punish criminals adequately, helping the industry return to the trend of violent subject matter popular before the code was created.
Examples of Modern Age Violence
Even with violence reemerging in all types of Modern Age graphic novels, a few texts mainly pushed the bar in terms of brutality and shock value. Author Alan Moore has been noted for his ruthless, disturbing characters, villains, and vigilantes. For example, because Rorschach in Watchmen (1986-1987) believes that life is meaningless and society apathetic, he freely administers his form of violent justice, which he considers to befit his sick, rudderless society. As a ten-year-old child, he partially blinds a bully by forcing a lighted cigarette into the other boy's eyeas an adult, to punish a murderer who dismembered a six-year-old girl, he handcuffs the perpetrator to an appliance, dumps kerosene around the house, gives the man a handsaw, and drops a lighted match, leaving the criminal with the option of dying in the fire or severing his hand to escape. Despite the heightened violence in the text's storyline, Dave Gibbons's accompanying illustrations typically use a perspective or angle that leaves much of the graphic brutality to the audience's imagination—thus increasing the work's overall violent effect because people's imaginations tend to be more gruesome than any illustration could ever be.
Conversely, Kick-Ass (2008-2010), by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., utilizes realistic, ultraviolent images throughout, never skimping on over-the-top blood spatter or uncensored, cringe-worthy physical brutality. Alarming to many conservative readers is the fact that such violence is carried out by an ordinary teenager named Dave, an avid comic book fan who possesses no superpowers. Even more shocking is ten-year-old Hit-Girl, also a "normal" child with no superhuman capabilities, who never hesitates to kill criminals. Using dual swords, she stabs ultimately through a drug dealer's chest while removing the heads, arms, and legs of his gang members before striking her final deathblows. Romita's illustrations in Kick-Ass leave nothing to the imagination, prolonging every gory, bloody detail to the extreme to comment upon the nature of comics and society.
The Cultural Importance of Violence
Based upon the historical connection between graphic novels and violence and the trend's reemergence into the medium, violent depictions, and storylines are essential in modern culture and youth's lives. It may help ease social tension over brutal content in comic books to realize that even young children can easily recognize cartoonish depictions of violence as unreal, distinguishing between fantasy violence and real-life situations because they adhere to different laws. Once middle childhood has been reached, children have mastered the difference between their fantasies and reality, allowing them to reason, reflect upon their new knowledge, and compare themselves to society's standards.
Thus, as long as adult culture does not blur the boundaries between the worlds of fantasy and reality by reacting to fantasy violence in ways that befit a real-life situation, reading about and seeing violence in graphic novels can have positive benefits, such as allowing young readers to harness feelings of personal anxiety, access a range of emotions to reach a new developmental level, discover personal power and feel stronger as individuals, make sense of society and their places within it, have a cathartic experience and learn socially appropriate ways to handle actual conflicts, and release strong feelings to exorcise emotional demons and prevent real experiences from being overwhelming. Once adults disregard the controversy over violent content in graphic novels, these benefits can become readily apparent, and youth audiences can continue to turn to brutal fantasy violence to cope with a reality that is also unreasonable and unkind.
Impact
Since the history of graphic novels was always interlaced with violent depictions, albeit to varying degrees, the Comics Code's attempts to remove violent imagery and storylines from the medium almost spelled the doom of the entire comics industry. At a time in which youth culture demanded conflict and challenges to authority, the industry was limited in the types of products it could release, and such comics did not meet the needs of the growing number of young consumers. While comics ranked as the most popular entertainment medium during the 1940s and early 1950s, after the code took effect, the industry dwindled to fewer than a dozen publishers by 1962, with a total output of around 350 million comic books—a 50 percent decrease from the previous decade. With strict censorship of violence and sexuality leading to blacked-out portions of panels and whited-out spaces in dialogue, comics lost many of their unique artistic qualities as well as the escapism they provided for readers. Many talented writers and artists left the industry forever, and "comics" became a dirty, socially unacceptable word.
Despite losing readers, the comic book industry managed to survive the code. Unsurprisingly, the sector's expansion during the 1980s and 1990s largely stemmed from the medium's increased violent content, with labels such as "For Mature Readers Only" generating more appeal for readers of all ages. When this graphic violence sparked media attention again, the public did not react with much concern the second time aroundgraphic novels were only starting to approach the level of violence already prevalent in music, films, and television, so the medium was left, once again, to its own devices.
In the 2010s and 2020s, a new line of thinking suggested that the violence depicted in graphic novels did not have to be gratuitous. Instead, many important messages could be conveyed to audiences using the graphic novel motif. One such thematic example was graphic novel stories of The Holocaust. This was the horrific and genocidal attempt by Nazi Germany to eliminate the Jewish population of Europe during World War II. In 2019, a graphic novel adaptation of The Diary of a Young Girlcommonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frankby Ari Folman was published. While the graphic novel was criticized for omitting critical and historical details of Anne Frank's story as a holocaust victim, the format it was presented garnered much acclaim. Graphic novels were recognized for their ability to address difficult and complex subjects to young readers in a way they found engaging. Graphic novels could also spark readers' interest in exploring the topic more deeply through academically rigorous literature. These same readers may not have otherwise obtained an essential understanding of the critical topic of The Holocaust.
Bibliography
Franklin, Ruth. "Anne Frank’s Diary, in Graphic Form, Reveals Its Humor." The New York Times, 9 Jan. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/books/review/anne-franks-diary-in-graphic-form-reveals-its-humor.html. Accessed 11 July 2024.
"Graphic Novels Can Accelerate Critical Thinking, Capture Nuance and Complexity of History, Says Stanford Historian." StanfordReport, 10 Feb. 2022, news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/02/graphic-novels-can-accelerate-critical-thinking-capture-nuance-complexity-history. Accessed 11 July 2024.
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Pasandi, Haniyeh Barahouie. "New Narratives of Trauma in Graphic Novels: Framing Sara Baartman in Vénus Noire." Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 134–42, 2022, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17409292.2022.2038896.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.