Tagged: Plastic Man

Maybe it’s because this presidential campaign is lasting more than two years, but lately, I’ve heard a lot of people bemoan their feelings of helplessness.  The system is unchangeable, they’ve decided, and there’s nothing they can do.

When I was a teenager, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, we thought we could fix everything.  War, poverty, pollution, inequality – it didn’t matter what the problem was.  All we needed was ourselves, our energy and resolve (music and drugs were optional, but helpful).

Today, not so much.

I don’t know precisely how, but our cool rebellion and anti-materialist hedonism got co-opted by the very corporations we despised.  The very culture we created sold us out.  Maybe it was the 1970s, when the music business got huge, segmented radio and split us apart in order to sell to us more efficiently.  Punk started in protest to this, but was co-opted even more quickly.  MTV turned rock’n’roll into long-form commercials.  By the time grunge was hip, Calvin Klein already had Time Square billboards with underwear models looking strung-out in Seattle.

Movies didn’t do much better.  The rebellious, independent filmmakers who gave us Taxi Driver, M*A*S*H, Easy Rider and others were rejecting Hollywood’s glamour, glitz and phoniness.  Somehow, they and their rebellious stars were absorbed into the studio machine even more quickly that the rockers.  Maybe Jane Fonda wasn’t the deepest political thinker, but she looks like Noam Chomsky compared to Lindsay Lohan.

So, comics?  They fall somewhere in the middle, and off to the side, as they do in so many conversations about media.  Originally reprints of newspaper strips, comic books were seen as disposable, cheap fun, so anything could happen.  There’s amazing, subversive energy is Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, just to pick one example.  When comics became popular, the people in power objected, and put through the Comics Code to keep the kids in place.  Hippies re-discovered comics, and started to make their own.  From these underground comics came new distribution, then the direct market, and now, with the exception of a few political titles like World War 3, independents have replaced undergrounds.. 

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