10 Things Everyone Always Gets Wrong About Comic Books
2. That They're Not Political
Pretty much since the advent of superhero books, comics have been political. Captain America was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby - two Jewish comic book creators - as a blatant anti-Nazi symbol at a time when a virulent isolationism gripped the United States. His first appearance literally has Steve socking Hitler square on the jaw, while other figures over at DC would join the war effort too.
World War II had a transformative influence on the comics medium, and though the Comics Code Authority would attempt to suppress and censor Marvel, DC and countless other publishers during the ensuing decades, the Big Two in particular wouldn't shy away from real-world events. Stan Lee, Kirby and the rest of Marvel's bullpen made a deliberate choice to set the stories in the real United States, with New York the epicentre of their new universe. From that era came books like the X-Men, an allegory for the Civil Rights Movement; Iron Man, which rooted itself firmly in the Cold War milieu, and the Fantastic Four, which span directly out of the Space Race.
Marvel's aforementioned commitment to 'reflect the world outside our window' is fundamentally woven into the company's DNA, right down to Lee's monthly soapbox column in which he attacked racism, prejudice, and decried calls for his books to stop "moralising".
DC, meanwhile, would go on to adopt a similar approach. The hard-travelling era of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow took an introspective look towards the reform of the sixties and criticised Nixon's America, while later books would go onto pose similar questions with regards to a myriad of different topics. And yet, today, there isn't a shortage of fans who criticise Marvel and DC's works for being political.
Politics have always been in your comics, folks. Pretending otherwise just intimates a wider misunderstanding of the medium as a whole.