Comical comics
Comical comics |
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Page 33 of 34  The Origin of the Fantastical Four from Hot Brand Echh (Marvel Comics, 1968). Art/script: Marie Severin and Tom Sutton. Yet, there was another side to this story of hardening attitudes. For simultaneously, an altogether more liberal approach towards comics developed. In particular, because they were now being produced for an exclusively younger age range, they were tolerated, and even encouraged, as part of 'childhood'. They may have had their faults, the thinking went, but, after all, they were a part of a particular, and special, time in life: a time symbolic of a state of innocence. This romanticism was a legacy from the Victorian era, when children began to be sentimentalized as angelic creatures to be protected from the temptations of a vicious world: later, it was manifested in ways such as the strictly controlled 'Children's Television' of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and, in America, the hokey naivety of the 'Our Gang' cinema serials. |