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Audience Awareness

As a medium of popular culture, the comic book industry is sensitive to public opinion. The need for a comics code in the mid-20th century indicates a public opinion against comics that was oppositional to the target audience of comics publishers. Since the contrast between comics haters and comics fans was so stark, the presence of comics as a niche industry increased the pressure of catering the material in comics to their mainstream audience, instead of publishing material that could reach the greater population.

Bradford Wright notes in his essay (2008) that publishers of comics observed an increase in social awareness in the comics audience of the 1970s. He mentions that the events circulating around the Civil Rights movement and other social campaigns of the 1960s influenced the minds of youth that emerged as comics readers in the 1970s. The result of this flux was manifested in the shift of comics publications toward a greater level of depth in regards to the values represented by protagonists, especially in those of the superhero genre.

DC comics published issues of the Green Lantern in this reactionary stage of comics publications that demonstrates a superhero with a greater sensitivity to social issues as opposed to superheroes of the earlier comics generation. Earlier comic book superheroes dealt with villains that were practically dimension-less in their motives against society. Although these villains from series such as Superman and Batman showed patterns in their identities throughout issues of a given volume, they did not directly criticize a contemporary facet of the realistic world. It is not until the publication of the Green Lantern, such as the #76 issue of 1970, that a direct criticism against society is made. Although this direct criticism becomes evident in the middle section of the text, however, there is a deferring twist at the end in which the criticised character turns out to be a typical villain with clearly criminal intent. This move on behalf of the writers was probably meant as a buffer against being too explicit.


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