Comic books and communities of memory

In an age of intense media expansion and narrowcasting, understanding how media forms negotiate social and cultural pressures becomes a central focus of investigation for sociology. By tracing the historical and narrative evolution of super hero comic books, this study illustrates the growing influence economic and social pressures have had upon how creators and readers treat the media form of the super hero comic book. By illustrating the impact of these influences it is shown how a confluence of productive, cultural, and political forces served to both create and empower a cohesive sub-cultural community of super hero comic book creators and readers centrally concerned with a very narrow range of narrative interests. By examining how these communities navigated meaning through the centralization of narrative concern for the past incarnations of the media's form the marginalization of the super hero comic book's narrative form is delineated. These processes of narrative marginalization are shown to arise not as a purposively enacted strategy but as the result of a series of seemingly non-marginalizing decision. The example of the marginalization of super hero comic books then serves as a case study for the power of marginalization processes to quickly accrete, thereby perpetuating an amplifying state of marginalization. In this, the ability of small changes in the forces acting upon media forms to pull media forms in ever more inescapably fragmentary ways is demonstrated.