Comics are primarily a social phenomenon. They are important because almost all children read them through the most impressionable years of their lives. It is therefore necessary to recognize that they must have a considerable influence on children's attitudes and values. in analyzing comics one should take account of the connection between entertainment and ideology, between formal composition and mythical context. It should be kept in mind that comics present symbols, not copies of specific attitudes, modes of vision, and ideologies. In spite of their name, comics are clearly not funny and even those that are meant to be humorous are often no laughing matter. It should also be realized that comics express their publishers' interests best of all, and these interests do not coincide with any that might considered in opposition to the social system those publishers are so successful in. As Dixon (1978: 52-53) put it, ‘ there is no need to take up the attitude teachers and parents sometimes take up - that comics are ‘bad’... the medium itself is neither good or bad... what is important is the use to which the medium is put...’
Researchers over the last years have suggested that the use of ephemeral nature of comics is to offer a light relief from the serious business of life and reading, but also, that, it leads to successful ways of exploitation of children and teenagers' problems and insecurities (Hoggart, 1981; Laycock, 1966; Faust, 1971; Alderson, 1968). Comics establish dreamlands and play on the readers' fears of leaving them. They offer intense forms of group identification locating the readers within a complex pattern of attitudes and responses, and giving them the pleasure of an ideological ‘window-shopping’. All these magazines are, in fact, advertising a way of life. They are almost all produced in the business interests of firms acting within a society which is repeatedly accused of manipulating people by a constant exploitation of their minds.
An interesting aspect of the ways comic magazines function, derives from ‘discourse theory’, which seeks to explain the organizations of emotions in conjunction with the organization of political and social consciousness. Hoggart (1981) argues that it is a specialty of all fiction that it continually offers ways of combing social attitudes with feelings. It is these combinations of ideas and feelings that are the ‘signifiers’ or the ‘signifying system’ of comics offering patterns of organization. Moreover, as products of popular culture, comics are important to those who wish to effect social and political change for what they can tell us about the audience to which they are addressed.
The latter has attracted the interest of social and political scientists to suggest that comic magazines are important factors of children's political socialization. That is, comics can have a considerable manipulative effect on the ways through which children adopt a general context of predispositions and knowledge about social and political phenomena, consequently the formation of their political attitudes. Moreover, it has been pointed out that comic magazines have, in their majority, the stamp of the American context, and project clearly American values and attitudes, leading this way to ideological legitimations of certain social and political realities, in accordance with the American, or in other words, capitalistic and imperialistic desires (Berger, 1971; Pantelidou-Malouta, 1984). It is a fact comics present stereotypical views about the relations of the two sexes, the role of children and citizens in the social system, social mobility motives, the role of wealth, and the political power and processes.
Berger (1971) is quite convinced that it is possible to discover important American values showing through the commercial comic book literature of children. This is also probably because the writers and artists unconsciously let their guards down, and in drawing from the American ethos, produce material that is centrally significant, though it may be, at the same time, ‘junk’ as Feiffer puts it. The dramatic social changes of the American middle class society have often been indicated in the comics culture (Kasen, 1979, 1980). Berger (1971:176) notes that it is a fact, ‘comics are distinctively an American idiom and are one of the few things that (all Americans) have in common, one of the few things in (America) society which cut across class barriers; ... major changes in the comic are often indicative of significant social changes in American society’.
One of the most influential analyses of the myth of the United States political, And the Great American Dream cultural, innocence, has been Dorfman and Mattelart's (1971) work. Their work directed to the ways in which capitalist and imperialist values are supported by comics culture, especially Disney's publications. What becomes politically complex and criminal, as Dorfman and Mattelart indicated, is when the comics’ common ideology is imposed upon non-capitalist under-developed countries, ignoring the grotesque disparity between the Disney dreams of wealth and leisure and the real needs in the Third World. It is the comic books and strips, among other media influences, that sustain old favorites in the public consciousness (in the U.S. and abroad) and keep it receptive to the massive merchandising operations which exploit the popularity of these characters (Kunzle, 1971:14).
The research ideas and attitudes behind Dorfman and Mattelart's analysis, have been the main motive for a content analysis of children's comic magazines in Greece where certain socio-economic conditions have not allowed the development of a local national comic market. Comic magazines in Greece have appeared through different historical eras, in the form of satirical papers and magazines. Early efforts to develop a comic market had only resulted in a few interesting productions by Greek designers. Though, around 1950s many of the last remaining cartoonists were forced to give up any attempt as they could not compensate the large imported numbers of comics with the colossal development of the Pechlivanidis Publishing group.
The emergence of comic magazines intrusion in Greece starts in 1967 with the establishment of the colonels' military dictatorship (Platis, 1978). Comics, as part of the overall picture of social conditions the media presented, had to conform to the propagandist desires of the colonels' and their American supporters. People were supposed to become familiar with uniforms, tanks, patrols in the streets, and guns and this should have become a way of life. Comic magazines dealing with war stories (mainly British), published by the Dragounis-Helm Press and others, came to fulfill those militaristic interests. Since then, foreign comics are being imported unquestioningly, and they are legitimised in a continuous process of cultural invasion.
It is these foreign imported comic magazines that have been the focus of the content analysis research in this part of the work. A sample of fifty comic magazines directed to children was randomly selected for a diagnostic and descriptive content analysis, which was decided to be both qualitative and quantitative, according to the kind of themes analyzed. As Table 3.1. shows an investigator has a choice among different research designs, to analyze messages and make inferences about the characteristics of the text, the causes or antecedents of messages, or the effects of communication. For the purposes of the analysis of comic culture a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods has been used. The reasons can be clearer with reference to the relevant debate about the two methods in content analysis research.
A broad definition of content analysis first, would be that, ‘content analysis is any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying characteristics of messages’ (Holsti, 1969:14) (also Figure 3.1.). There has been a lot of debate and criticism among researchers whether content analysis should be quantitative or qualitative. The content analysis in this thesis, adopting both methods, could probable be set along the lines of the R.A.D.I.R. studies 9 Revolution and the Development of International Relations), which combine frequency and non-frequency techniques, scoring presence or absence of symbols (Lasswell, Lerner & Pool, 1952) The qualitative and quantitative aspects of a content analysis then supplement each other. It is by moving back and forth between these approaches that the investigation is most likely to gain insight into the meaning of the data. Pool (1959:152) summarizes this point: ‘ it should not be assumed that qualitative methods are insightful and quantitative ones, merely mechanical methods for checking hypotheses. The relationship is a circular one; each provides new insights on which the other can feed’.
In the two earlier chapters of the thesis the attempt has been to show that both mass media organizations and the comic industries as part of them, are clearly associated with American ownership and control. In the following content analysis the main concern is to examine the themes prevalent in children's comic magazines, and to provide the links to American culture and contemporary social issues. The analysis suggests that the content of these comics reflects values and attitudes of the Anglo-American ‘free’ capitalist world. The stress is on the analysis of the message and its origin. Social order and hierarchy, propaganda of Anglo-American nationalism, and various ideological forms of sexism, racism and violence are identified. Therefore, a brief discussion of characteristics of American culture and history is provided; the concepts of nationalism, sexism, racism and violence are also discussed and the attempt is to indicate the links which would identify their capitalist and imperialist origin. Thus, comic culture can be seen as just one of the forms of modern neo-colonialist attempts of manipulation and exploitation of human consciousness, justifying the characterization of comics in this thesis as powerful cultural invaders.
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