Action and adventure

Sexism was seen as an even bigger problem. Most adventure comics were created by men for a male audience, and women generally came off very badly. There were three main objections to the images put forward: that women performed subordinate roles, typically as 'helpers' (nurses, mums, housewives); that they were used as plot devices, commonly as 'victims' (there to be rescued, and the subject for violence); and that they were portrayed as sex objects, all plunging necklines and endless legs (see above). The new awareness that feminism brought in the late 1960s initiated calls for the complete reassessment of the industry's treatment of women characters. However the publishers were unwilling to mess with (so far successful) genre conventions, and in fact very little was done until the 1980s, and even then the changes were largely cosmetic.
All these worries concerned the perceived 'effects' of adventure comics on readers, and on children especially. Although the level of theory was often very rudimentary, youngsters were thought of as empty vessels, unable to think for themselves: the idea that a visual medium like comics would have a lasting effect seemed like common sense. But in fact there was no empirical data to support this case, which rested on long-standing fears: as we saw in our last chapter, it can be traced back to the cult of the 'innocent child', somebody who should be kept away from vicious temptations of adult world at all costs. More recent analysis has been much more sophisticated, and shown, among other things, that children interpret comics according to their circumstances, and often 'set their own agenda'. The evidence is still inconclusive, however, and the debate on effects continues to be far from dead.