Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945

Comic Strips and Consumer Culture explores how comic strips contributed to the expansion of a mass consumer culture that was increasingly driven by visual images. He details how "Gasoline Alley" advocated the pleasures of the automobile and how 1920's working girl Winnie Winkle became determined to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. The invention of the comic book in the 1940s also produced a super-licensed Superman, whose girlfriend Lois Lane even went on a shopping spree during a period of wartime rationing. Comic strips emerged just as Americans were beginning to define themselves less by what they made and believed and more by what they bought. Ian Gordon shows that the most enduring role of the strips has been not only to mirror a burgeoning consumer culture but also to actively promote it.

Ian Gordon is an associate professor in history and convenor of the American studies program at the National University of Singapore. He is the coeditor of Comics & Ideology (2001).