Giant-Size Malaise : Comic Books and 1970s America

Giant-Size Malaise: Comic Books and 1970s America is an examination of how a group of often-ignored popular culture texts can teach us about life in the United States during an uncertain decade. Focusing on mainstream comic books (mostly those published by Marvel and DC), Giant-Size Malaise illustrates how creators and the industry as a whole responded to important events and trends of the 1970s, including the Vietnam War, Watergate, the "crisis of confidence," the women’s rights movement, and race relations in the post-Civil Rights era.

The book also examines how these responses emerged from an industry struggling to deal with diminished sales and changes in the marketplace. Giant-Size Malaise is a portrait of a cultural form on the cusp of leaving the mass audience behind and exchanging it for a more loyal (but more exclusive) fan-oriented one. These two forces—societal discomfort and an industry in crisis—combined to produce a disorderly mosaic of unique stories and quirky, memorable characters that this book argues is one key to understanding the unruly complexity of the 1970s. Featuring discussions of series ranging from Conan the Barbarian and Green Lantern to Howard the Duck and Hero for Hire, Giant-Size Malaise offers a new way to understand an endlessly fascinating decade.