Mark Dudley, Illustrator, saw Steve Bennett’s most recent column about comics content  (see “Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--This Far And No Farther”) and says comics reflects society:

I just finished reading the opinion piece "This far and no farther" and I have to say, while I understand the climate that helped to form Mr. Bennett's opinion, I can't say that I totally agree with him.  It's not that comics are on this dangerous slope of unwholesomeness, it's actually the age old habit that art has of imitating life.

I was born in 1970 and I saw a lot of comics due to my uncle being an artist as well as visits to Akron where my cousin Chris has a MONSTROUS comic collection.  I always marveled at the art but as a child couldn't really understand how to read comics.  This was a new era for Americans and a lot of us were getting to truly voice our opinions for the first time.

Growing up in that era I wanted to be the characters in the books.  I believed in truth and justice and all that stuff, and they looked cool.  Now let’s move on to age 13: I was dabbling in drawing and my roommate at Upward Bound begins to truly educate me about the comics medium.  At this age I was savvy enough to realize the difference between Marvel and DC styles of storytelling and thanks to the likes of Arnold and Stallone, I gravitated more toward Marvel.  It was around this time to that I discovered Robotech anime and manga.  The storytelling was more intense in these mediums than in American comics and again the characters in anime looked way cool.  At this point I identified more not with the superhero but the supersoldier.  The ‘80s were all about the me generation, hedonism and excess.  The comics of that period reflect that.

Let me not belabor my point; comics reflect the mode of the society in which they are published.

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