The Devolution Of American Culture Takes Another

As For Comics, One Has Only To Turn To The Characteristic Output Of Marvel Comics, For The Period From About 1961 To About 1975, To Find Not An Expression Of Base And Cynical Impulses But Of Good, Old-fashioned Liberal Humanism Of A Kind That May Strike Us Today, God Help Us, As Quaint, But Which Nevertheless Appealed, In Story After Story, To Ideals Such As Tolerance, Technological Optimism, And Self-sacrifice For The Benefit Of Others.

The Whole House Seemed To Exhale A Melancholy Breath Of Emptiness

That's Why School Was Invented - To Give Your Parents Some Peace And Quiet During The Day.

Horror Grows Impatient, Rhetorically, With The Stoic Fatalism Of Ecclesiastes. That We Are All Going To Die, That Death Mocks And Cancels Every One Of Our Acts And Attainments And Every Moment Of Our Life Histories, This Knowledge Is To Storytelling What Rust Is To Oxidation; The Writer Of Horror Holds With Those Who Favor Fire. The Horror Writer Is Not Content To Report On Death As The Universal System Of Human Weather; He Or She Chases Tornadoes. Horror Is Stoicism With A Taste For Spectacle.

One Knew, Of Course, That It Was Not The Red Cape Any More Than It Was The Boots, The Tights, The Trunks, Or The Trademark "s" That Gave Superman The Ability To Fly. That Ability Derived From The Effects Of The Rays Of Our Yellow Sun On Superman's Alien Anatomy, Which Had Evolved Under The Red Sun Of Krypton. And Yet You Had Only To Tie A Towel Around Your Shoulders To Feel The Strange Vibratory Pulse Of Flight Stirring In The Red Sun Of Your Heart.