Suburbia and the Subversion of Its Values in 1950s Crime Comics

Summary

During the late 1940s, the United States experienced a housing boom, which enabled millions of Americans to move from central cities to the suburbs, completely changing the patterns of living in the country. Owning a detached house with a driveway and a front lawn became the new embodiment of the American Dream. Coincidentally, the Golden Age of Comic Books was culminating in the same period. With television in its infancy and rock and roll still almost a decade away, comic books were the most popular entertainment for American youth, selling hundreds of millions of copies per month. Never before or after in the history of popular entertainment in the United States were so many comic book titles available to young Americans. Of all the genres, crime comics were at the peak of their popularity and the authors of these works were the first to use the suburbs as a setting for their disturbing stories.

The suburbs have been studied in a number of fields, including architecture, sociology, history, planning design, literature, and media studies, but only seldom have they been looked at by scholars of comic book studies. The present chapter attempts to fill that vacuum. Its aim is to examine how suburbia is represented in a specific genre of crime comics, whose extreme popularity in the second half of the 1940s was followed by a rapid decline a decade later. Furthermore, it examines how the crime comic books of that era consciously subverted what has become known as “suburban values.” In his insightful study of the narrative representations of suburbs in popular culture, David R. Coon observes that films and television series from recent decades such as American Beauty (1999) and Desperate Housewives (2004–2012) are part of wider trends in Hollywood that “interrogate and subvert conventional images of American suburbia” (Coon 2013: 2). The fact is that such conventional images were already being subverted by crime comic books in the first half of the 1950s, and comic books were probably the first medium to do so.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope can serve as a point of reference for my analysis.