Fighting and Flying: Archival Analysis of Threat, Authoritarianism, and the North American Comic Book

In this archival study, themes of authoritarianism ( Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950 ) were content coded in American comic books. Comic books produced during years of relatively high social and economic threat (1978–82 and 1991–92) contained more aggressive imagery, more conventional themes, less intraception, and fewer spoken lines by women characters relative to comic books produced during years of relatively low threat (1983–90). Unexpectedly, speaking roles for characters of color did not differ due to the influence of threat. Discussion focused on the theoretical relationship between threat and manifestations of authoritarianism at the societal and individual levels.