The Book is a Weapon (16)

By: Joshua Glenn
February 13, 2010

Wonder Woman #165 (October 1966): When Horace, a chemical plant worker, falls into a vat of liquid paper that was being developed by military intelligence, he’s transformed into a sentient sheet of paper who commits crimes. Surely this story (by Robert Kanigher) and awesome cover (Ross Andru and Mike Esposito) are a sly allegorical illustration of the postmodernist argument, first advanced in McLuhan’s ’64 book Understanding Media, that print is a (villainous) hot medium and the comic book a (heroic) cool one?

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Sixteenth in an occasional series.

Categories

Pulp, Spectacles