Some publishers tried to deal with the outrage and dwindling sales by addressing the new Atomic Age. But characters like Atoman -- an atomic scientist with special powers who fights to make sure that all countries have access to nuclear power -- missed the mark. Other publishers moved away from controversy entirely. They launched a new kind of comic -- soft romances for softer times. Solving the problem of both moral outrage and lagging interest in good vs. evil story lines, Archie Comics, Jughead and others traced the silly life in the suburbs. The humor caught on, and the comics audience started growing once again.

Around 1950, true-crime titles that claimed to instill good values in readers began to appear, with titles like "Crime Does Not Pay." But their lurid artwork and graphic stories included violence and criminals who seemed to enjoy life right up until the last page of the book.

Wright maintains that these lowbrow titles revealed that the industry was growing up. "By demonstrating that successful comic books need not be confined to juvenile adventure stories, fatuous teen humor, and talking animals, they expanded the creative possibility of the medium considerably," he writes. Specifically, they opened the door to a new, challenging genre that Wright holds in high esteem -- horror comics. Created by William Gaines, founder of EC Comics, horrors trafficked in grim tales that dealt directly with problems in America. Titles such as "Tales From the Crypt" and "The Vault of Horror," though often graphic, did more than titillate. With sharp artwork and complex story lines, they showed the underbelly of American values.

Wright provides striking examples. In "The Guilty," a black man accused of killing a white woman suffers the fate of American segregation. Though the case against him is only circumstantial, the story ends with the town sheriff killing the black man before he goes to trial. Another story, "Confession," touches on similar themes of injustice. It opens with a motorist killed in a hit-and-run. The dead woman turns out to be the wife of a cop, who interrogates a black suspect with the intensity of a madman. When the suspect confesses, the lieutenant returns home -- where he cleans his wife's blood off his car, which he had used to murder her.

Horror comics like these "spoke bluntly to readers' feelings that evil existed in America, without offering the slightest pretense of resolution," Wright writes. They sold well, he claims, because they shined a mirror onto a nation that denied its troubles, a "society at war with itself." But if children loved them, parents surely did not. By 1954 -- a year when comic sales topped $1 billion -- a second backlash was beginning. An anti-comics book by a psychiatrist titled "Seduction of the Innocent" inspired Congress to hold hearings. Responding to the growing sense of disgust with lurid comics and parental fears that comics publishers were preying on American children -- not to mention ruining their moral fiber -- publishers reined themselves in, creating an independent watchdog group and imposing a "comics code" that essentially banned horror comics.

The timing couldn't have been worse. Rock 'n' roll, television and movies were starting to eat away at their market, but because of the code, the comics industry didn't have much room to maneuver, and the late '50s became a time of shrinkage. By 1962, fewer than a dozen publishers accounted for a total industry output of 350 million comics, a drop of 50 percent from the previous decade.

The companies that survived -- especially DC and Marvel -- responded with an old favorite, superheroes. Marvel took the lead. Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, Marvel veterans since the '40s, developed a new formula characterized by grim endings and tragic antiheroes. The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk -- they all grew out of Lee's sense that readers wanted to see "human" characters with not just superpowers but also doubts, fears and insecurities.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"