Inventing America: The Comic Book Revolution

Inventing America: The Comic Book Revolution at the Skirball Cultural Center traces how a uniquely American art form shaped, and was shaped by, the country's popular culture. Co-curated by Patrick Reed and Michelle Urton, the exhibition opens with Franklin D. Roosevelt's voice and the early days of World War II, when first-generation American creators like Jack Kirby and Joe Simon channeled their opposition to the Third Reich into Captain America, whose debut issue shows the hero punching Hitler. The show follows comics from wartime morale-building, with Donald Duck selling war bonds and Wonder Woman running for president on a platform of peace, through the medium's confrontation with racism, immigration, the counterculture and the generation gap. It revisits the 1950s congressional hearings on comic books and juvenile delinquency and the campaigns to burn, ban and censor them, then traces the rise of the graphic novel, including Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. Drawing a line from Superman and Captain America to the present, the exhibition presents comics as what Urton calls the story of America in microcosm, told through a diverse roster of creators working from their own lived experiences. Inventing America is on view at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles through February 28, 2027.