Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation

This text examines how comic books - overwhelmingly popular but extremely controversial in post-revolutionary Mexico - played an important role in the development of a stable, legitimate state. Studying the relationship of the Mexican state to its civil society from the 1930s to the 1970s through comic books, the author shows how these tales reveal much about Mexico's cutural nationalism and government attempts to direct, if not control, social change. The text looks at the complex dynamics of the politics of censorship occasioned by Mexican comic books, including the conservative political campaigns against them, government and industrial responses to such campaigns and the publishers' championing of Mexican nationalism.