Academic literature on the topic 'Feral children – Comic books, strips, etc'

Abstract The TV environment ratifies itself everywhere. Cartoons, comic strips, fabric prints, sculpture, music, paintings, flip books, T-shirts, jewellry, movies, and TV itself—these, along with printed texts, have featured television prominently, often critically, both attacking television and at the same time exploiting its resources, but above all affirming and validating the TV environment. Television is by now ubiquitous in virtually every cultural format and venue in the United States. It takes shape as familial hearth, as the illuminator/corruptor of children, as the paradoxical site of sedentary activism, as the locus of a new, multivalent consciousness. It is a source of language, virtually a contemporary phrasebook, and certifies human experience in contexts ranging from sports stadiums to personal spaces where camcorder cassette tapes are played on personal screens. Every sign of it, from a T-shirt front to a refrigerator magnet reinforces the idea of the TV environment, one extending from the Magic Screen on “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” to the video apparatus (video camera, VCR, big-screen monitor) on which the pantomime, Will Irwin, the electronic-age Charlie Chaplin, performs onstage in his one man video vaudeville act. Everywhere television is ratified as it is reified in contemporary culture.