InsaneJournal

Captain "Skinny Dipper" Marvel
Yep, busted. WHIZ COMICS# 50. If he turns back, will Billy be nekkid too or will he have on that red sweater and blue pants outfit?



It's often a jolt to read old books and realize how society has changed in ways that we hardly notice anymore. Boys and girls up into their teens used to go swimming naked in the summer (not together), usually in secluded swimming holes and ponds on someone's property or in some semi-hidden bend of the river. No one thought twice about it. Kids used to shower after gym class as a routine, too, and I imagine that has been long dropped. Something happened in the late 1950s or so that made people more apprehensive than before about their children. Walking a mile or so to catch the school bus or to get home after school was normal, kids used to disappear all day on Saturday or in the summer to play, and parents trusted them not to get in too much trouble (and they didn't). At the beginning of POLLYANNA, we see a bunch of young boys jumping into the old swimming hole, bare as when they were born and that was a Disney film. Maybe that still goes on deep in the backwoods of the South or the Midwest today, but I doubt it.

era: golden age, char: captain marvel/billy batson