Trash Culture

This chapter analyses the historical context of bubblegum comics, as well as comics otherwise profoundly embedded in consumer culture, before offering a critical reading of the comics found in a bucket of Dubble Bubble bubblegum. The chapter argues that comics are profoundly indebted to marketing, both as advertising and as premiums (items offered free with a purchase). It also argues that even bubblegum comics display an ambivalent relationship to consumerism, particularly as their meanings are unavoidably bound up in the text’s materiality as literal garbage.