Cold War Culture and Graphic Novels

Definition

Comic books reflected shifts in American culture during the prolonged Cold War period, providing commentary and catharsis while suffering from censorship that forever altered the comic book industry and the medium’s methods of telling stories.

Introduction

In the years following World War II, the United States was a study in contradictions. Americans were victors in war but faced a new conflict with former ally the Soviet Union, entered the age of atomic power and wielded responsibility for employing this energy of the future but feared its use against the United States, and built a prosperous, family-oriented country but stifled increased female independence. Those in power were indebted to the nation’s young people for their role in fighting the war but feared the emerging youth culture and its independent ways of thinking. Americans were desperate for entertainment that reflected their fears and would provide catharsis but were scared of their desires and willing to crusade against the very media for which they yearned. In the midst of all this turmoil, the still-young comic book industry walked a fine line, capturing this era of rapid, painful transition in American culture but also becoming one of the nation’s chosen targets for vilification.

The superhero genre, so successful during the 1930’s and 1940’s, suffered in the 1950’s with a rapid decline in sales, perhaps because the United States’ enemy was no longer an easily portrayed Axis stereotype but the more amorphous threat of communist infiltration. Some heroes still tried to maintain their past relevance. One was Captain America, who briefly tussled with communists in the 1950’s and whose former Nazi nemesis, the Red Skull, had a convenient appellation that could be exploited.

Ironically, costumed crime fighters often depended on maintaining secret identities and now had to fight enemies whose principal advantage was their use of subterfuge. Thus, the superhero genre gave way to other genres in comics: romance, Westerns, humor, and, perhaps most important, horror. The growing popularity of shocking, gory horror comics was an obvious cry for catharsis from a nation gripped by fear.

Crypt of Censorship

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, a movement led by psychologists, newspaper pundits, and government officials blamed comics for the corruption of the nation’s youth, even suggesting they were part of a deliberate campaign to weaken American culture for an impending communist invasion. EC Comics and its over-the-top brand of horror storytelling and subversive military comics, in which the true terrors of the Korean War were portrayed, became the centerpiece of a highly publicized crusade that resulted in a Senate subcommittee investigation. Aided by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham and his anticomics book, Seduction of the Innocent (1954), the hearings led directly to the collapse of the popular EC Comics horror line and the formation of the comics industry’s self-regulatory censor, the Comics Code Authority.

Fearing further government interference, surviving publishers offered propaganda that exposed the evils of those invisible invaders from overseas. One of the most famous is Blood Is the Harvest (1950), published by the Catechetical Guild. The Catholic Guild’s Treasure Chest, issue 2 (1961), features the first chapter of a ten-part story titled “This Godless Communism,” with an introductory letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover proclaiming communism as “the most serious threat facing our way of life.” The story features biographies of communist leaders and claims that their cause is the product of the devil himself. Such comics told American children that the Cold War was not only a political and ideological conflict but also a holy war.

Birth of Atomic Age Heroes

Just before the Cold War reached a dramatic peak during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the superhero genre surged back into popularity. Arguably the most profound effect of the Cold War on comics was the introduction of the atom-charged Marvel Comics pantheon of superheroes. Editor and writer Stan Lee crafted virtually every one of them as a response to the United States’ roiling culture of contradictions. The dysfunctional family unit of the Fantastic Four, transformed by strange cosmic rays, reflected the desire for Americans to rely on traditional domestic roles but also illustrated the tensions that underlay the pretense. The Incredible Hulk, a creature born of a device not unlike an atomic bomb, was the raging, übermasculine alter ego of Dr. Robert Bruce Banner, a sensitive man struggling with the responsibility of wielding destructive forces from within and without while symbolizing the shift in gender roles facing American men.

Marvel’s flagship hero, Spider-Man, was an intellectual, socially isolated teenager, the embodiment of many of his comics’ readers and part of the new youth culture that both amazed and disturbed the nation’s adults just as Spider-Man’s bizarre antics thrilled and terrified the people he defended. In one of Marvel’s most subversive commentaries on the era, Iron Man is a life-preserving, armored heroic guise built by former arms manufacturer Tony Stark, a millionaire playboy who pays a terrible price for his role in the military-industrial complex when he falls into communist hands and suffers a near-fatal wound. In that blend of guilt and responsibility, conscience and complicity, Marvel defined the Cold War United States.

If This Be Détente

Throughout the early history of Marvel Comics, its heroes frequently battled Russian or Far Eastern archenemies, international spy organizations such as HYDRA and A.I.M., and other representatives of the so-called worldwide communist conspiracy. The 1960’s and 1970’s, however, were marked by increasing social and political unrest during and after the Vietnam War, and American entertainment began to offer a more nuanced, ambivalent look at the Cold War, the country’s position in the world, and the decisions its leaders were making. Even staunch symbols of American ideals such as Captain America began to question their place in society, and for a time, this patriotic hero left his star-spangled uniform behind and assumed the more ambiguous identity of Nomad.

Following a period of détente, the Cold War surged one more time in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Sometimes dubbed the “Second Cold War,” this period of conflict sparked a renewed media focus on the threat of communism and the potential for global thermonuclear war. One of the most significant examples of the late-era Cold War in graphic novels is British comics creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen (1986-1987). One of the most influential graphic novels ever conceived, it serves as a commentary on the dangerous game of mutually assured destruction played by the world’s superpowers. Watchmen is not only a deconstruction of the superhero genre and a metacommentary on the comics medium but also a satire of the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union in which the nuclear-powered Dr. Manhattan serves as the literal embodiment of brinksmanship. The story concludes with the suggestion that perhaps society’s most feared outcome of the Cold War, total annihilation, was inevitable.

Impact

The end of the Cold War did come, but not in the way so many feared. In 1989, the Berlin Wall, which served as one of the most potent symbols of the divide between the Western and communist cultures, came down. In 1991, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. For all intents and purposes, the United States had won the Cold War, if for no other reason than that it outlasted its opponent. As the world shifted to other battles no less profound, the comics medium also moved on to reflect the world outside its pages. Communism and the Cold War became parts of comics history but are themes that continue to resonate through the medium.

Marvel Comics characters still carry the era within their radiation-mutated DNA, and the fear of industry-wide censorship that led to the creation of the Comics Code is still felt by creators and fans, although the code is defunct. In the twenty-first century superhero genre, a number of comics offer intriguing takes on the evocative historical period of the Cold War. The three-issue miniseries Superman: Red Son (2003), for example, dares to take the quintessential American icon and transplant him into an alternate reality in which his rocket ship landed in the Soviet Union and Superman became a dedicated crusader for communism. In the comic book pages, history and its myriad possibilities, as well as all the fear and tension that fueled the decades-long Cold War, are only a few panels away.

Bibliography

Genter, Robert. “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Cold War Culture and the Birth of Marvel Comics.” Journal of Popular Culture 40, no. 6 (December, 2007): 953-978. Analyzes Marvel’s superheroes, from the Fantastic Four to the Hulk, and Stan Lee’s use of them to reflect aspects of Cold War culture.

Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Provides a detailed account of the comic book censorship movement, controversial comics stories published at the time, and the Cold War-era politics that motivated the individuals involved.

Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Discusses the formation of the comics industry in the United States and includes anecdotal portraits of many of the prominent players and their sociopolitical leanings.