Today, the superhero blockbuster reigns supreme as the United States’ most significant cultural export. Avengers: Endgame (2019), the three-hour culmination of twenty-two other Marvel movies, remains among the top-grossing movies of all time, due in part to $600 million in Chinese ticket sales. And though the genre is frequently panned as the “death of cinema,” the global ubiquity of Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and other costumed vigilantes collectively project a vision of the United States—usually a conservative one—to the rest of the world.
As historian Paul S. Hirsch outlines in Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, comics have always been entwined with capitalism, race, and foreign policy.
But the “soft power” commanded by superheroes isn’t coincidental, and it isn’t new. As historian Paul S. Hirsch outlines in Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, comics have always been entwined with capitalism, race, and foreign policy. While physical comic books are now overshadowed by television, movies, and video games, it’s difficult to overstate how beloved comics were for most of the twentieth century. Cheap, easy to read, and available almost everywhere, they saturated schools, waiting rooms, drug stores, and, notably, military bases. It was these traits that made comics such an attractive propaganda tool for the federal government during World War II and the Cold War.
Pulp Empire chronicles how comics, once nothing more than a lowbrow form of pop culture, were adopted by the government as a strategic weapon in the battle to sway populations to embrace a U.S.-led future. Hirsch—who spent months combing through archives, searching for prints that were, for the most part, meant to be thrown away—begins his account with the early and unregulated years of comic book history.
When comics first became widespread in the 1930s, newsstands were dominated by crime and horror titles. Series like Murder, Inc. and Crime Does Not Pay, created by writers and artists toiling in New York’s underbelly, depicted a version of U.S. society that was replete with extreme violence, chaos, and disrespect for authority. It was not uncommon for these comics to be “packed with murder, dismemberment, and torture committed by—and against—very average-looking American men, women, and children.”
This uncensored world of early sensationalist comics, for government officials, was both an embarrassment—their overwhelmingly negative portrayal of U.S. society frustrated attempts to paint the United States as an enlightened country abroad—as well as an opportunity. Since “wherever servicemen went during World War II, huge quantities of comic books followed,” comics became a natural instrument to stoke anti-fascist hatred. During this period, comic book publishers, under the guidance of the FDR-sanctioned Writers’ War Board, produced hundreds of comics that centered on white male protagonists assailed by bumbling Nazis and stereotyped caricatures of Japanese soldiers.
In the post-war years, the exaggerated violence, sexism, and racism embedded in comics came under fire for, allegedly, poisoning the nation’s youth. Spurred by concerned parents and State Department officials, the 1954 “comic book hearings” in the U.S. Senate resulted in a more sanitized and nationalistic standard for the narratives that could be printed. Simultaneously, federal agencies such as the CIA and the United States Information Agency took a more active role in using comic books to win allies, particularly in the Global South.
The Free World Speaks, a screed against the Soviet Union featured an image of Joseph Stalin as a “malignant octopus.”
Convinced that people of color would be more susceptible to comic book propaganda, the United States unloaded millions of anti-communist comics to cities across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In some cases—as with The Free World Speaks, a screed against the Soviet Union featuring an image of Joseph Stalin as a “malignant octopus”—the comics were clearly marked as products of the U.S. government; in others, the source was obscured and, at least in Latin America, often distributed “discreetly” at union meetings or shoved into shoppers’ handbags at food markets.
Many of the records on CIA-created comics, according to Hirsch, remain classified. Because agents were not especially proud of using comics, stained by the stigma of smut, as a propaganda tool, those records may never have been written down in the first place. Despite this, Hirsch makes an important inroad into not only understanding the cultural politics of the Cold War, but in the forces that led to the omni-presence of comic book motifs in the present.
My only serious criticism of Hirsch’s book would be that, in focusing almost exclusively on how propaganda comics were produced and distributed and to what ends, it neglects to detail how international readers—in Latin America or elsewhere—responded; even the most blatant propaganda, after all, is often re-interpreted to end up with a meaning completely different from the intention.
The point at which comic book propaganda became ineffective was during the Vietnam War, when the United States carpet-bombed Southeast Asia and the horrors of U.S. imperialism could no longer be so easily glossed over with colorful superheroes.