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Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism

2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 109; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaac421

1945-2314

Allan W. Austin,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Comic books—or at least their superhero progeny—have achieved cultural hegemony in the twenty-first-century United States. Their box-office dominance is relatively recent, but scholars have been at work for some time exploring what comic books might teach us about Americans and their past. Much of this burgeoning field has focused on biographies of creators, institutional histories, and cultural readings. Paul S. Hirsch complements such studies by connecting comics to the international arena. Pulp Empire argues that comic books can teach us about the intersections between culture, capitalism, imperialism, and prevailing racial attitudes during and after World War II. The result is layered and complex, suggesting new ways to think about American foreign policy making as well as comics. The first half of Pulp Empire relates stories not totally unfamiliar to comic book scholars in analyzing wartime and early postwar comics: their wartime violence, misogyny, and racism; the postwar atomic anxiety; and the anticomics crusade. But Hirsch takes such materials and repurposes them by focusing on the government's inconsistent relationship with the industry during this era. Importantly, Hirsch considers not just the popular commercial offerings of the day but also government-sanctioned comics created to propagandize abroad. The second half of the book picks up with revived government efforts to shape comic book messaging, largely via resuming the wartime initiative to have comics produced at its order to further American messaging throughout the world. Such efforts were in part directed at countering negative images produced by unregulated horror and romance comics, which circulated (seemingly endlessly) around the world. Indeed, the nature of comics—cheap, portable, easily understood, and readily translated—facilitated, both formally and informally, a wide dissemination that concerned government officials. A concluding chapter looks at the rise of Marvel in the early 1960s, which Hirsch describes as straddling “the cultural space between overt propaganda comic books and commercial titles,” even in the absence of direct government intervention (p. 246).