Digital Comic Museum
General Category => Comic Related Discussion => Topic started by: kusunoki on April 24, 2010, 10:47:22 PM
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When reading golden age comics, every so often one finds a page or a panel that just defies belief. I thought it might be interesting to share these and create something of an archive of the disturbing elements of early comics.
That being said, I offer up a page from Hangman 3 (1942), which for some reason or another is the top rated comic offered for download. The book itself is quite an interesting piece of work, featuring a carpet bombing of "Tokio" ordered after a Japanese supervillain captured and dismembered General Chiang Kai-shek. As worthy of note on its own as that story was, it's the one-page ad for a fan organization afterward that really leaves one speechless.
(http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/2821/hangman0347kns.jpg)...
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Picture did not come through K
make sure your link is active
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Picture did not come through K
make sure your link is active
That's strange. It shows up fine in my browser...
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I think the part he was trying to show was "Civilian Casualties Severe." I can't imagine that even back then killing civilians was okay. I saw an interview a British guy gave during WW2 and when asked about bombing Berlin, he said "I feel sorry for the women and children of Germany but what about the women and children of Britain?" The interview was given in the streets after a blitz attack on London. Even after this, he didn't seem bloodthirsty at all. Not the way that ad seemed to make it.
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It is coming through now not sure why not earlier. We have to remember how vilified the "Japs" were then. Many would have lumped them all together as evil. I have the Life Mag the week following Pearl Harbor. In it there is a guide on how to tell a Chinese from Japanese. There was a hatred for the "Japenese race"
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Thanks for starting this interesting topic kusunoki.
:)
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Yeah, it was really the celebrating of the bombing of civilians that surprised me. The Second World War was the first conflict (other than the Spanish Civil War) in which civilians in Western, industrialized countries were specifically targeted in military attacks. My impression had always been that these actions had always been vilified by governments and media when their nations were the victims and covered up when they were the aggressors. To see them actually promoted and celebrated in the entertainment media was not something I expected to see. Although, come to think of it, independent (heavily censored, but still independent) newspapers in Japan also gave infamously encouraging coverage to a contest between imperial army field commanders to collect the heads of Chinese men during the southward advance in China. Still, I think that these victims were at least reported as being enemy combatants, rather than civilians.
Does anyone know how the London Blitz was treated in the German popular media? I'd be curious to know whether it was justified as an actual attack on military targets or whether it might have been celebrated as an attack on the British people.
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I can still recall the low-grade horror I felt when reading an ish of BILL BARNES that showed Japan literally being wiped off the face of the Earth when our "hero" dropped what amounted to an atom bomb down a volcano. The good guys, in the aftermath, didn't seem to feel any remorse at all.
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It is easy to vilify those who are different. Remember Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps. So there was a hatred for the Japanese people in general after Pearl Harbor. It was doubtful the Germans were pleased with civilian death in England. They did not see the English people as evil just not Aryan. The Jews on the other hand....
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I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that I've read somewhere that there were limited forms of internment camps for German-Americans and Canadians in some areas as well. I better get on top of this info, I'm supposed to co-teach a class on WWII history next year...
Also, that Bill Barnes thing sounds interesting, in a horrifying way. Do you remember what issue it's from, DM? I have sort of been collecting these kinds of things with the idea of someday making them into some sort of project.
Actually, I've been thinking less about the horror implicit in all of this than of the willingness of private publishers operating in relative autonomy to toe so willingly official propaganda lines, particularly in military conflicts or even just atmospheres of general military hostility. Thinking from this angle, the rabid anticommunism from the late 1940s through the 1970s is especially interesting. The change from Japanese people as warlike beasts-Chinese people as virtuous but overwhelmed victims to Japanese people as plucky American allies-Chinese people as marauding red hordes came really abruptly following the end of the war. My favorite capsule expression of this trend is in a story from Simon and Kirby's Fighting American in which the heroes go to Tokyo to help out an Uncle Sam outfit wearing Tokyoite conman type to outwit some gorilla-like and aggressive Chinese agents. This sort of thing continued all through the 60s, probably reaching its zenith in the frothingly anticommunist stories in the early Marvel superhero and monster stories. Japanese people had mostly disappeared by then, but the red Chinese popped up everywhere as a constant menace and there were endless references to the "bamboo curtain" around China.
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Hi K,
Some links that might help with your class - with the warning it's propaganda from WWII -
Wally Lepp's PROPAGANDER sites - http://propagander.tripod.com/index.html
and from the other side -
Randall Bytwerk's German Propaganda Archive - http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/
-Yoc
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Great stuff, Yoc. Thanks for the links.
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It's also interesting to note that this page is from a comic published only about 4 months after Pearl Harbor and represented wishful thinking not actual fact. Emotions in America were pretty high in early 1942.
(|:{>
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Yes having a couple of smiling hero-kids holding news paper celebrating civilian casualties in a bombing run is pretty damn shocking (I wonder if Wertham read this issue too?).
But what gets me is that they misspelled "Tokyo".
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But what gets me is that they misspelled "Tokyo".
Actually Tokio was an alternate spelling for Tokyo then. It's pretty much fallen into disuse now. See for example:
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/THE_TOO/TOKYO_or_TOKIO_formerly_called_.html
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Along the lines of shocking stories:
I think it was in Jungle comics #1---it was the BW reprint that I was reading at the time--maybe 15 yrs ago.
'Twas a story about a couple of white guys who fly into a jungle and basically steal diamonds from a community of natives....and they were the heroes, of the story [the thieves]. There seemed to be no idea that they were stealing from the rightful owners of the jewels--as if the natives were too dumb to realize how valuable the jewels were outside the jungle--and therefore they had no right to them.
I'll have to go back and read it again to be sure I read it right---but it was a strange story--though I did understand it was 1940 or whatever, and PC wasn't even a term yet.
moondood
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WWIII will be an all-out nuclear war, and I believe it's coming soon with US vs. Muslims.
My son is 18 -- I don't want him drafted!!!!!
Barefoot Gen is a good Japanese anti-WWII comic.
War is hell.
Civilians are ALWAYS targeted in modern warfare.
Bob
Public Enemy #1 and Vietnam War draft evader
(I said I was Conscientious Objector but I guess I was really a Political Objector, against US imperialism.)
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But what gets me is that they misspelled "Tokyo".
Actually Tokio was an alternate spelling for Tokyo then. It's pretty much fallen into disuse now. See for example:
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/THE_TOO/TOKYO_or_TOKIO_formerly_called_.html
Beijing used to be Peking and before that Peiping. Etc.