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but when such stories were contradicted so clearly by experience they could have the
opposite eff ect. Interestingly, reality confl icted with comics in other regards too, as the
majority of stories involving Nazis concerned spy rings and espionage on American soil.
In reality, Nazi sabotage of American industry was practically nonexistent, and the few
spy rings that existed had little success and were rounded up quite effi ciently by the FBI,
so never really posed much of a threat. If one were to believe the comics however, there
were hundreds of plots and an army of saboteurs.
When the war ended in 1945 superheroes continued to fi ght the Nazis for a time,
as there was a backlog of stories to work through. However, in time the superhero
genre faltered, in part because it was so heavily invested in propagandist attacks on the
enemy that, without Nazis or Japanese to fi ght, the superhero was largely redundant.
In time, though, Nazis would reappear, fi rst in the war comics of the 1950s, then again
in the 1960s, when a revival of Captain America by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby brought
Captain America’s wartime exploits back to life, along with his old antagonist the Red
Skull, and new Nazi villains, such as Baron Zemo. When Captain America was revived
as a character in the Marvel universe of the 1960s, having been frozen in a block of ice
since the end of the war, his enemies came with him, refi gured as supervillains. How-
ever, by this time there was a new generation of readers and Nazis villains, when they
appeared, had much less impact. By this time Nazis had been diluted somewhat in the
popular consciousness by endless Hollywood fi lms and television shows like Hogan’s
Heroes , which made the Nazis seem like buff oons. In addition, sensitivity about the
Holocaust made the use of Nazi characters a cause for concern. Th us, for a time, the
Red Skull was reconfi gured as a communist, rather than a Nazi.
In the 1970s there was resurgence in fan and collector interest in what became known
as the Golden Age of comics, roughly speaking, the war years. Th is resulted in Roy
Th omas’s homage to the comics of the 1940s, Th e Invaders (1975). Th is comic featured
the previously untold wartime exploits of Timely’s Golden Age heroes, Captain America,
Th e Sub-Mariner, and Th e Torch, along with some more obscure 1940s characters, and
a handful of new ones. Th e Invaders ran for four years. In the course of this run they
faced the Red Skull, Hitler, and Masterman, a Nazi version of Captain America, who
was an amalgam of various Nazi villains, notably Captain Marvel’s wartime nemesis,
Captain Nazi. Interestingly, this was also a time when Neo-Nazi groups were increas-
ingly on the rise, as were instances of Holocaust denial. Th e reappearance of Golden
Age heroes to defeat the Nazis all over again had a strong appeal for some older readers,
but in the main, Th e Invaders was for lovers of nostalgia. Th e taste of the average comics
fan at that time was for more cynical comics.
Allusions to 1940s comics and World War II continued to appear throughout the
1980s, in comics such as Dave Stevens’s Th e Rocketeer , which drew heavily from 1930s
and 1940s radio adventures and movie serials such as King of the Rocketmen. Th is was
another appeal to nostalgia, and perhaps a little old fashioned for most readers, but it was
clear that creators seemed to continually return to the war. Th ere was some connection
between the war and comics that could not be broken. In Britain, Grant Morrison and
