COLD WAR 107
and Kirby even created a new superhero, modeled on Captain America, the Fighting
American (1954). However, despite capturing the mood of the times, these comics were
not very successful. Th ey were old fashioned, and audiences were not particularly capti-
vated by such fear-mongering, and the strangely up-beat imagery of troops slaughtering
North Korean troops was at odds with the frustrating war of attrition described in news
reports. During the Great Depression and the war, the fears that these comics played
on had been real and immediate. In the 1950s the economy was booming, and when the
Cold War warmed up slightly it was always somewhere far away. Th e threat of nuclear
war was another matter, but it was continually mitigated by advertising and other forms
of aspirational imagery that imagined a positive future fueled by cheap nuclear energy,
promising cities on the moon, and modernist idylls of dome cities and robot servants.
For every apocalyptic vision of nuclear destruction there was the promise that the space
age and the atomic age would combine to create a technological utopia. Another reason
for the failure of the anti-communist superhero comics of the mid-1950s was, simply,
that they could not compete with the quality of comics such as those produced by EC,
though this would not be a problem for much longer.
When the Korean War ended in a stalemate, the war genre faltered, but did not
disappear entirely. Th e villains in Blackhawk, previously Nazis, became Soviets. Other
comics returned to World War II, commenting on Cold War fears using the earlier
confl ict as a backdrop. Th is trend was seen in National’s Our Army at War (1959),
which introduced Sgt. Rock, and later in Marvel’s Sgt. Fury and His Howling Comman-
does (1963), which combined war stories with the dynamic excess of superhero comics.
Th ese comics treated World War II as a simple battle between good and evil, which was
a reassuring political sentiment as the United States found itself becoming embroiled in
the far more morally and politically ambiguous confl ict in Vietnam.
With popular culture being drawn into the ideological war against communism,
there was a renewed interest in the politics and values being expressed in popular en-
tertainment. Th e House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) along with
Senator Joseph McCarthy, put Hollywood on trial. One of the chief causes for suspi-
cion was that during World War II, Hollywood had made pro-Soviet fi lms. Th is was
hardly much of a surprise, as the USSR had been allies of the United States and the
government specifi cally asked for pro-Soviet fi lms to highlight this. Comics, likewise,
had provided pro-Soviet stories to help the war eff ort. Now, at the height of the Cold
War, this was used as a pretext to attack Hollywood. Comics, while much further down
the cultural hierarchy than fi lm, and therefore less of a target, faced similar scrutiny, dif-
ferent only in degree.
Th e fi rst wave of attacks on the comics industry came in the form of renewed
controversy over the infl uence of comics on children. Noted psychiatrist Dr. Fredric
Wertham, exploring the causes in rising levels of juvenile delinquency, asserted that
comics were corrupting children, turning them into sex-obsessed criminal deviants.
His book Th e Seduction of the Innocent (1954) made the case against comics largely
based on wild accusations and poor research, but it was eff ective in whipping up public
