440 NEW MUTANTS
Steve Yeowell’s superhero series Zenith , which ran in the British weekly science fi ction
comic 2000 AD from 1988 to 1993, took World War II as its starting point, and in a
direct allusion to Th e Invaders Zenith faced a resurrected Nazi supersoldier called Master-
man. Here Morrison played with the occult associations of the Nazi party, elaborating
on conspiracy theories that linked prominent Nazis with the Th ule Society and occult
practices. Rumored links between Nazis and the occult would also fi gure prominently in
Mike Mignola’s Hellboy , which began appearing in 1993. Also in 1993, wartime super-
heroes once again came to the fore in the four-part miniseries Th e Golden Age , published
by DC Comics, which examined the fate of DC’s 1940s heroes in the years immediately
following the end of the war. By the end of the series the fi rst of a new breed of superhero
for the atomic age, Dynaman, who represents the coming superhero of 1950s and 1960s
comics, is revealed as the villain, a superhuman body housing the transplanted brain
of Adolf Hitler. Once again, World War II was the event that defi ned the superhero
genre’s origins. Th is was also the case in 1996, when a collaboration between Marvel and
DC, Amalgam Comics, produced Super-Soldier by Dave Gibbons , a hybrid version of
Captain America and Superman. In the story, Super-Solder fi ghts a Nazi war machine,
“Ultra-Metallo,” who is programmed to destroy the White House.
In the wake of the attacks on American on September 11, 2001, many comics returned
to imagery from World War II, presenting the ambiguous war on terror in terms of the
certainties associated with the earlier confl ict. Th is was particularly evident in the new
volumes of Captain America comics, which featured versions of famous World War II
propaganda posters as covers. Marvel Comics returned to the war in the fi rst issue of
Mark Millar’s Th e Ultimates (2002), a post-9/11 version of Th e Avengers , and Image
Comics re-launched their modern version of Captain America, SuperPatriot, in 2004. As
a patriotic superhero, the latter has a host of Nazi enemies, including a Nazi supervillain
who seems to be an amalgam of Th e Red Skull, Captain Nazi, and Masterman. Indeed,
SuperPatriot even encounters a giant robot ape which houses the brain of Hitler.
In spite of the rather clichéd and superfi cial treatment of World War II in most comics,
there have been several thought-provoking and intelligent responses to the war, such as
Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1973–91), which tells the story of the Holocaust, and portrays
the Nazis as cats, the Jews as mice. However, for the most part Nazis have been, and
continue to be, stock villains who represent evil and oppression.
Selected Bibliography: Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth
of the Comic Book. New York: Basic Books, 2004; Jones, Gerard, and Jacobs, Will. Th e
Comic Book Heroes. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1997; Wright, Bradford. Comic
Book Nation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003; Wright, Nicky. Th e
Classic Era of American Comics. London: Prion Books Ltd, 2000.
Chris Murray
NEW MUTANTS. Th e New Mutants superhero team fi rst appeared in Marvel Graphic
Novel #4 (1982) written by Chris Claremont. Th ey launched their own title with
