POLITICS AND POLITICIANS 471
the war eff ort after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As William Savage observes, “comic
books became an integral part of the Allied propaganda machine, emphasizing the
need for a maximum war eff ort by portraying the enemy as the inhuman off spring of a
vast and pernicious evil” (10). Japanese soldiers in particular were often caricatured as
monstrous, slavering beasts.
After the close of the war, superhero comic books slipped into escapism, social
irrelevance, and general unpopularity. Not even the menace of communism provided a
compelling motivation for superheroes in this era. A telling example is that of Joe Simon
and Jack Kirby’s Fighting American (1954–55), whose patriotic title character did not
meet with the same success as his more famous predecessor. Th e Fighting American
began as an earnest communist-smasher, but the chronicles of his exploits—which
involved vanquishing foes such as “Poison Ivan” and “Super-Khakalovitch”—quickly
turned to lighthearted satire of Cold War political attitudes. Neither approach was
enough to keep the book afl oat. Among the new genres that arose to take the place of
superhero tales, none was more engaged with political issues of the post-war era than
crime and horror comics, especially those published by EC Comics. EC titles spun often
grisly tales of murder and betrayal, but their stories also often took the United States
to task for failing to live up to the ideals for which it had so recently gone to war, and
for succumbing to the paranoia of anticommunist politicians such as Joseph McCarthy.
Shock SuspenStories (1952–55), primarily featuring tales written by William Gaines
and Al Feldstein , was the primary venue for EC’s most pointed social commentary.
Stories such as “In Gratitude” (#11, 1953) and “Th e Whipping” (#14, 1954) took on the
evils of racism and segregation, while “Th e Patriots!” tackled the issue of anticommunist
hysteria. EC’s war comics , Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales , edited and usually
written by Harvey Kurtzman , tended to emphasize the futility of war and to critique
post-war American exceptionalism. Even the more fantastic genres were sometimes
pressed into the service of EC’s social satire: Weird Fantasy #18 (1952) features an
African American astronaut’s exploration of an alien world divided and diminished by
segregation.
Although EC’s frequent renderings of decapitations and other forms of dismem-
berment were among the more overt targets for anti–comic book crusaders like
Dr. Fredric Wertham and Senator Estes Kefauver, the Comics Code that emerged
from this time of crisis did as much to blunt EC’s political commentary as it did
to tame its representations of violence. Among the code’s regulations were prohibi-
tions against depicting politicians, government offi cials, and other authority fi gures
in a negative light. Although Kurtzman took his penchant for satirical broadsides to
the wildly popular Mad magazine, the loss of EC’s dissenting voice meant that most
comic books in the later 1950s and early 1960s continued to enforce a vision of a Cold
War-era United States whose major problems stemmed not from internal strife, but
from the forces of communism. Although the short-lived war comic Blazing Combat
(1965–66), from Warren Publications , questioned the morality of the Vietnam War
in a manner that recalled Kurtzman’s work, other war comics such as Dell’s Jungle War
