CONTENTS
6 FOREWORD by Someone Famous
8 INTRODUCTION 14 RE ADY THE N, RE ADY NOW Comics About the Military
72 SHOW ME THE MONE Y Comics About Employment and Economics
154 BE PRE PARE D
Comics About Health, Safety, and Civil Defense
206 THE AME RICAN WAY
Comics About Landscapes and Lifestyles
284 SOURCE S 298 INDE X
INTRODUCTION
M
y first comic book reeked of diesel fuel. I was eight, and my dad worked at the motor pool on a U.S. Army base near Darmstadt, West Germany. He handed it to me in a desperate attempt to distract me while he finished his maintenance duties. Dad knew I lusted after comics. He and my mother had to drag me from magazine racks at the PX, where I got my first glimpses of American super heroes; at a German market nearby, I was transfixed by the indecipherable yet appealing Asterix and Obelix of the popular Franco-Belgian comics series. But what my father handed me was radically different from anything I had thought of as a comic. It was small enough to fit in my coat pocket (no coincidence, I would find out later). It featured an anthropomorphic jeep and a talking goat; there was page after page of military acronyms, diagrams—and pretty blonde girls. It was simultaneously boring and titillating. Clearly this comic had no evil villains, no imaginary worlds, no city in need of saving. I was tempted to throw it aside and crawl around under a greasy cargo truck instead. But in the end, I couldn’t resist: I was holding a comic . . . even if it was an army manual. I was captivated by the twotone images within; I could read the simple strings of words on my own. I soon learned there were thirty-seven items to look for during a walk-around inspection of an M561/M792 Gama Goat (the anthropomorphic jeep), or as my father referred to it later that evening—after he made sure the comic was properly stored away, in case of inspection—“the biggest piece of shit ever forced upon the American taxpayer.” I left the Gama Goat and his busty harem back in Germany when I came home from overseas with my parents. It lay buried like a literary land mine in my brain. I didn’t know that decades later, comics, particularly ones paid for by the American taxpayer (thanks!), would play such an important role in shaping my professional life. In 2005 I began my career as an academic librarian at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and was frantically looking for a research focus. I was adrift online and beginning to despair when I came across solicitation H9223905-T-0026, posted by the U.S. Special Operations Command. It was a call for contractors interested in publishing a comic book to distribute to Iraqi youth. Specifications as to story, dimensions, and print run were included, as well as this rationale: In order to achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East, the youth need to be reached. One effective means of influencing youth is through the use of comic books. A series of comic books provides the opportunity for youth to learn lessons, develop role models and improve their education. Gama Goat! All these years later, I suddenly could smell that comic, feel it in my hands. I had my focus. But would I be able to find enough comics like
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above Sample caption Pudaepe qui omnihicienis ute et re velliat inullaudae. Simaionest quaspid ellate magnatis nus et maionsedi raeperum fuga. To cone sequi di reium
that to foster a field of study? The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is a regional member of the Federal Depository Library Program. This means the university’s library is legally mandated to collect and make available all publications produced by the federal government. All of them, even lowly comics. Inspired by memory and that online post, I forayed into the library’s labyrinthine stacks to hunt for government comics. The UN–L collection was vast and far removed from the more frequented parts of the university’s library; I felt like Indiana Jones seeking the Ark of the Covenant in an endless government warehouse. I sneezed my way down near-deserted library stacks for two years, stumbling upon the caches of liquor, food, clothes, and pornography of other research castaways. I also unearthed a treasure trove of government-produced comic books. I discovered that although the U.S. Department of Defense was responsible for a majority of the comics produced by the federal government, many other departments and agencies utilized the comics medium, from the Social Security Administration to the U.S. Postal Service. The Government Printing Office published many of the comic books, but Harvey, Marvel, DC, and even corporations produced, distributed, and marketed government comics as subcontractors and sponsors. Government agencies, both federal and state, employed a variety of established and renowned freelance artists from the newspaper strip and comic book industries, as well as in-house and now chiefly anonymous contributors. Comics legend Will Eisner, now one of the main figures associated with the government’s use of comic books, created his sympathetic soldier Joe Dope and PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly for the U.S. Army. Eisner used what he learned from his experience to found the American Visuals Corporation, a pioneer in commercial educational comics. A debt-laden Walt Disney produced many government comics, as well as churning out instruction manuals and films on behalf of the United States. Disney teetered at the edge of bankruptcy as World War II raged in Europe and cut off a huge part of Disney’s market. So Uncle Walt turned to Uncle Sam to make ends meet. By 1943 the Walt Disney Company was a full-fledged government contractor, churning out films, instruction manuals, and comics at a whirlwind pace. Thomas Johnstone, an Art Institute of Chicago alumnus, cofounded the Johnstone and Cushing art agency, which produced a stable of early comic royalty like Joe King, Milt Gross, Stan Drake, Katie Osann, and Milton Caniff. From 1936 to 1962, Johnstone’s agency produced thousands of comics for nonprofit and nongovernment organizations as well as for the military. Malcolm Ater’s Commercial Comics, which got its start in the late 1940s as a producer of political and business promotional comics, was also a major provider for the government until the 1980s and was responsible for many classic comics titles, such as Teenage Boobytrap and Dennis the Menace Takes a Poke at Poison.
Government comics are peopled with familiar comics icons, new characters, and über-American John and Jane Does who share their world with talking bears, turtles, and elephants. These are comics with messages, stories with morals, instruction booklets aimed at adults and children, civilians and soldiers. They were distributed at schools, civic events, and recruiting offices; they were inserted in local newspapers and national magazines; the U.S. Army currently has an online webcomic. These official comics reached their intended audiences by a variety of means, and the intended audience was the American people: comics as civics lessons. The government understood that comics, as a form of popular culture, have the capacity to simplify even the most crucial civic issues and shape public opinion. The Johnson administration (1963–69) used comics to promote LBJ’s Great Society, even as war raged in Vietnam. The president launched new programs addressing education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation; comics such as Hooked!, on the dangers of drug dependency, and Pogo: Welcome to the Beginning, on the benefits of joining the Neighborhood Youth Corps, introduced and marketed these social and civil initiatives. These comics encouraged children and adults to protect the environment, become involved in local community projects, understand their rights and duties, and avoid drugs. Small-government conservatives did not forsake comics as a means to press their agendas. The Reagan era (1981–89) produced a variety of official comics with social and safety themes, distributed freely through comic shops, youth clubs, and public schools. Even the New Teen Titans joined Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. During George W. Bush’s presidency, a comic aimed at armed forces personnel tried to explain the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy concerning homosexual service members. It would be easy to dismiss government comics as mere propaganda, to chuckle at the plainly embarrassing attempts to engage youth culture, or mock the clichéd characterizations in the sex and drug stories. Certainly many of the early military comics could be regarded as propaganda. They reached mass numbers of people and united diverse populations by subjecting many readers simultaneously to the same images. They often visually denigrated “the other” and perpetuated long-standing cultural traditions such as the family, sentimentalism, and the military hero. But official comics also reinforced the government’s expectations about the preferred cultural identity of the country. While the melting-pot metaphor is a popular attempt to explain the idealized process of immigration, what was actually depicted in government comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s was the immigrant home culture melting away, replaced by an unchanged, conservative American culture of unquestioning loyalty to Old Glory, apple pie, and the wisdom of Rex Morgan, M.D. That the government believed in the persuasive power and mass appeal of comics is clear from the widespread use of the medium and its simultaneous suppression of the format. Responding to government pressure, the
commercial comics industry began self-regulating in the 1950s. The purpose of this regulation was not only to prohibit horror and violence, but also to uphold American values. As I waded through and examined these official comics, I saw a definite and deliberate convergence of persuasion, entertainment, and education. Portrayals of life found in government comics are not neutral or random images; depictions of social issues are fraught with significant ideological implications. No doubt characterizations of “the enemy” or ethnic groups, with exaggerated and stereotypical features, reflected and reinforced prejudices we still contend with today. The government had certain ideals in mind with regard to what American culture was and ought to be, and it recognized the mass appeal of comics and their potential for getting those cultural messages across. Images convey information quickly and can evoke deep emotions in their viewers. This power of the image derives from its ability to convey a message simultaneously, as both a gestalt and a specific chunk of meaning. When images are used for political purposes and disseminated through mass media, their power to persuade is increased dramatically. But let’s not get carried away here. Public opinion and cultural norms are not so malleable. Despite the meticulous and vetted stories these government comics tell, their intended messages can still be misinterpreted, read ironically, rejected altogether, or just left on the table in the community center to be thrown away. Once these comics are released to the public, the government loses control of whatever messages it hopes to deliver. Consequently, government comics stand a better chance of success in delivering their messages when they demonstrate procedures or explain facts, rather than illustrate overly dramatic morality tales intended to persuade, which much of the target audience only laughs at. Despite their shortcomings and the sometimes questionable quality of their artistry, government comics are important artifacts in the history of comic books and in the history of popular culture. They are a looking-glass into our government’s idealized or assumed “American Experience.” The stories and their subtexts, characters, and depictions in these official comics all reflect our nation’s shifting attitudes and concerns and our government’s attempts to recognize and address them. These comics deserve to be read, warts and all; they are important for their content as much as for how they record the attitudes of a specific time. We should look at many of these comics as attempts by our government to communicate with us, to disseminate public information. Setting aside cynicism, the fact that our government reaches out using a medium that many associate with illiterates and children is notable. Despite the irony of a “funny book” illustrating how to clean an M-16, or the dissonance of a helmeted turtle discussing survival strategies in a nuclear holocaust, these publicly funded comics demonstrate how highly the government regarded the comics medium as a means to mobilize and benefit the American people. I invite you to see for yourself.
READY THEN, READY NOW COMICS ABOUT THE MILITARY
B
efore my father ever showed me the Gama Goat manual (actual title: Operation and Preventive Maintenance: The M561/M792 Gama Goat ), the U.S. military already had a long-standing tradition of using comics as propaganda, recruitment literature, and even part of psychological operations. The massive scale of any war effort requires persuasive means to mobilize the troops, send a strong message to the enemy, and bolster support from those at home. So it’s no surprise that the bulk of the government’s comic book output has been—and continues to be—for the Pentagon. While the army has the longest association with the comics medium, all branches of the military have at one time or another decided to self-publish or subcontract propaganda, manuals, or recruitment pamphlets in comic book form. The government’s efforts to win public support for its foreign policies are common in American history, but these activities ratchet up when America goes to war. World War I (1914–18 ) was a turning point in the development of government-produced propaganda. During this era, the word itself took on a more sinister meaning. Up until then, public relations, propaganda, and advertising were more or less synonymous and considered benign, but with the onset of the war and the advent of modern warfare, propaganda soon developed into a strategic method of political persuasion based on myths and emotion in the service of mass control. Images were purposefully selected to produce both fear and loyalty, at home and abroad. Slogans and phrases were crafted to be quick and memorable. And comics, with their combination of images, economy of text, and widespread popularity, proved a most useful tool for the military. After Congress declared war and the United States entered World War I in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information to mobilize and sustain public support for the conflict. George Creel, the Kansas City journalist appointed as civilian chair, described the CPI’s mission as coordinating “not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the ‘propagation of faith.’” Under Creel’s energetic leadership, the CPI was determined to infiltrate all communications media in its fight for public opinion. Few social groups were neglected by the CPI’s focused appeal: women, children, workers, ethnic groups, and immigrants were all targeted in a nationally coordinated propaganda campaign. In 1918 the CPI established a Bureau of Cartoons as part of this media saturation effort. The bureau published a bulletin for newspaper and editorial cartoonists listing suggested themes for them to illustrate, such as “Do Your Bit” and other messages that various government departments wished to impart. Few comic strips or cartoons printed in newspapers at this time told continuous stories; they were primarily single-panel vignettes, similar to the editorial cartoons of today. With wild caricatures of Germans, emotional patriotic appeals, and sternly worded slogans, the comics used by the government during World War I mirrored comics’ illustrative cousin, the
SHOW ME THE MONEY
Smash Up At Big Rock (1958) a r t i s t : Ed Dodd w r i t e r : Unknown p u b l i s h e r : U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; Social Security Administration, U.S. Government Printing Office
SHOW ME THE MONEY
A Social Security comic aimed at minority workers has the main characters, migrant workers, discussing Social Security deductions right before a tragic train collision. The survivors worry about finances and medical insurance, but are reassured when they discover they are eligible for benefits. Artist Ed Dodd also created the popular syndicated newspaper comic strip Mark Trail, which had an environmental theme
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