Comic books and the American military would seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. During World War II, millions of servicemen carried Superman and Batman with them; those same characters then encouraged readers, military and civilian to buy war bonds and stamps to support the war effort. The US government’s Writers War Board used comics to spread pro-war propaganda. Even when what President Eisenhower termed “the Great Crusade” ended, American comics continued a partnership with the military. The first training manual for the M-16 rifle was a comic book produced by comics great Will Eisner.
Nevertheless, the relationship between comics and the US military has not always been amicable. Signs of discord first appeared during World War II in the work of future Pulitzer Prize winner Bill Mauldin. Mauldin served in Europe, contributing cartoons to 45th Division News and the U.S. Army’s Stars and Stripes. Although many soldiers appreciated Mauldin’s down-to-earth approach that deglamorized war, General George S. Patton did not. Patton viewed Mauldin’s cartoons of scruffy, disheveled soldiers as a disgrace to the armed forces. Patton told Troy Middleton, the commanding officer of the 45th Division, “Get rid of Mauldin and his cartoons.” Mauldin’s job was saved when Middleton demanded a written order to that effect and Patton backed down.
In February 1945, General Patton made another attempt to force Mauldin out. Before a meeting between the two could be arranged, Patton announced, “If that little son of a bitch [Mauldin] sets foot in Third Army, I’ll throw his ass in jail.” But a meeting was held, and Mauldin asserted that his cartoons allowed soldiers to harmlessly blow off steam. Plus, it was beneficial for them to see their struggles reflected in print. Ol’ “Blood and Guts” was unconvinced. It was only through the intervention of General Eisenhower that Mauldin stayed on at Stars and Stripes. Eisenhower circulated a letter to officers that they were “not to interfere” with “such things as Mauldin’s cartoons…”
Even the fictional Superman’s full-throated endorsement of the war didn’t prevent him from receiving unwanted scrutiny from the Army. When the Superman comic strip used the term “cyclotron”, the Defense Department was perturbed. The cyclotron, or “atom smasher”, was a key part of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. Military intelligence wondered if Alvin Schwartz, the writer of the comic strip, was receiving intelligence leaks. They shouldn’t have worried; later, Schwartz revealed that he recalled reading the story about the atom smasher from an old issue of Popular Mechanics. Other Superman stories that dealt with atomic weapons were delayed until the end of World War II due to similar security concerns.
The Korean War was the sight of the most pitched battle between the US military and comic books. The War, or “police action”, as President Truman called it, reinvigorated the war genre in comics. However, unlike the comics that proliferated during World War II, these comics had little to offer as pro-war propaganda. Most were grim, unsentimental looks at war. Stateside, the Cincinnati Committee on the Evaluation of Comic Books, a group that reviewed comics for ostensible wholesomeness, worried about the war comics. They said that such comics “could be construed as trying to make Americans want to pull out of the war and to discourage young men from enlisting.”
The military was also concerned about the tone of some of the war comics. EC Comics’ war stories in Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales were the brainchild of writer, artist, and editor Harvey Kurtzman. Kurtzman put down jingoistic war comics, saying that they were “feeding this crap to the children that soldiers spend their time merrily killing little buck-toothed yellow men with the butt of a rifle.” An example of what Kurtzman was talking about can be seen in the pages of publisher Ziff-Davis’ G.I. Joe. The covers of that series feature beaming American soldiers, sometimes with a puppy, mowing down inhuman-looking Asian communists.
Although Kurtzman’s comics never attacked the premise behind the Korean War, their sheer, unrelentingly fatalistic tone attracted the attention of U.S. Army intelligence. An FBI report determined that “some of the material is detrimental to the morale of combat soldiers and emphasizes the horrors, hardships, and futility of war.” The report continued that the FBI considered “these publications subversive because they tend to discredit the army and undermine troop morale…” The FBI was encouraged to investigate EC Comics as to whether these comics were seditious, which they did, although the investigation was terminated when the Justice Department determined that “prosecution under the sedition statute is not warranted.” Kurtzman and EC publisher Bill Gaines almost joined cartoonist Art Young in being prosecuted for sedition.
The U.S. Navy joined the Army in their concern over potentially demoralizing comics. 12th District Navy Intelligence barred sailors from seven titles condemned as “designed to undermine morale”. A Navy spokesman cited as an example a war comic that includes a scene of a soldier on gravedigging duty saying, “All I’ve done since I’m out here in Korea is burying my buddies.” His compatriot replies, “Better than being shot at the front.” A magazine dealer was quoted as saying that the Navy requested a halt of “crime or war” comics being sent to sailors. The Socialist Workers Party, who opposed the war in Korea, crowed about the incident in their newspaper, the Militant.
Even comics designed to help the military’s reputation were the victims of friendly fire from higher-ups. The comic character Sad Sack, which originated in Yank in 1942, was enlisted to promote reenlistment in the comic Sad Sack Goes Home, a collaboration between Harvey Comics and the U.S. Army. The result was a perfect disaster, caused primarily by the U.S. Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana.
Capehart was a devoted red-baiter who saw something distinctly pink in Sad Sack Goes Home. Capehart declared that the comic looked “like Socialistic propaganda aimed at discrediting American industry.” Capehart’s criticism was based on the over-the-top awful picture the comic presented of civilian life. Sad Sack finds it difficult to land a job, and when he does, high taxes have dropped his take-home pay to a nickel. When he gives the nickel to a homeless person, the coin turns out to be counterfeit. Duly chastened by Senator Capehart, the Pentagon burned their remaining stock of Sad Sack Goes Home. The cost of the comics to US taxpayers was just over $17k – money gone up in smoke.
Actual socialists thought the whole incident was hilarious. In Labor Action, the Workers Party joked that Senator Capehart had uncovered a “plot to undermine the American Way of Life”. The aforementioned Militant laughed at Sad Sack, who had “turned out to be a socialist in disguise”. Turning serious, the publication argued that it was the right-wing policies of Capehart and company that had “all of us Sad Sacks so worried”. Although it would have made for great publicity, neither group offered the comic character an honorary membership.
The American war in Vietnam was difficult for comic book publishers to navigate. A 1966 Newsweek article wrote that comic companies were having “the same kind of trouble holding reader support for their war that the Administration is having rallying support for the real war.” Of publishers that did address the war, second-stringer Charlton Comics was the most hawkish. One Charlton story in Fightin’ Army ended with this chilling monologue: “The fools back home who burn draft cards or march in peace demonstrations are helping the Viet Cong. They are his enemies and he knows it now.”
Blazing Combat, a black-and-white magazine from Warren Publishing, took a different track. The title had four stories set in Vietnam, with the same feel as the earlier downbeat war stories from EC Comics. Warren’s black-and-white horror magazine Creepy was hugely successful, so hopes were high that Blazing Combat could match that success. The reception to the book’s critical depiction of the ongoing Vietnam War would throw a monkey wrench into those plans.
Publisher Jim Warren was an odd anti-war voice. “When Korea broke out,” he recalled, “I broke my mother’s heart and enlisted…By God I was gonna get some war stories of my own.” A training injury ended his dreams of wartime heroics. He said of the Vietnam War, “I was against the war in Vietnam because I’ve never believed in limited war.” Archie Goodwin, who wrote almost all of the title’s stories, had a more conventional view. He said that the US “shouldn’t have been there” in Vietnam at all.
The first Blazing Combat story about the war, “Viet-Cong”, was hardly a flag-waving tale, given that it included a scene of a South Vietnamese soldier torturing a prisoner. But it was the second issue, “Landscape”, that caused a host of problems. The story appeared to show a Vietnamese peasant being killed by South Vietnamese troops, America’s allies, while they pursued the forces of the National Liberation Front. The title was banned from sale on military bases, and distributors, many of whom were members of the American Legion, treated the book like it was radioactive.
Warren, however, had so much faith in Blazing Combat that he was prepared to continue publishing it even if he lost $2k an issue. But when losses totaled $4k to produce just one issue, he was forced to surrender and cancel the title after four issues. For the rest of the war, there would be no comics critical of the war. Warren called the actions of the military and the distributors “Censorship of the worst kind.”
In 1987, Eclipse Comics, in partnership with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, published Real War Stories. Unlike EC’s war comics, these were stories specifically designed to discourage enlistment in the armed forces. Contributor Alan Moore described the series as offering a critique of “war mongering aspects” of other war comics. These stories attacked war and militarism from seemingly every angle, including those set during Vietnam and one exposing the brutal hazing in the U.S. Navy. This latter example led to a legal assault from the Department of Defense.
One aspect of hazing in the Navy shown was the practice of “greasing”, which is rape via the barrel of an M-3 submachine gun, or “grease gun”. The Defense Department denied that greasing was practiced in the Navy and filed a lawsuit against Eclipse and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors in an attempt to stop the publication of Real War Stories. The suit failed when the Navy’s own records showed that greasing did, in fact, occur. Real War Stories only lasted two issues, and although the second interprets Major General Smedley Butler’s famous “War is a Racket“, it’s generally considered a step down from the first.
In the nearly 40 years since the Real War Stories incident, there has been a ceasefire between comics and the military. Did comics stop taking shots at the military or war? Not hardly – even during the seemingly never-ending War on Terror. Titles like Army @ Love and Special Forces are a testament to that. Even Garth Ennis’ Punisher stories have assailed the war profiteering of defense contractors and the arms industry. Yet the US military raised no concerns over these titles. Perhaps they realized that there is no anti-war comic book, no matter how well written, that will put an end to war. Only the people of the world working against war—and the causes of war—can do that.