lame the comic book. Cheap and transportable, a trove of infantile fantasy and psychosexual Pop Art, often spiced with egregious stereotypes and nativist aggression, this humble medium was for a time the United States’ most ubiquitous cultural ambassador. Such is the thesis of Paul S. Hirsch’s Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, an engaging account of the ways in which comics variously served or confounded official interests.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
PULP EMPIRE: THE SECRET HISTORY OF COMIC BOOK IMPERIALISM
By Paul S. Hirsch
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Vividly illustrated and enjoyably hyperbolic, Pulp Empire tells its tale as a kind of horror comic. Recounting the emergence of comic books during the Depression, Hirsch details how the medium was drafted during World War II to play its own modest part in defeating the Axis, then cues the scary music: Having discharged their patriotic chore and more popular than ever, comic books “showed the world that American society was racist, gruesomely violent, and soaked in sex,” creating what, in 1952, the Daily Worker excoriated as a “Billion Dollar Industry Glorifying Brutality.” That industry would go through many iterations but only truly recovered from the ensuing moral panic and backlash in the 1960s, when Marvel Comics reshaped its product into a more sophisticated form, with a relatively mature readership that was solidified by the dark superhero “graphic novels” of the 1980s to provide the template for the movie blockbusters of the 21st century.
