TY - CONF
T1 - An American perspective on a global war
T2 - History in Comics 2022
AU - Ribbens, C R
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Since the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the events and developments that would take place during the following war years have appealed to a variety of comic book and comic strip creators. Not only did the war provide a convenient setting for many adventurous and heroic comic strips, particularly in the United States where a young but thriving comic book industry had emerged at the time, but current events were also exploited by various belligerents, both on the side of the Allies and on the side of the Axis powers, to engage in propaganda in comic book form. In addition, new comic strips appeared, in magazines such as Real Life Comics, which pretended to offer a more documentary view.While in many countries history education in the first years after the war hardly focused on the most recent past, there was a certain need for a historical overview of the war years. The publisher of the American comic book series Classics Illustrated, which attempted to emphasize the educational and serious potential of the medium by publishing famous novels from the canon of Western literature as comics, sought to meet this need by releasing a special volume in 1961 that attempted to outline the war history in less than 100 pages.Although this comic was created in one specific national context, that of the United States, this publication provides an interesting view of a global conflict, one that would moreover be widely disseminated in Western Europe through translations and reprints. This presentation will take a closer look at what perspectives the comic shows on this recent past and what choices were made in highlighting specific topics and actors. The question is not only which war-narrative is visualized here and how this relates to the dominant historical portrayal of this war in the 1960s, but also which visual material (particularly press photos and propaganda posters) served as the basis for the realization of this narrative.
AB - Since the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the events and developments that would take place during the following war years have appealed to a variety of comic book and comic strip creators. Not only did the war provide a convenient setting for many adventurous and heroic comic strips, particularly in the United States where a young but thriving comic book industry had emerged at the time, but current events were also exploited by various belligerents, both on the side of the Allies and on the side of the Axis powers, to engage in propaganda in comic book form. In addition, new comic strips appeared, in magazines such as Real Life Comics, which pretended to offer a more documentary view.While in many countries history education in the first years after the war hardly focused on the most recent past, there was a certain need for a historical overview of the war years. The publisher of the American comic book series Classics Illustrated, which attempted to emphasize the educational and serious potential of the medium by publishing famous novels from the canon of Western literature as comics, sought to meet this need by releasing a special volume in 1961 that attempted to outline the war history in less than 100 pages.Although this comic was created in one specific national context, that of the United States, this publication provides an interesting view of a global conflict, one that would moreover be widely disseminated in Western Europe through translations and reprints. This presentation will take a closer look at what perspectives the comic shows on this recent past and what choices were made in highlighting specific topics and actors. The question is not only which war-narrative is visualized here and how this relates to the dominant historical portrayal of this war in the 1960s, but also which visual material (particularly press photos and propaganda posters) served as the basis for the realization of this narrative.
UR - https://www.historyincomics.org/
M3 - Paper
ER -