Adam Sherif

Comics and the World Wars: A Cultural Record

Comics and the World Wars argues for the use of comics as a primary source by offering a highly original argument that such examples produced during the World Wars act as a cultural record. Recuperating currently unknown or neglected strips, this work demonstrates how these can be used for the study of both world wars. Representing the fruits of over five years team research, this book reveals how sequential illustrated narratives used humour as a coping mechanism and a way to criticise authority, promoted certain forms of behaviour and discouraged others, represented a deliberately inclusive educational strategy for reading wartime content, and became a barometer for contemporary popular thinking.

The Cultural Construction of Women: Pin-Ups, Proactive Women and Representation in Combat

This chapter provides an important record of gendered values at a turning point in history when attitudes towards women and their contribution to society were undergoing fundamental change. Respecting E. H. Carr’s emphasis on rehabilitation of sources (1961), whilst also concurring with Collingwood’s (1935) idea of interpolation, the aim is to compare and contrast cultural record transnationally in a selection of sources that contribute discursively to academic understanding of both women as wartime pin-ups and women at war. The range of potential representation of women varies according to the intended readership of the publication, the point of view adopted and the consequential subjectivity and framing. The types of record discerned are coloured by the discursive contexts within which the comics are evaluated. This chapter carries out examinations focused on the wartime needs of mass circulation daily strips, the roles fulfilled by female pin-up characters in servicemen newspapers and the accuracy or aptness of depictions of women in combat scenarios.

Childhood Memories of the Holocaust and Vichy

This chapter proposes that comic books such as Paroles d’etoiles can enhance our understanding about producing and transmitting knowledge concerning the Holocaust under Vichy. Survivor testimonials and memories of hidden Jewish children are presented within the context of memory studies, connecting this with new cultural history and the widening of sources, discussed here in relation to the problems of representing trauma and memory in Holocaust Studies. Creative synergy between drawings and text provides insights into less tangible aspects of memory and of ordinary children’s experiences, including previously under emphasised personal aspects of their world. This highlights how comics can be used to portray the relationship between iconic symbolism and memory, haunting guilt, feelings of abandonment and identity crises.

The Rise and Fall of the First World War Gullible Worker as a Counterculture

This chapter explores the use of humour as a tool to expose the perceived ‘incorrect’ political thinking, or ‘false consciousness’, of the ‘common worker’ in English-speaking labour movement comic strips. Humour was used both to entertain and to educate. In order to achieve the latter, the comic strips repeated concepts discussed in trade union and socialist newspapers in an easily digestible form. This allows scholars today to triangulate and cross-reference editorial and comic strip newspaper content, as well as other sources (Collingwood: 1935), leading to a greater understanding of mentalite as a record of the Left in the First World War.

Proto Comics as Trench Record: Anti-Heroism, Disparagement Humour and Citizens’ Journalism

The First World War represented the peak of soldier newspaper production, and textual expressions by soldiers in their own trench and troopship newspapers are relatively well known (Fuller: 1990; Kent: 1999; Seal: 1990, 2013a, 2013b; Nelson: 2010, 2011), but the way the men created and used the cartoon multi-panel format is not. Humorous visual self-expression represents a record of satirical social observation from a ‘bottom up’ perspective, with potential to contribute to the trend towards use of a wider range of sources in First World War historiography1

A Proposed Theory and Method for the Incorporation of Comic Books as Primary Sources

Taking as its imperative the democratisation of the discipline and the reconsideration of the nature of evidence, both central tenets of New Cultural History, and in conjunction with an understanding of the task of the historian as derived from the seminal theories of Robin Collingwood and Edward Carr, this proposal determines to argue for, and demonstrate the potential of, the inclusion of comics as record, document and evidence in the process, or discipline, of history. What follows is the presentation of a theory which centres on ideas of subjectivity, narrative and, crucially, subject location or position, to suggest that comic books, here contemporary comic books and strips of the First and Second World Wars, are liable to contain actual historical content. Despite being ostensibly fictional, even works of apparently pure fantasy, these comics are nevertheless likely to hold some mark, some degree, of the ‘real’ within their pages. The second part of this chapter will detail a proposed methodology by which the historian may determine this historical content. The approach, consisting of close reading and cross-reference, derives from a consideration of the deferential nature of truth and historical meaning. The principal influences here are Collingwood and Jacques Derrida. Finally, before its deployment in the case studies which succeed this chapter, a demonstration of the methodology akin to a scientific ‘control’ experiment will be provided. Whereas the case studies will be conducted within the confines of particular historiographical contexts, this control, focused on the first adventures of the All-American Publications (and later DC Comics) character, Wonder Woman, will simply seek to draw out and categorise the record of historical content residing in the comics.

Adjusting to Total War: US Propaganda, Commerce and Audience

On 21 October 1939, Radio Fun began printing a Union Jack on its masthead and at the bottom of the front page, a second banner — previously featuring general jokey catchphrases of the two main characters of the comic strip ‘Big Hearted Arthur’ — now thanked ‘the cheery lads of the army, navy and air force who are keeping Britain’s flag flying’. Its sister paper, Knockout, abandoned its subtitle ‘The Chummy Comic’ for ‘Victory Comic’. These are clear examples of how the Second World War patriotism in comics extended even to children’s publications. Simultaneously adult titles were also taking the matter of comics and patriotism seriously. In particular, communications industry professionals were addressing how such feelings should be harnessed to the good of the war effort, drawing on earlier pre-war studies within the advertising industry on the efficacy of comic strips for promotion.

Case Study: National Socialist Persecution and Genocide in Contemporary U.S. Comic Books

Making use of a tailored methodology for the incorporation of comic books as primary sources for historians, this chapter is a case study focused on National Socialist persecution and genocide in contemporary U.S. public discourse, within the wider context of discussions of Allied ‘bystanders’ to the Holocaust. Analysing a sample of anthology comic book titles published by the Quality Comics Group during the Second World War, techniques of close reading and deconstruction are harnessed to highlight potential historical content. Cross-reference with relevant historiographical detail is the means by which this content is then assessed and categorised. This chapter seeks to contribute to an established historiographical area and also to reflect on how comic books function as evidence and the different types of record they may be said to constitute.

Collective Culture as Dynamic Record: The Daily Worker, 1940–43

In a speech to the House of Commons on 20 August 1940 Winston Churchill emphasised the reality of Total War: ‘The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children.’ As the First World War had shown, the Home Front was crucial to the modern war effort and in the 1939–45 conflict, ‘the engineers’ war’ (Croucher: 1982, ix), manufacturing was essential. In this struggle, fought out on the factory floor, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) made an impact far beyond its small membership in encouraging production and efficiency and discouraging labour conflict. At a time of ‘total war’, the party whose creed was that of ‘producer’ (Morgan et al.: 2003, 144) came into its own, but how did this emerge in its main comic strip?

Haselden as Pioneer: Reflecting or Constructing Home Front Opinion?

In January 1915 the highest-selling daily newspaper in Britain, the Daily Mirror, carried the headline ‘Germany and the Big and Little Willies, who represent Germany, face […] imminent disaster’.1 The Mirror could be confident that its readership would recognise the epithets of the German Kaiser and his son bestowed upon them by the paper’s popular staff cartoonist, William Kerridge Haselden. Haselden’s comic episodes featuring the Kaiser and the Crown Prince eventually reached 159 in total. These were so popular with the Mirror’s audience that they were collected into book form as The Sad Adventures of Big and Little Willie in 1915; such compilations were published by the Mirror during and immediately after the war years. These cartoons found popularity both at home and abroad, and were, said the German Kaiser when interviewed by the Mirror post-war, ‘damnably effective’ when compared to the less subtle forms of German propaganda (Horn: 1976, 306). Indeed their names permeated even the British military. The first tank prototype was nicknamed ‘Little Willie’ in tribute to Haselden’s character, and its successor ‘Big Willie’ saw active service on the front lines.2