Comics for Film, Games, and Animation

CHAPTER 9

Punching Hitler

The Comics Go to War. 1941–1945

The economic climate of the 1930s that created the Great Depression and fermented a desire within the American populace to escape into the four-color displays of derring-do in the comics also created super-villains that were all too real. Superman’s first foe, the Ultra-Humanite had nothing on the villains that would bring the world to its knees and imbue the American public with a patriotism never before seen.

Seizing upon the ripple effect wrought by the Great Depression, totalitarian regimes rose throughout Europe as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis unleashed a reign of terror and atrocity that led to the defining conflict of the first half of the 20th century: World War II.

The pre-war ...