Pulp Empire - The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism

Winner of the Popular Culture Association's Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular or American Culture In the 1940s and -50s, comic books were some of the most popular-and most unfiltered-entertainment in the United States. Publishers sold hundreds of millions of copies a year of violent, racist, and luridly sexual comics to Americans of all ages until a 1954 Senate investigation led to a censorship code that nearly destroyed the industry. But this was far from the first time the US government actively involved itself with comics-it was simply the most dramatic manifestation of a long, strange relationship between high-level policy makers and a medium that even artists and writers often dismissed as a creative sewer. In Pulp Empire, Paul S. Hirsch uncovers the gripping untold story of how the US government both attacked and appropriated comic books to help wage World War II and the Cold War, promote official-and clandestine-foreign policy and deflect global critiques of Amer