Comic Book Apocalypse!: The Death of Pre-Code Comics and Why It Happened, 1940–1955

Pop culture historian Hogan (Invasion USA) offers an eye-opening overview of American comic books during WWII and the postwar period, before the U.S. government established the Comics Code Authority, a censorship board designed to rein in the medium’s “excesses.” Featuring panels and covers from across the era’s popular genres—superheroes, westerns, and noirs—Hogan shows how the art form flourished as a hyperactive, aggressive, and subversive subcurrent of American culture. Contemporary readers inured to violence in films and TV may well find themselves shocked by the intensity of pre-Code comics: there are shootings, strangulations, and suggestions of sexual assault; severed heads drip with blood; a cover of a comic titled Crime Does Not Pay shows a criminal shoving a woman’s head onto a lit stovetop. Hogan’s commentary offers fascinating reflections on how such violence and gore tied into the era’s mainstream sentiments (a Stan Lee character punching Hitler is featured, although not Captain America; it turns out Lee had more than one character take a swing at the Führer). The author also points to more obscure social shifts, noting that “the rate of single white motherhood more than doubled during 1941–53,” a fact attested to by the proliferation of the light-romance genre of “love comics.” The result is not only a lavish appreciation of pre-Code comics, but an endlessly fascinating deep dive into wartime and postwar culture. (Sept.)