War Comics #1
Dell Publishing Company (January, 1940)
I mean…look at the title. It’s not you can’t tell what we’re about to read. Pretty obvious. It’s still over a year before the US would join the war, and for all I know we only went after the Nazis and their Axis pals because Japan was one of those pals. Still, there was interest, if not sentiment, for what was becoming a second worldwide war, after the “war to end all wars” turned out to not be what was advertised. At the very least it’s a good backdrop for action stories. While Nazi Germany and the then current Japanese regime were the usual targets we forget that Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Croatia (according to Duck Duck Go’s AI search) were also in there. Maybe we remember Italy, but now we get along with all of those nations, especially Japan and Italy. World War II probably the easiest to define “good guys” and “bad guys” of any war, which might we why we go back there so often in fiction and extremist political discourse.










