In the wake of the atomic bombings which effectively ended World War II, George Orwell warned in the October 19, 1945 Tribune, of a "peace that is no peace," a state which Orwell called a "cold war." Orwell's warning was right, for a number of reasons, ranging from Vladimir Lenin's fear of a "Capitalistic encirclement" of his young government to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 to the disputes over the post war Tehran and Yalta conferences. The Soviets and their allies were engaged in an ongoing political conflict with the West, which often diverged into proxy wars, and led to a nuclear arms race which left the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. This was, in a nutshell, the "Cold War."
The Great Communist Conspiracy
One of the earliest fears of the Cold War was that spies from the Soviet Union would come to the United States, infiltrate those sacred institutions which were the backbone of the American way and somehow use this new advantage to brainwash average folk, turning them into evil Communists. What was perhaps the first comic book to either mirror or launch this conspiracy theory came from an unlikely source: the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul Minnesota.
Father Louis Gales founded the Catechetical Guild Educational Society in 1942 as a means of publishing Catholic comic books. Gales was a wise observer of the mass media and its impact on children. He knew that the popularity of comic books was something which the Church could utilize to effectively spread its dogma among children. The Guild's first series, Topix, was filled with religious allegory and is primarily remembered as the series which gave Peanuts' creator George Schulz his first professional work in comics (as a letterer).
Is This Tomorrow
In 1947, the Guild published the "educational comic" Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism! In this vividly lurid work, the Guild gave its young readers a 48 page story where Communists infiltrate nearly every aspect of America, including subverting the Speaker of the House, before assassinating both the President and Vice-President. At the climax of the melodrama, the evil Communists smash a statue of the Virgin Mary with an axe causing a shaken father to surrender his son to the red menace.
Is This Tomorrow had a cover price of ten cents. It was distributed (either sold or given away) to an estimated four million readers. It would not be much of a stretch to argue that if Is This Tomorrow was not the seed of the communist conspiracy theories which blossomed in the 1950s, it was certainly outstanding fertilizer. Is This Tomorrow was followed by an equally lurid anti-Communist follow-up later in 1947 entitled Blood is the Harvest.
Atomic Age Combat
Other small presses put out anti-Communist comics through the rest of the Cold War. Titles included Vital Publications,' America Menaced in 1950, St. John Publishing's Atomic Age Combat, and ACE periodical's Atomic War! Even the federal government got involved, publishing such tracts as Komrad Ivan. Komrad Ivan was designed to teach American GIs at Fort Benning in Georgia what they needed to know about their potential Cold War opponent from the Soviet Union.
The mainstream publishers turned to war comics during this time as both DC and Timely produced such titles as Battle Action, Our Army At War, and Star Spangled War Stories. But it was another small publisher, EC Comics, who was publishing the best war comics with titles such as Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales. Yet the EC books lacked the hard core propagandizing seen in the other publishers.
It would be Timely/Marvel who would combine the war hero and the super hero into the ultimate comics cold-warrior.
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