Harshing my Squee

[bcholmes]

So one of the several things I've been toying with on my vacation is comics-related stuff. At one point, I started trying to draw some stuff in a very Kirby-esque style, and that suddenly got me interested in playing around with old WWII heroes, and one thing lead to another, and I was toying with Nedor and other public domain heroes.

A lot of people know this, but there are a bunch of old World War II era comics that have fallen into the public domain for various reasons. Nedor, Fox, and a bunch of other publishers have a really rich set of old characters that, basically, anyone can pick up and run with because the characters are in the public domain. Alan Moore used the Nedor characters in his Tom Strong comic (and, later, the Terra Obscura spin-off). Another company did something similar in a book called Project Superpowers (which I haven't read).

There are blogs that reproduce full pages of some of these old comics. Another interesting site is a digital archive of dozens of scanned comics.

And some times you see odd elements of the war time era. Like, the comics with slogans across the bottom border of the pages: "Buy war bonds!" "Don't spread rumours!" "Save your fats, waste paper and old rubber for the war effort!"

But, holy fuck, the racism. Especially in the depictions of the Japanese.

Comments

[trinker]

Ah, yes. The reason why I can't be completely enthusiastic about "vintage". (B tried to convince me that the Koreans had it far worse as far as targeted racism. I *still* have no idea where he got such a crazy idea.)