Description: The story of how the comic book industry anticipated the fight against fascism and helped sustain America's war effort
Brief description: James J. Kimble is associate professor of communication and the arts at Seton Hall University, is author of Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda and Prairie Forge: The Extraordinary Story of the Nebraska Scrap Metal Drive of World War II, as well as writer and co-producer of the feature documentary Scrappers: How the Heartland Won World War II.
Review Quotes: The 10 Cent War revisits the iconic conventions of the World War II comic book--the pin-up girl heroine, the demonized Japanese antagonist, and the titular male superhero and his boyish-but-stalwart sidekick--and demonstrates that everything we think we already know about Golden Age comics needs reassessment. The contributing scholars provide fascinating close-readings of both famous and obscure works, placing them in historical context and showing that these 'funnybooks' still have much to teach us about war, propaganda, and race and gender relations that remains relevant to our own time.--Marc DiPaolo, author of War, Politics, and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film