A Nebraska Boy’s Comic Strip Narrative of World War II

How might a kid from the rural Midwest imagine war in the 1940s? One unusual source for answering this question is an illustrated history of the Second World War in the Pacific, drawn by a thirteen-year-old Nebraskan, with “Toads” and “Frogs” replacing human fighters (figure 1).

These armed amphibians are not cute, Disney-style characters. Decades before Art Spiegelman’s Maus, these stories were intense and darkly funny. Their deadly adversaries deployed modern weapons and were portrayed in a style familiar to audiences of 1940s war movies and readers of wartime comics.

The artist, James “Jimmy” Kugler, lived in Lexington, Nebraska, a railroad hub and county seat of about 3600, surrounded by crops and feedlots.¹ Jimmy’s father, Otto Carl Kugler, was the son of immigrants, a First World War veteran and typesetter for the Lexington Clipper. His wife Daisy, Jimmy’s mother, was a hairdresser. Jimmy was their only child. Both parents drank heavily and eventually divorced, possibly in 1945 when he was thirteen. Jimmy was an athlete and a good student, regularly picked to draw seasonal blackboard decorations for Halloween, Christmas, or Easter (figure 2).²

But he remembered coming home to an empty house from watching a horror movie, or sitting alone for long hours at his grandmother’s kitchen table drawing.³ He was so frightened to be alone with the wind and trees scratching at the windows, he would grab the kitchen knives and lay them on the table next to his bed.

Jimmy grew into early adolescence against a backdrop of world war, which changed a great deal for Americans at home. German prisoners of war were held in Nebraska, some near Lexington, and Army Air Corps trainers regularly flew overhead.⁴ Of the one hundred two-sided sheets of comics Jimmy drew, over half told his version of the war. Reading these comic strips lets us into the imagination of a white, small-town boy during an epic era of American history.

Figure 1.

“The Famous War of the Frogs and the Toads”

Figure 2.

“Jimmy Kugler (#7) on the Junior HS basketball team (Lexington High School yearbook, The Minuteman, 1948, Dawson County Historical Society)”

Jimmy’s “Famous War of the Frogs and Toads” includes the stories “What Started the War,” “The Fate of a Toad Convoy,” “The Battle of Toadajima,” “The Fall of Eagle Island,” and “The Fall of Frogington.” According to a former classmate, Jimmy and his best friend Jack Kutz invented the “Frogs” before the war and were constantly drawing them in and out of class (figure 3). Their behavior as class clowns, and devotion to the drawings, made them regular targets of discipline.⁵

Figure 3.

“Frogtown”

Jimmy drew his Frogs from the old “funny animal” cartoon tradition. Slender Frogs stand upright and feature distinctively sharp faces and overbites. Their big rounded eyes are typical conventions. He communicated their sinister motives by giving them narrowed eyes and pointy teeth. Occasionally these Frogs (or “Toads” in the war cartoons) were larger, darker, or hairier. Why did Jimmy choose frogs as his villains? It is impossible to know, but he was a hunter and often caught wild creatures; he also kept scrap books of pictures of birds and other animals. The thin angularity of the Frogs resembles the salamanders in illustrations from a book he owned. They also recall Ub Iwerk’s animated “Flip the Frog” character of the 1930s and 1940s. Flip’s stocky, neck-less body, broad mouth, and big round eyes were typical of cartoon frogs. But Flip’s long, thin arms and legs, upright posture, and sharply webbed feet resemble Jimmy’s characters.⁶ Comics were not Jimmy’s only influences. By the 1930s children were direct targets of various marketing campaigns for toys associated directly with radio programs and film. Radio and pulp movie serials, especially The Shadow and The Whistler, were very popular and accessible to everyone. Movies also seem to...