Atomic Comics: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World

Conclusion

133 A lthough no artistic medium—film, art, fiction, song, theater, sculpture, history, photography, or opera—can ever encompass the entirety of the story of atomic energy, for over seven decades the world’s cartoonists have contributed more than their share to public discourse. Recall Robert Crumb’s gentle dismissal of his craft as “only lines on paper.” Yet this very simplicity gave the cartoonists their power.1 The vast implications that flowed from the emergence of the subatomic world proved so complex that Americans needed a new way to comprehend the incomprehensible. Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon introduced millions of readers to the ideas of endless power sources, horrific weapons, dangerous rays, and the need to keep both from the hands of evildoers. Atom Blake the Boy Wizard, Spacehawk, TNT Todd, Superman, and the Human Torch continued the theme during the World War II years. In August of 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki emerged as a terrible embodiment of these predictions. The subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb and the possibility of destroying life on earth—concepts too deep for words and well beyond human comprehension—made the pictorial representation of the atomic era even more necessary. The powerful cartoons of David Low, D. R. Fitzpatrick , Leslie G. Illingworth, Pat Oliphant, and (especially) Herblock provided essential frames of reference for their times. During the cultural revolt of the 1960s/70s, the underground artists inaugurated a wholesale anti-nuclear critique that mainstream cartoonists helped redirect into millions of households during the Reagan years. The range and intensity of nuclear-themed graphic art of that period is not likely to be duplicated. All cartoons and comics, of course, are embedded in the larger C O N C L U S I O N 134 ^ AT O M I C C O M I C S culture. Every cartoonist clearly reflects the times in which he or she draws. The General Electric and General Dynamics pro-nuclear comic books of the 1950s were echoed by such government-sponsored films as Atomic Energy as a Force of Good (1955) and Plowshare (1961). The underground comix emerged as part of the “Beatnik” counterculture of the West Coast. The anti-nuclear graphic novels of the Reagan years were complemented by the satirical Cold War film The Atomic Café (1982) as well as the profound 1983 Roman Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,” which denounced America’s nuclear policy in the strongest terms: “Jesus must weep at such a world.” This often-overlooked pastoral letter argued that the United States had never fully accepted its share of responsibility for the wartime use of the atomic bombs. The bishops said that the nation must express “profound sorrow” over the bombings (not exactly an apology) before it could begin to see its way toward repudiating such weapons.2 The shifting atomic ground from 1929 to the present plus the ambiguous nature of popular culture makes it a challenge to evaluate the cartoonists’ precise role in shaping the popular understanding of the fissioned atom. Even the cartoonists themselves have been hesitant to make pronouncements. Leonard Rifas remains uncertain as to the impact of his classic All-Atomic Comics. Recalling the work of the early underground artists, Robert Crumb similarly doubted that they had much effect on the nation as a whole. “Nobody’s ever done a comic that changed the world,” he said. “That’s for sure.”3 In a sense, Crumb is correct. But if no single cartoon or comic book has that power, how about an entire corpus? There is an old Russian proverb that quantity has a quality all its own. Over the last seven decades, comic artists and writers have produced billions of nuclear-themed cover art, splash panels, and interior stories. Such numbers cannot be discounted. The cartoonists were never of a single mind, of course, and their messages shifted dramatically over time. For obvious reasons, the dominant theme driving atomic comics has revolved around the terrible truth of atomic weapons. Any discussion of the “positive” side of the atomic equation—nuclear power and nuclear medicine—pales by comparison . Moreover, neither of these themes had any dramatic cachet. Aside from Andy’s Atomic Adventures I could find only one comic book C O N C L U S I O N ^ 135 adventure tale that treated nuclear medicine, the simply dreadful Cancerman (Edge 1994). Cancerman...