Atomic Comics: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World

Introduction

1 A t 10:45 a.m. on August 6, 1945, President Harry S Truman revealed to the world that the Allies had dropped a new type of weapon on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. “It is an atomic bomb,” the president said. “It is the harnessing of the basic power of the universe.” Within three weeks, the editors of Pocket Books had compiled and published a slim volume that reflected the nation’s shocked response, and The Atomic Age Opens quickly disappeared from bookstore shelves. As Pocket Books had guessed, the public desperately wanted to comprehend the meaning of the fissioned atom. Atomic energy is so powerful, the editors said, that it could never be left solely to scientific experts or private development by American corporations. Instead, “It belongs to the people. The people must understand it.”1 From August 6, 1945, to the present day, “the people”—the ultimate source of authority under the American political experiment—have struggled mightily to comprehend the meaning of Harry Truman’s announcement. As writer Laura Fermi observed twelve years later, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy were introduced to the world on the very same day, and for the majority of citizens, the two remained synonymous.2 For the next seven decades, voices from every walk of life tried to untangle this nuclear weapons/nuclear energy overlap. Scientists , politicians, newspaper columnists, science writers, poets, artists , filmmakers, physicians, photographers, sculptors, psychologists, musicians (from country-and-western singers to opera librettists), just to name a few, have all had their say. Each, in his or her own way, has tried to enlighten the American people as to the long-term significance of the fissioned atom. Although the literature on this subject is enormous, historians have generally overlooked another important I N T R O D U C T I O N 2 ^ AT O M I C C O M I C S medium that helped translate the atomic world for “the people”: cartoons , especially newspaper comic strips and the lowly comic book. With circulation figures reaching into the millions, cartoonists played a major role in forging the nation’s atomic awareness for over three generations. Noted cartoon expert Bill Blackbeard has defined the comic strip as “a serially published, episodic, open-ended dramatic narrative or a series of linked anecdotes about recurrent, identified characters, told in successive drawings regularly enclosing ballooned dialogue or its equivalent and minimized text.” Although Blackbeard’s definition covers the waterfront, it somehow slights the overall power of the comics medium. This power reaches well beyond realistic art (Mickey Mouse looks nothing like a real mouse) to somehow capture the imagination of the viewer. Famed comix artist Robert Crumb once gently derided his craft as “only lines on paper,” but in the hands of skilled cartoonists , this magic blend of picture-and-text can speak to untold audiences . “Comics are to art what Yiddish is to language,” cartoonist Art Spiegelman once observed: “it is the vernacular language of a certain kind.”3 From the beginning, the classic newspaper comic strips commanded a fiercely loyal following. When President Woodrow Wilson opened his newspaper in 1915, he turned first to Krazy Kat; in the 1940s, poet Dorothy Parker did the same for Barnaby; so, too, did thousands of Americans start the day with Calvin and Hobbes during the 1990s. This loyalty and affection, when combined with massive circulation figures, allowed the comics to shape public opinion in ways that can hardly be imagined.4 There is no comparable definition of the comic book that I am aware of—outside of a general classification as “sequential art”—but if there were, it would have to emphasize the “collective nature” of the genre. This fact means that the creation of comic books would be vastly different from newspaper comic strips, which are usually produced by one or two individuals. (Charles Schultz, for example, wrote every single newspaper Peanuts strip by himself.) Comic books, on the other hand, became a communal enterprise, involving editors, writers , pencillers, inkers, letterers, and colorists. A number of early comic book stories emerged from semianonymous industry “bullpens,” or from such venues as the famed Eisner/Iger comic studio in New York I N T R O D U C T I O N ^ 3 City. In a sense, putting together a successful comic book resembles the creation of a musical: both rely on the talents of many...