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Author, film researcher and member of the Swedish Military History Commission.

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Third Reich Comics in Swedish Book

A page about a Afrika Korps soldier's survival ordeal in the desert from the Third Reich comic book "Bilderbogen vom Kriege".

I had no idea there were comics in the Third Reich until I found Swedish comics historian Fredrik Strömberg's book Comic Art Propaganda. Nor did I know that the SS in its journal Das Schwarze Korps attacked Superman in 1940.

In Comic Art Propaganda you will find some fantastic images from the Third Reich comic book Bilderbogen vom Kriege (Picture Stories from the War) and the Superman article in Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps) and many, many examples of comic art used as propaganda until the present day. The author Fredrik Strömberg has put together an impressive collection, albeit not only related to war and sometimes he uses the term propaganda a bit too generously in my opinion.

Strömberg provides several gems of information about American comics in WWII and during the classic Cold War period. Sadly, there is little in his book about Soviet and Russian comic art. Thus the general impression of the Cold War era that one gets is rather one-sided (very common, but I do not think that is a good excuse). I have in my collection even a quite recent Russian election poster using comic art.

There is a German website with some other samples from Bilderbogen vom Kriege.


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