Anti-War

Battlefield heroics and the drama of war were staple subjects for comic books throughout the 20th century. During World War II, American comics fought the war inside their pages, pitting heroes against the Nazi war machine and caricatured Japanese antagonists. However, these straightforward patriotic depictions of combat as a theater where good triumphs over evil were occasionally challenged in the decades after the war. The short lived 1950s anti-war comic Never Again approached combat stories with the aim of showing the utter futility of war. While not strictly anti-war. The ‘Nam (1986) portrayed the events of the Vietnam conflict in a realistic fashion, stretching its narrative to cover the Vietnamese civilian perspective, the war at home, and the mental cost of combat. As the Cold War came to an end, the rise of regional conflicts and more critical perspectives on past conflicts shed light on the suffering of the civilians caught in war zones and the toll on those called to serve their countries. Often notably intertwined with concepts of trauma and recovery, anti-war comics approached conflicts from the viewpoint of those caught up in forces beyond their control. The comics presented here are based around the themes of anti-war sentiment and the brutality of modern conflict from creators outside of the United States, showing both the universality of the human experience during war and the ability of the medium to tell deeply impactful stories.