Prop-up art

It’s nice to think that most of the propaganda put out there in the last century has spun from totalitarian regimes—happy, proud Nazis living in a righteous comic-book world. But then, what’s Captain America doing in Iraq? Fredrik Strömberg’s gorgeously produced Comic Art Propaganda (St. Martin’s, $19.99) looks through world history and finds the beautiful and bizarre use of comics to push an agenda (like the Catechetical Guild’s 1950 red-scare comic, Is This Tomorrow?).

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