ABSTRACT
Since the First World War, comics have been part of psychological warfare, and even children’s comics were enlisted in the propaganda war against the enemy. This chapter will study the situation in Sweden during the Second World War, when the country was neutral, and violence had become a natural and ever-growing part of such comics. In the 1930s American comics had become an important part of the Swedish dailies and weeklies, but homegrown Swedish comics were still important for readers. Popular Swedish comics with a long national tradition presented a combination of entertainment and propaganda, that seesawed between the justification of Sweden’s neutral politics and a growing pro-war propaganda related to the Western powers. During the war more and more American comics, produced or initiated by the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Writers’ War Board (WWB), came to Sweden, spreading American values, encouraging abhorrence of fascism and Nazism and promoting the achievements of the allies in the anti-Hitler-coalition. As it was on the battlefields, violence was a growing part of these comics. American comics influenced numerous readers in Sweden towards democratic values by the questionable use of visual violence and by introducing racial stereotypes, thereby constructing a justification for race-based hatred of other nations. By the end of the war we can find in Swedish media more openness to publish American propaganda comics, but even in the Swedish comics the heroes fought on the side of the Anti-Hitler-coalition and did so with the same violence as in most of the American comic books of the time.
