Comic book origin in the Axis

by BigMicrowave69

So American comic books originally showed superhero’s taking down Hitler and the Axis. So did Germany, Japan or Italy have their own comics/cartoons depicting people taking down the allies?

ElMejorPinguino

I've answered that for Germany here before (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ikaph/during_the_ww2_era_the_us_had_comic_book/) and also for the Soviet Union while we're at it (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fjjz0i/did_the_soviet_union_have_superhero_comics_andor/).

The tl;dr answer of that is "no, because comics weren't a thing in Germany", but it's a pretty short answer anyway. :)

As for Italy, comics did play a propaganda role in the World War... but in the first one. According to Roberto Bianchi of the University of Florence: ^1

Later, in Benito Mussolini’s (1883-1945) Italy, the Great War, presented as the spark that had kindled the fascist revolution, was rarely featured in comic books dealing with major episodes of national history and in periodicals for young readers, whose “golden age” was the 1930s.

You may also want to check out Kurt Caesar (see e.g. https://www.lambiek.net/artists/c/caesar_kurt.htm) who drew the possibly most famous Italian war cartoon of the 1930s - but while it was fascist propaganda, it wasn't really anti-allies particularly, so it doesn't count towards your question. Between the wars, comics were big in Italy - mostly American ones, so the catholic church tried to intervene with their own comics as well, and in 1938, Mussolini's government banned all foreign comics with the exception of Mickey Mouse. Still, this didn't evolve into cartoons taking down the allies, as you asked.

Besides that, it's important to acknowledge that superheroes were still a very American thing, and many of them were created by Jewish authors - not exactly popular with the opposition.

Japanese war-era comics aren't part of my forte, so I'll have to defer that to others. And Italian isn't a language I can read fluently, so I'm relying more on English-language sources than usual.

^1: Bianchi, Roberto: War and Comics (Italy), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2015-12-15. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10784.