Authors

Discussion

Despite a virtual absence of comics in Stalinist Poland, in the early 1950s the medium became a byword for the imperialist threat. According to journalists, intellectuals, and anti-imperialist campaigners of the time, that threat was said to lurk on the pages of American publications, corrupting the youth and educating them into violence. Literary historians tend to read these contributions as an offshoot of the anti-imperialist campaign that swept across the socialist bloc in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This paper argues that it was more than that: it marked Poland’s participation in a wider transnational community. Like other anti-comics campaigners across the world, Polish commentators joined in in a global struggle in the defence of childhood, highbrow culture, and peace. Their contributions attested not only to the porousness of the Iron Curtain but also showed that the interests of Polish commentators were often aligned with those of their counterparts in the non-socialist world. By following developments in the West, for example the anti-comics campaign led by American psychiatrists like Fredric Wertham, Polish commentators, too, participated in the wider global discussion about comics.