Chris York has taught English at Pine Technical College in Pine City, Minnesota. He has been an active participant in the Comics and Comic Art Area at the National Popular Culture Association Conference for nearly a decade, and his comics scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art. Rafiel York is a teacher in Jackson, Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Frederic Wertham, Containment, and Comic Books

CHRIS YORK and RAFIEL YORK

PART I : CONTAINING COMMUNISM, CONTROLLING THE ATOM

1. Lights, Camera, Action 101: A Brief Lesson on How to See an Atomic Bomb

NATHAN ATKINSON

2. Decrypting Espionage Comic Books in 1950s America

PETER LEE

3. "He Was a Living Breathing Human Being": Harvey Kurtzman's War Comics and the "Yellow Peril" in 1950s Containment Culture

CHRISTOPHER B. FIELD

4. "I Can Pass Right Through Solid Matter!": How the Flash Upheld American Values While Breaking the Speed Limit

FREDERICK A. WRIGHT

5. Jack Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown: Establishing Order in an Age of Anxiety

PHILLIP PAYNE and PAUL J. SPAETH

6. Red Menace on the Moon: Containment in Space as Depicted in Comics of the 1950s

JOHN DONOVAN

PART II: CONTAINING SEXUALITY IN THE COLD WARBR>
7. Girls Who Sinned in Secret and Paid in Public: Romance Comics, 1949-1954

JEANNE GARDNER

8. Rebellion in Riverdale

RAFIEL YORK

9. The Amazon Mystique: Subverting Cold War Domesticity in Wonder Woman Comics, 1948-1965

RUTH MCCLELLAND-NUGENT

10. The Girls in White: Nurse Images in Early Cold War Era Romance and War Comics

CHRISTOPHER J. HAYTON and SHEILA HAYTON

11. Horror Camp: Homoerotic Subtext in EC Comics

DIANA GREEN

PART III: THE PROBLEM OF CONSENSUS

12. "Dedicated to the Youth of America": Deviant Narration in Crime Does Not Pay

CHRIS YORK

13. MAD's Guest Writers

LAWRENCE RODMAN

14. Beyond the Frontier: Turok, Son of Stone and the Native American in Cold War America

CHRIS YORK

15. East Europeans in the Cold War Comic This Godless Communism

ALEXANDER MAXWELL

16. The Fantastic Four: A Mirror of Cold War America

RAFIEL YORK

About the Contributors
Index