When Captain Marvel fought antisemitism

What’s the best way to combat hatred? In the 1940s in America the country’s top cartoonists joined forces to battle antisemitism.

It was the brainchild of advertising executive Richard J Rothschild, backed by the American Jewish Committee. Anti Jewish sentiment was on the rise in an isolationist United States of America. Prominent figures like industrialist Henry Ford were espousing the toxic propaganda screed The Protocols of the Elders Of Zion and US-based Nazis were a part of the country’s political makeup during the war. Rothschild’s aim was to call out the bigots as being worse than racists, dubbing them publically as figures who were actually against US democracy publicly.

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A set of six one-panel cartoons created back in 1944 was picked up and run in 478 US newspapers, reaching an audience of 1.3 million readers. Artists and cartoonists including Captain Marvel artist Mac Raboy and MAD cartoonist Dave Berg took part, as did multiple Pulitzer Prize winners Bill Mauldin and Vaughn Shoemaker; New Yorker cartoonists Carl Rose, Mischa Richter, and Frank Hanley; sports cartoonist Willard Mullin and Eric Godal, who escaped from Nazi Germany and became a leading cartoonist in the American press.

With antisemitism again showing its ugly face in the US, it was sadly appropriate for US comic book publisher Dark Horse, best known for titles like Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Frank Miller’s Sin City and 300, to publish Craig Yoe and Holocaust historian Rafael Medoff’s Cartoonists Against Racism: The Secret Jewish War on Bigotry .