The Comic Book Era!

It's hard to separate our perceptions of classic comic heroes with the polished movie icons they've become today. While some consider this franchise trite and derivative, one cannot deny they are an accepted cultural staple.
I find this perception interesting in comparison to the view of comic books in the 40s-60s as illiterate pulp.
On the course resource page, I read some Captain America and Donald Duck.
Captain America is very pro-military, with simple good/evil stories often centered around military scenes and fighting Nazis or Japanese.
The Ringmaster of Death was interesting to me because it contained characters and references to the military throughout while being a story about a circus! Some generals attend, and the evil ringmaster hatches a plan to murder one of them. His "wheel of death" in which he chooses his targets has a swastika in the middle even though the character isn't explicitly stated to be a Nazi and it never comes up again. I think the reason for this is an association with Nazism is an easy way to say "villain" or emphasize that point.

The Donald Duck comics were a fun adventure. I read The Secret of Atlantis. It started off as a squabble between Donald and Scrooge about a debt, turned into a wild goose chase for a lost coin, and ended up with the whole Duck gang boogieing in Atlantis with mer-people. The writing was surprising interesting and innovative, especially compared to the Captain America. The story was self-contained in a way unique to this medium.

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