Comic Cuts — 22 May 2026

I'm still working on PIRATES!, the history of the independent publishers of the post-WWII decade, and making some good progress. I mentioned last week that this is based on some articles I wrote back in the late 1990s and then dipped into again during the COVID lock-downs that I've picked up again while I'm waiting on some decisions to be made on some other books I want to do. (And, I should add, that some progress has been made in that direction, too.)

So... PIRATES!, which might not be the final title, but it's something I can use while I'm chatting here. I've had to spend some time getting a great deal of information into some kind of logical order. The articles written back in 1995-97 period are all over the place because they appeared in a monthly magazine and had to be complete in themselves so that casual buyers could read them; that meant a certain amount of repeated information, everything broken down into small parts, and no reference back to earlier articles that were now no longer available (we didn't do back issues).

A for instance: one of the most important aspects of WWII to the comic industry was paper rationing. In the articles I'd mentioned this, but fleetingly due to space, before going into it with a little more detail about eight episodes in. Now, for a book it makes more sense to move that to the front. However, there are a whole bunch of things that need to be introduced up front that will be important as the book progresses, including a brief look at American comic books, a brief look at how American comic books first came to the UK, a brief look at the early months of World War II and how that caused huge changes, not just how we lost our main source of paper but how a huge part of the audience for comics had to be evacuated from London and elsewhere.

Trying to weave all these elements together, as well as incorporating some more recent research, took a couple of days until I was happy with it. Then it was back into the comics themselves ... and some interesting stories are turning up that may or may not reach the final edit. For instance, there was a British publisher who appears to have been leading a double life, living with two different women who both claimed to be his wife. It's possible that they only found out about each other when the publisher — at that time a bookseller — went to prison for selling a book that was deemed obscene.

Another publisher that caught my eye was the American Joshua B. Powers, who published a comic reprinting newspaper strips for distribution in the UK before the war. Apart from information being a bit scarce on this guy, one thing that did turn up time and again was that he worked for the CIA. But was it in the 1930s or the 1950s ... that depended on which bit of the internet you believed. 

I don't have a definitive answer, but I think it must have been around 1940. The New York Times ran an article in 1977 that Powers' company Editors Press Service was used to channel agency-inspired propaganda into Latin America. Well, Powers was syndicating comic strips into Latin America as early as 1933, swapping them for advertising space that he would then sell to US clients who wanted to promote their goods in South America.

However, I suspect the real connection came about in 1940 when the CIA wanted to counter Nazi propaganda. The Nazi's fed propaganda through a subsidized press association such as the German Transocean Agency, which was very successful in getting material published in South American papers. The CIA tried to counter this with a publication called En Guardia, which was prepared by the Press Division of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA). Editors Press Service was involved in its publication, the first issue appearing in 1941 and ending in 1945.

How connected Powers was to the CIA we will likely never know. The New York Times article notes the following:

Mr. Powers acknowledged that for years he was a close friend of the late Col. J. C. King, longtime chief of the agency's Western Hemisphere Division; that he had served as an officer of the C.I.A.financed Henry Clay foundation, and that it was he who had purchased The South Pacific Mail from David A. Phillips and owned it during the period, in the mid-1960's, when it was being used for cover by David Hellyer.

Mr. Powers could recall only a single connection, however, between Editors Press and the C.I.A. He said that in the mid‐1960's he had used C.I.A. funds to finance the Latin American travels of one of his writers, Guillermo Martinez Marquez, the exiled editor of a Cuban newspaper. Mr. Marquez said that he had never known that the money he received from Mr. Powers had come team the C.I.A.

The above is the result of a morning's work trying to figure out whether Powers was using his pre-War British and Australian publications to spread propaganda; I'm reasonably sure that wasn't the case and it was the loss of those magazines that led to his connections to the C.I.A.

In other words, it doesn't get mentioned in the PIRATES! book, but I hate to see any research go to waste...

(* The book covers are all published by an imprint of Philipp Marx, who is covered in the book; I have a handful of comic scans but dug these out at the same time and you know me... I've said it before (about five seconds ago) and I'll say it again — I never let anything go to waste.)