America's Best Comics #7 October 1943
the little 3 or 4 year historical blip where the U.S. was nominally pro-soviet is so weird it's like a fever dream.
What even more bizarre is that the U.S. was fairly anti-British at the same time. Like FDR knew the British empire was completely untenable, and the Brits were seen as this snooty, thankless deadweight during WWII.
There were a lot of hostilities between the UK and America in the interwar years that are comparable to China-US relations now. The British Empire was in decline, America was in ascendancy as the global power. America had just refused to join the League of Nations, which stoked suspicion and some breakdown of diplomacy. The American public was against British rule in India and some were against British control of Ireland. There were a lot of back and forth trade wars, then a few incidents of the two getting mad at the other's naval routes. There was a brief UK-America arms race in the early 1920s to build bigger and higher capacity battleships, until the Washington Naval Treaty was signed in 1922 to limit battleship size and armaments.
The British Empire didn't renew the treaty in 1932, and by 1933 it was fairly common understanding the UK might ally with Nazi Germany. The British weren't exactly...shy about praising fascism at first. There were a number of prominent British fascists, like Oswald Mosley and Harold Harmsworth (founder of the Daily Mail). Churchill himself made speeches praising Mussolini. So that made the international situation shaky.
So a lot of those conflicts were still unresolved by WW2, especially the American public expressing weird levels of sympathy for India and the Quit India movement. I guess there was some kind of feeling of camaraderie there, since America had also been a British colony at one point. Who knows.
There was a brief moment in 1975 where it happened again and it was actually pretty uplifting.
It was the Apollo-Soyuz cooperative space mission, where American and Soviet spacecrafts docked and performed experiments together over the course of two days, including photography of a solar eclipse from space. Unfortunately it didn't lead to increased cooperation, it was just a nice moment.
Going back to 1932 to give Stalin the complete technical schematics for mecha-godzilla
Giving Stalin modern industrial equipment would be much more helpful.
We’ve got all your favorites like
The Red Flash
Captain Britain
Regular Man
and Captain Harlock: Space Pirate
Took a bit but I was able to look all these characters up. From left to right: Doc Strange, Black Terror, American Eagle, and Pyroman. Apparently these belonged to a company called Standard Comics that went defunct in the 50’s, and I think are now considered public domain.
Doc Strange
Tom Strange is capable of flight (or at least vast Golden Age Superman-like leaps), superhuman strength, and surviving indefinitely in the vacuum of space (without air or water), and has invulnerability to re-entry, extreme impacts (falling to Earth from space) and bullets. He is also a brilliant scientist.
Coincidence that they gave the based flag to the hottest one? I think not.
"So hey, I noticed our uniforms have a skull and crossbones on them..."
