In this roundtable, three historians discuss the intersection of Cold War and comic book history. Starting with a conversation about their field-specific approaches to postwar comics, they contextualize various comic genres in broader historical context. R. Joseph Parrott (The Ohio State University) argues that Silver Age stories, even more than promoting Cold War anti-communism, consistently revisited World War II as part of the national mythmaking that laid the foundations of U.S. internationalism. Sydney Heifler (The Ohio State University) explores the overt communist plotlines that appeared in romance comics, providing an overview of how changes in representations of sexual desire serve as a better index of the era's McCarthyistic tensions. Sean O'Brien (Wayne State University) highlights the decisions that went into making such comics. Touching on the labor side of comic production, he explains what was happening behind the scenes within companies, which informed (or contested) what was being printed. The roundtable concludes with a brief overview of the future of comics in the field of history and what each historian hopes to see emerge as best practices.
