Nuke Pop: Popular Culture Images of Nuclear War • Credits

Bomberotica

Bomb Erotica
Black and white photo of man
Nuclear weapons, like other weapons, have been linked in the male imagination to sex from very early on. In 1946 Pat Frank, later to become much better known for Alas, Babylon, had a bestseller in a comic novel titled Mr. Adam in which a nuclear accident sterilizes all men on earth except one, and he becomes the object of frenzied pursuit by still-fertile women determined to have babies by him.
But it was Dr. Strangelove which fixed the stereotype of the bomb as sex organ.
Man on top of missile
as Slim Pickins exhuberantly rode the missile which triggered Armageddon.
Cartoon comic cover with Uncle Sam like person and the text, Yellow Dog.
The image is here picked up as an antiwar statement on the cover of a Vietnam-era underground comic book.
Comic book cover with Wonder Woman strapped to missile over city, fighter jets attacking her and the text, Wonder Woman, DC 20 cents, Target -- Wonder Woman.
Note that whereas in Dr. Strangelove the missile was an ironic symbol of male potency, in Wonder Woman comics it symbolizes female impotence and fear.
Three comic panels with man in suit photographing scantily clad woman with bomb.
Howard Chaykin, in his eighties revival of the classic pop character of The Shadow, gave this theme a perverse twist, when his villain, using nuclear blackmail to gain his evil ends, harked back to the film: “This is what America wants-a combination of Dr. Strangelove, The Story of O, and Let’s Make a Deal.”
Comic cover with woman standing on nuclear waste green hill with sword. Text: First American Edition Series, AXA 2 - The Desired. by Avenell & Romero
A Spanish artist and a British writer collaborated to create AXA, a female adventurer in the radioactive wasteland who appeared in a British newspaper for five years.
Two comic panels, One with mushroom cloud and text. The unthinkable became a reality and one September afternoon civilization committed suicide; The second panel shows a destroyed city and the text, All that the world had been was no more. In its place was a world of death and despair...
The war which created the setting for the strip was paid little attention, having taken place centuries in the past.
First panel: giant spider grabbing person and text, ...and horror. Second panel: Desolate landscape with no plants and city in a bubble in the distance and text, But a hundred years after the death of mankind pockets of civilization began to grow anew.
Axa was an utterly conventional strip which revived the old fifties stereotype of gigantic insects and other monsters born of nuclear radiation.
Two comic panels. The first has woman in city saying, Maybe it is... but to me, the domed city is a prison... The second panel shows the city from afar again and her words, ...And freedom is the wilderness of the outside!
Axa is a rebel, but a rebel based on conventional male ideas of a heroine. She rejects the regulated life of the high-tech domed city, trades her sterile jumpsuit for a fur bikini that keeps falling off, and promptly plunges into a series of perils little different in essence from those undergone by the heroine of a nineteenth-century melodrama.
Two comic panels. The first shows a woman saying, So that's why you didn't kill me when I arrived on the island! Because I was good breeding stock! The second panel has a man and a woman; she says, Oh I do, Jason. You never really loved me at all! And he says, Axa, try to understand...
But a modern twist is given her adventures because in a world of warped mutants, AXA’s normal and highly appealing genes are even more attractive than her body.
Two comic panels. The first shows a woman taking off her clothes and saying, If we have to repopulate the entire world... The second panel has a man and a woman's silhouette in an embrace; she says, ... Don't you think we'd better get started.
A favorite theme in postholocaust fiction is the new Adam and Eve story, as the last woman and man must mate to recreate the human race, often featuring the favorite male fantasy of the assertively sexual female.
Comic book cover with scantily clad woman in uniform at space ship console crying and Earth in the background with multiple explosions. Text: Shattered Earth. Ex-Mutants Universe Anthology.
As this cover makes clear, sexuality can be associated even with a holocaust of global proportions.

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