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.
as Slim Pickins exhuberantly rode the missile which triggered Armageddon.
The image is here picked up as an antiwar statement on the cover of a Vietnam-era underground comic book.
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.
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.”
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.
The war which created the setting for the strip was paid little attention, having taken place centuries in the past.
Axa was an utterly conventional strip which revived the old fifties stereotype of gigantic insects and other monsters born of nuclear radiation.
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.
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.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.
As this cover makes clear, sexuality can be associated even with a holocaust of global proportions.
