In the early nineties, nuclear war imagery became highly self-conscious and self-referential. One of the more interesting recent trends was the bomb as nostalgia, themes from the forties and fifties combined with atomic bomb imagery. The 1991 series, Atomic Age, archly incorporates period artifacts such as Sputnik and this drive-in movie.
Look at this frame from Hard Boiled comics.
Now zoom in on the fast-food containers on the front seat. One is labelled with the code name of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima: “Little Boy” and the other bears the name of the Nagasaki bomb: “Fat Man.”
Consider this ad from a Fall, 1988 J. Crew catalog, featuring “a jacket that might have been worn by J. Rob’t Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.
In contrast, the Def Jeans company ran an ad campaign on television and in print media contrasting their “def” jeans with nuclear war as “dumb.”
Of the several modern novels about the Manhattan Project and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat is both the most unusual and most interesting, using old comic strip characters to develop Oppenheimer’s famous quotation–“The scientists have known sin”–to argue that the opening of the atomic age marked a fall from grace into guilty self-knowledge.
This strip from a very interesting comic book devoted entirely to the theme of nuclear war (itchy Planet) treats nuclear war as a fifties family situation comedy, with father and daughter taking out their frustrations on each other with nuclear missiles.
America’s favorite nuclear technician, Homer Simpson, was transformed into a nostalgic atomic hero in Radioactive Man (1993). It bears a phony cover date of “Nov 1952.”
But the ultimate in ironic nuclear nostalgia is undoubtedly this comic book cover.
