UC Berkeley

The affective landscape of the global Cold War is commonly associated with fear and paranoia about ubiquitous enemies who had to be purged to preserve life worth living. My dissertation argues instead that the Cold War was one of the most comic times in recent history; not in spite of, but because of the apocalyptic stakes of the global stand-off. In East Asia, where authoritarian governments carried out the ideological war through tight media policy and censorship, comic culture became a vital form of mass communication out of necessity. Comic culture’s circuitous nature allowed transgressive public affects to gather in plain sight, fostering new rituals of collective understanding that bypassed state control.

This dissertation demonstrates the regional resonance of the Cold War comic aesthetic through a comparative methodology, revealing cultural convergences among two US-allied East Asian countries that were also former Japanese colonies, Taiwan and South Korea. The similar contours of their comic cultures arise from these historical factors, as well as their common participation in global anti-Communism and their rapid industrialization under developmental policies. Nevertheless, the comic cultural field became a particularly important space of vernacularization for Taiwan and South Korea as they encountered the norms of new global cultures under Pax Americana, and it was there that the differences between them were articulated and amplified.

I identify three intertwined comic aesthetics that side-stepped the state’s totalizing machine of anti-Communist, developmental ideology, creating a counterpublic in the process of coming into being. Caricature, genre game, and nonsense were the three intermedial aesthetics that forged new forms of communication by cleaving to the margins of expression. If caricature suggests the method of minimalism, of communicating with the least amount of visual information possible, genre games offer the method of maximalism, of engaging heterogenous genres all at once. Nonsense, in turn, suggests the liberating possibility that reckoning with the impossibility of communication in the Cold War era is itself the most honest act of communication. Together, these aesthetics playfully invert the power structures of the era by making the trivial aim of collective laughter a primary and immediate affective objective.