“I’ll be frank: I love this book. Hirsch’s writing is crisp and exciting and it’s a joy to see the history of comic books and the Cold War United States told from such a fresh angle. This fun, sharp book is one I’ll be thinking about for a while.”

Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Every so often, a single book changes our understanding of an entire topic. Hirsch’s brilliant, artfully written Pulp Empire does that for mid-twentieth-century American studies. The billions of comic books that rolled off American presses and circumnavigated the globe in the 1940s and ’50s reveal significant unexplored aspects of American society, politics, and foreign policy. While Hirsch’s spectacular research introduces American historians to a new field of study, his elegant writing invites a broad audience to read this unique and beautifully produced book.”

Martin J. Sherwin, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of American Prometheus and author of Gambling with Armageddon

“It has been a long time since I read a history of comic books that genuinely brought significant new issues and sources to the table. Pulp Empire is such a book—smart, lively, and well-written. Hirsch positions the early decades of the American comic book in a global context and illuminates the anxieties this powerful new form of popular culture inspired not only in parents and cultural critics but also in government officials and world leaders.”

Jared Gardner, author of Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling

"As Hirsch outlines in Pulp Empire, comics have always been entwined with capitalism, race, and foreign policy. . . . Hirsch makes an important inroad into not only understanding the cultural politics of the Cold War, but in the forces that led to the omnipresence of comic book motifs in the present."

The Progressive