Narrating the Nation, Panel-by-Panel: A Popular Geopolitics of Identity Construction in Turkey's Cold War Comic Books

In 1927, the Turkish republic’s first census recorded just under 13.65 million citizens with a literacy rate variously estimated between 8 and 10.5 percent. By the 1950 census, almost a quarter century later and three years after the 12 March 1947 “beginning” of the Cold War—as commonly linked with the Truman Doctrine’s declaration, the population had risen to almost 21 million, but the nation’s literacy rate only rose to just below 32 percent. Noting that visual mass media was still vitally important in 1947—for this country that is so often touted as an exemplar of twentieth-century nation-building—would be a profound understatement. While there are abundant histories of literacy, education, and national consciousness for the republic, there are few scholarly or other inquiries into how Turks learned to identify as such, much less on how they came to construe Turkey’s place in the world. In studies of nationalism, wherein ideas of literacy and print capitalism are foundational, how might we explain a thorough nation-building project when well over half the population remained illiterate after two and a half decades?

In my research on identity construction in Cold War Turkey and the republic’s foreign affairs, I have turned to approaches found in the field of critical geopolitics to engage with this historiographic oversight and theoretical problem. While factors like conscription, commerce and development, public health, and other dynamics might explain dimensions of alternative routes to finding one’s Turkishness, I contend that the rise and widespread propagation of popular cultural narratives and icons, including superheroes, also played herculean roles. In concentrating my inquiry into the tropes and terrains of these tales, I have chosen the specific medium of comic books.

Drawing from scholarship devoted to popular culture and critical geopolitics, researchers of Western comics identified and analyzed the idea of nationalist superheroes. While these characters typically occupied only a portion of the comic book marketplace in countries like the US, I demonstrate how the nationalist superhero genre became and endured as the mainstay of comics in Cold War Turkey. In doing so, I account not only for figures from their sales but also how particular sub-genres of the Turkish superhero comic book spoke to a plurality of past and present predicaments faced by both Turkish and Turkic peoples, giving way to nationalist heroes both of mythic pasts and of the emerging Cold War itself. While the Kemalist republic focused largely on the life, legend, and lessons of its singular founder, this fictional pantheon of heroes safely and entertainingly augmented the wider Turkish national narrative while providing citizens with yarns of adventure, heroism, intrigue, and even romance. While these heroes no longer monopolize the attention of the country’s youth—today regarded more so with nostalgia than nationalistic reverence, they are still highly regarded, linked inseparably with Cold War recollections, and propagated each year as their invented eponyms continue to be bestowed upon many of the nation’s newborn males.