Pecos Bill and the campaign against children’s Comics in Postwar Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay studies the case of Pecos Bill: The Legendary Hero of Texas, a western comic published in Italy by Mondadori from 1949 to 1954. I analyze the series in the context of the widespread national campaign against comics and in relation to the cultural politics of Mondadori’s corporate partner Walt Disney. Both Catholic and Leftist critics condemned western fictions because of their violent and sexual content. Debates about children’s magazines and their educational purposes, on the other hand, were minimally concerned with how western narratives represented race, ethnicity, or gender. Pecos Bill was blacklisted,even though Mondadori’s cowboy is a wholesome hero who never fires a gun. Starting from this discrepancy, my analysis sheds light on the contradictions within the campaign against comics and explores issues of identity politics in Italian children’s readings. I demonstrate that representations of Mexican and African characters, as well as of whiteness and of American history, promoted the same anti-leftist and racist discourses of Disney’s western fictions at the time of the Cold War.