47 Comics About World War II

In his classic autobiography, Nakazawa relates how he survived the bomb that America dropped on his hometown of Hiroshima in August 1945. Only 6 years old when the bomb hit, Nakazawa and his mother were lucky enough to survive, but the rest of his family wasn’t. This harrowing, epic-length manga explores the trauma they endured during and after the event.

This collection introduces you to three people who survived the Holocaust as children and who continued to be haunted by their experiences long after the war was over.

Sandler was a teenager attending school in New York when war broke out, separating him from his English Jewish family. This is the story of how Sandler ended up serving in the American army and of how his own family fared during the war.

With all the atrocities that occurred in World War II, it is too easy to overlook the Japanese army’s sexual enslavement of Korean women and girls. This graphic novel tells the story of Lee Okseon, one of the many girls uprooted from her home, brutally mistreated, and then left to deal with the consequences alone.

By the summer of 1945, it was clear to most Japanese soldiers that they were fighting for a lost cause — but they were pushed to keep fighting anyway. Mizuki, who was himself a soldier, writes here about the desperation and atrocities that characterized the war’s final weeks.

Many comic book creators were drafted or enlisted in the war. Glanzman was one of them. In this memoir, he recounts his time on a Navy destroyer.

“Soldier’s heart” is an old term for post-traumatic stress disorder. Tyler’s father, who served in World War II, kept his pain hidden until decades after the conflict. This memoir recounts Charles Tyler and Carol Tyler’s attempts to make sense of his service and his mental scars.

Through the infamous Executive Order 9066, President Roosevelt forced Japanese Americans living on the West Coast — even those who were citizens — to stay in concentration camps for the duration of the war, allegedly to prevent Japanese spies from undermining American security. Future Star Trek actor Takei, just a child at the time, and his family were among those forced to relocate.

Miriam and her mother were living in Hungary during most of the war. But when the Nazis invaded, they were forced to fake their deaths and go on the run. Since Miriam was just a child at the time, her memory of their flight is sometimes faded or fragmentary, emphasizing the horror that something so terrible could happen to someone so young.

In 2017, hundreds of autobiographies written by Jewish teenagers were found in a church basement in Lithuania. Krimstein took six of these stories and compiled them in a memorable, heartbreaking collection that reveals the hopes and dreams these young people had, unaware of how their world was about to collapse.

Adapted from the prose novel, this tense graphic novel follows siblings Max and Zena, two Jewish children living in Poland in the 1930s. Antisemitism has long colored their lives, but when the Nazis invade and separate the children from their parents, things get exponentially worse. Max and Zena will come to rely on Jewish resistance fighters — and each other — to survive the horrors to come.

This graphic adaptation of the novel follows Dita, an imprisoned Jewish girl who agrees to protect books for her fellow prisoners, risking her life to keep hope and knowledge alive.

Francisco Boix was a communist who was imprisoned at Mauthausen concentration camp. But Boix was also a photographer, which prompted one of the camp’s officers to recruit him to photograph dead prisoners. Boix risked his life to leak these photos to the outside world and expose the truth behind places like Mauthausen.

This award-winning, somehow-controversial title is the gold standard when it comes to graphic novels about the Holocaust. Through interviews with his cantankerous father, Spiegelman weaves a tale of luck, courage, heartbreak, and multi-generational trauma that will stay with you long after you finish reading.

Part of the “Wonder” universe of stories, White Bird follows a young Jewish girl named Sara, who survives the Holocaust thanks to the French family who hides her and the boy who risks everything to keep her safe.

Unlike Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, which focused largely on the lives of soldiers at war’s end, this title tells both the personal story of Mizuki, who was forced into the army and shipped off to Papua New Guinea, and the broader story of how the war all but destroyed Japanese society.

A Japanese American trapped in Japan after the Pearl Harbor bombing, Iva Toguri was pressed into service as a propaganda mouthpiece for the Japanese government. As “Tokyo Rose,” she did her best to undermine any potential harm caused by her position and even became a favorite among American soldiers. None of that helped her when she returned to America and was charged with treason.

Growing up, I only ever heard about the Japanese Americans who bravely fought for America. While we should absolutely teach their story, just as important are the stories of those who resisted. The American government’s treatment of its Japanese American residents and citizens was deplorable (see: Displacement and They Called Us Enemy), and some courageous individuals fought back by refusing to serve, by declining to sign a condescending loyalty oath, or by going to court.

The Manhattan Project was one of the most incredible scientific endeavors in American history, complete with thorny ethical debates and larger-than-life characters. Trinity gives you an intimate glimpse at their complex world.

Combining the legend of Captain America with the gruesome reality of the U.S. government’s experiments on unwitting Black “subjects,” Truth follows Isaiah Bradley as he is injected with a new version of the Super Soldier Serum and becomes a hero in his own right.

DC’s greatest heroines take on the Axis in this stylish reimagining of the Golden Age of Comics. See Wonder Woman, Stargirl, Supergirl, Zatanna, and more team up to make the world safe once again!

In this follow-up to Bombshells, our heroines confront the dark side of the American homefront, including the xenophobia that led to the widespread incarceration of Japanese residents and citizens.

Hitler’s obsession with the occult is well-documented. In this graphic novel, which is inspired by a true story, British intelligence seeks to exploit that fact by recruiting a coven of witches to capture Hitler’s second-in-command, Rudolf Hess. Together, these offbeat, unlikely heroes will risk it all to help bring the Third Reich to its knees.

The Tuskegee Airmen became some of the most celebrated American pilots of the war. But first, as Black men, they had to fight back against the racism meted out by the very people they were supposed to be serving with.

Keeping information out of enemy hands was always a top priority for the Allies. The Americans got a leg up in this regard thanks to the Navajo code talkers, whose unbreakable code, based on the Navajo language, served military intelligence very well indeed.

American women were not allowed to fly combat missions. In the Soviet Union, however, some young women trained to do just that. Nicknamed “the Night Witches,” they would fly their ramshackle planes on deadly night missions — with incredible results.

In addition to writing Showa 1939-1944 and Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, which relate the war from the perspective of an unwilling Japanese Soldier, Mizuki also penned this biography of Adolf Hitler himself.

The Battle of Guadalcanal was a turning point of the war in the Pacific theater, with the Allies winning crucial victories in 1943 from which the Japanese military never recovered. This and the D-Day book below are part of a series called “Graphic Battles of World War II,” if you want more in this vein.

D-Day was the codename for one of the largest (though, it must be said, not the largest) military operations in history, with the Allies coming ashore in Normandy, France, to free Paris — and all of Europe — from the Nazis’ clutches.

Adapted from the nonfiction book of the same name, this book tells the story of the men serving in Taffy 3, a small unit of hardly-armed boats that unexpectedly became the last line of defense against a Japanese invasion of the Philippine island of Leyte. Despite facing overwhelming odds, the men of Taffy 3 plunged into the Battle of Samar with determination and courage.

Part of Hale’s series of historical nonfiction adventures for kids, Raid of No Return explains the history and execution of the Doolittle Raid, in which American bombers risked it all to bomb Tokyo in early 1942.

In this inventive YA comic, a girl named Kiku is mysteriously transported back to the 1940s, when her own grandmother was taken to a Japanese internment camp. To find her way back to the present, Kiku will first have to discover first-hand what life was like for Japanese Americans in the 1940s.

Vonnegut’s antiwar classic is now available as a graphic novel, following the alleged adventures of World War II vet Billy Pilgrim as he exposes the futile, ludicrous nature of war.

Before her seminal reporting on the trial of war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt was herself a victim of Nazi persecution. This award-winning graphic biography tells the story of how she became one of the most important voices in documenting the events of the Holocaust and German totalitarianism.

This is the first book in a duology that explores the reasons why World War II happened, how the people with the power to stop it failed to do so, and why we can never allow a conflict of this magnitude to ever happen again.