Several comic books, graphic narratives, and manga depict both citizens’ and soldiers’ experiences during war. For World War II history, notably, we can point to George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy, wherein he describes his childhood experience in a Japanese internment camp. Showa: A History of Japan by Shigeru Mizuki uses the graphic narrative genre to describe his life and military service during the war era; Art Spiegelman’s renowned Maus depicted the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Perhaps less known is James Kugler’s Into the Jungle! A Boy’s Comic Strip History of World War II notable because a young man from a small Nebraska town does not depict first-hand experience in war, but his own interpretation of events based on news accounts and other media.

The Korean War has similarly been depicted in texts like The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim and “Cold War Correspondent,” included in Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales series. Such a range of texts for these historical events is important, as comics creator, scholar and authority Hilary Chute explains in Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, because “they incline the [graphic narrative] form to the expression of witness, to picturing subjectivity and the paradox of history’s layered spaces and temporalities” (p. 69).

This paper proposes to feature other war heroes. Like Kugler himself, these heroes come from a town that’s not generally well-known: Gallup, New Mexico. The more famous of them are the Navajo Code Talkers, whose story is depicted in texts like Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers, edited by Arigon Starr, Janet Miner, and Lee Francis IV, canonical figures in the Native American comics industry. Another text is the Graphic Library’s Navajo Code Talkers: Top Secret Messengers of World War II. Juxtaposed with the images from this text, I’ll include images of artifacts collected in a museum in Gallup dedicated to the Code Talkers.

Related thereto, I’ll also present on another Gallup World War II hero, Hiroshi Miyamura. As a noted Korean War hero, many local institutions (a bridge, a school, and more) are named for Miyamura. However, his life and valorous service in the war have been immortalized in the Association of the Unites States Army’s comic book series, Medal of Honor: Hiroshi Miyamura.

While most often, concepts of the hero in the comics and graphic narrative world focus on superheroes, this presentation takes a different tack: demonstrating how real-life heroes can come from tiny towns and become renowned for their actions. They’re not from Smallville, Kansas, but instead from Gallup, New Mexico.

Superheroes in komiks (Philippine adaptation of comics) possess a unique ability to reflect cultural values and societal issues through their narratives, making them an important medium for critical analysis. Interestingly, the term "Third World" is used in contemporary Filipino superhero narratives in this study, framing local socio-political realities within a global context while challenging its traditional implications. My paper contends that the Filipino superhero genre, with its hybridity and engagement with the concept of the "Third World," challenges dominant narratives and redefines the genre. The study analyzes Filipino Heroes League by Paolo Fabregas (2009–2019), 3rd World Power by JV Tanjuatco and Jim N. Jimenez (2022), and Sixty Six by Russell Molina, Ian Sta. Maria, and Mikey Marchan (2015, 2020) using superhero genre elements (powers, mission, and identity) and the general narrative structure of superhero stories. These texts utilize genre conventions not only to engage with global archetypes but also to reflect on issues of poverty, corruption, and inequality within urban Philippine contexts. Through genre analysis, this chapter highlights how Filipino komiks blend Western influences with distinctly Filipino elements, using the superhero narrative as a medium to critique socio-political realities while reimagining and ultimately redefining the concept of the "Third World."

In the early eighties Comics Forum obtained the publishing rights of Marvel superheroes in Spain that until then had been in the hands of Ediciones Vértice and Editorial Bruguera. Forum’s success was based on the creation of a close link with the reader through sections such as fan mail and other similar ones. This link meant the creation of a fandom that, together with the decline during those years of the European-style magazine model, meant an Americanization of the publishing paradigm associated with comics in Spain in the nineties. From that moment, most publishers adopted to a greater extent the comic-book format of the U.S. market. This meant that series created by Spanish authors began to appear in this format, some of which included stories featuring superheroes. This paper will analyze one of these initiatives, that of the Iberia Inc group, which is particularly interesting because it shows how this process of Americanization reflected in the adoption of the figure of the superhero is adapted to the tradition of Spanish comics, so that the series is a mixture of conventions related to the history of comics in both countries that allows us to analyze what popular culture was in Spain in the eighties and the enormous influence that the United States had in its configuration. In addition, the analysis of this group of superheroes allows us to study how the ideology of the superhero adapts to the circumstances of Spanish society, very different from that of the United States, in years not too far removed from the process of transition from dictatorship to democracy that happened in Spain after Franco’s death.