No investigation into Myanmar's role in popular Western culture could ignore the country's place in the world of comics. To a surprising extent, Burma (as it was once known) has featured in many such publications. Many familiar tropes were given a fresh life in the minds of their readership, usually made up of impressionable children. A two-part article on the subject initially appeared on the New Mandala website, and was later picked up and republished by Yangon's English language daily newspaper The Myanmar Times.

In his 2011 study, British Comics, James Chapman wrote that comic books were “a valuable but neglected source of social history that provided insights into the societies and cultures in which they were produced and consumed”. Like other forms of popular visual culture, such as movies, comics are not only a reflection of the tastes and social values of consumers, but they also play an important role in influencing their attitudes and behaviours. Chapman went on to state; “The fact that the main consumers of comics have been children make them an even more potent form of popular culture”.

In this regard, George Orwell's views remain pertinent. In an essay on “Boys’ Weeklies”, first published in 1940, he wrote that:

Orwell was writing about children's story papers like Gem (1907–39) and Magnet (1908–40), but his comments could apply equally to comics.

With these thoughts in mind, it might be instructive to survey the development of comic books in key English-speaking countries and to look at the way in which Burma (formally known after 1989 as Myanmar) has been depicted in them.