The second of my two articles about Myanmar and the comics explored a wider range of themes and imaginary characters. Once again, Burma (as it was called then) was cast in exotic terms as a remote and dangerous place where strange things happened. This piece too was initially published on the New Mandala website and later reproduced in The Myanmar Times.

Over the past 75 years, Western comic books with a Burma theme have been dominated by stories set during World War II. There were some noteworthy exceptions but, even when new characters appeared and the plots changed, descriptions of the country and its population rarely did so.

During the Cold War, Western governments exploited the power of comics to influence public opinion, including in Burma. For example, in 1950 the British embassy in Rangoon persuaded a local newspaper to run a comic strip based on George Orwell's anti-totalitarian fable Animal Farm. In 1961, the US government recruited Roy Crane, creator of the comic book hero Buzz Sawyer, to help save countries like Burma from communism. In a series titled “Your United Nations at Work”, a 1963 Action Comics story portrayed a young Burmese woman who saved her village, thanks to her training at a WHO school in Rangoon. While described as part of a public service program, such stories were designed to garner support for the then pro-Western UN.

Burma also continued to provide the setting for adventures by a range of heroes, heroines and superheroes.

Between 1942 and 1953, for example, Fawcett Comics published a series called “Nyoka the Jungle Girl”. It was based on a film serial inspired in turn by a 1931 pulp fiction story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, about a Cambodian princess. The later Nyoka character lived in Africa, but this did not prevent her from appearing in two multi-part stories set in Burma. “The Burmese Expedition” was released in 1947, followed by “Adventure in Burma” in 1948. In these stories, the smartly-dressed Nyoka frequently encountered wild animals, with mixed results, and in one tale had to deal with a “Chinese head hunter”.