Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Charles Biro, lev gleason
Biro, Robinson, Propaganda & Censorship, Daredevil Comics 8 at Auction
Charles Biro’s Daredevil story in Daredevil Comics #8 takes on propaganda, while Jerry Robinson’s hero London is checked by the Ministry of Information.
Article Summary
- Daredevil Comics #8 pits Charles Biro’s hero against Bund propaganda, fake news, sabotage, and an attempted uprising.
- Biro grounds Daredevil’s battle in wartime fears, drawing on the German-American Bund’s camps, ideology, and tactics.
- Jerry Robinson’s London story turns to censorship, as BBC commentator Marc Holmes defies the Ministry of Information.
- With just 16 CGC Universal copies recorded, Daredevil Comics #8 stands out for Biro, Robinson, and wartime themes.
In Daredevil Comics #8‘s lead story, written and drawn by Charles Biro, Daredevil has to defeat a campaign of deceptive media aimed at inciting an insurrection, as well as the men behind it. Cover-dated March 1942, the story depicts the German-American Bund attempting to instigate an uprising by using printing presses, radio broadcasts, cutting phone lines, and disrupting police communications, helping its leaders manufacture panic. Their leaflets even reach Camp Dix, in an attempt to make soldiers disobey orders. Meanwhile, in Jerry Robinson‘s tale of the costumed hero called London, the character’s BBC broadcaster alter ego defies the Ministry of Information and is drawn into a trap as a result.
Daredevil and the Bund’s War of False News
The real Bund’s propaganda and camp activities give Biro’s story its historical foundation. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s history of the organization documents the Bund’s ideology, camps, indoctrination, and exclusionary membership requirements. Biro uses those elements in a story whose villains enforce their own grotesque version of racial purity, as they attempt to incite an insurrection in the United States. At one camp depicted in the story, a new member is punished because of his ancestry, and they threaten to send him to Germany. The Bund’s leader, Herr Herring, has Mein Kampf on his desk. Soon, telephone and telegraph connections are cut, and police radio transmissions are disrupted, while flyers, leaflets, and loudspeakers are used to spread propaganda. A teenager working with Daredevil to infiltrate the Bund camp is captured, but Sniffer’s refusal to shoot a kid helps unravel their scheme. He assists Daredevil in attacking Herring, and together they foil the Bund’s plans.
Jerry Robinson‘s London feature involves the power of broadcasting in a different way. Its hero’s civilian identity is BBC commentator Marc Holmes, who intends to speak against “appeasers who have high positions” who are impeding the country’s war efforts. When the Ministry of Information says it will prohibit his radio speech, he broadcasts it anyway. A villain known as the Boar, a saboteur sent to Britain by Hitler, uses this incident to fake a Ministry of Information summons regarding the matter, in an attempt to capture Holmes.
Britain’s implementation of the censorship component of the 1939 Emergency Powers Act provides the root inspiration for this story, and points towards one more direct inspiration in particular. As Bradford Special Collections explains, Novelist, screenwriter, and popular war-era BBC commentator J. B. Priestley voluntarily ended his first Postscripts series in 1940, while Ministry of Information intervention brought the second to an end in 1941.
There are 16 Universal copies of this issue on the CGC census, with three copies at 6.5 and two higher. An issue with excellent story and art by Biro and Robinson that looks at the power of information flow from two different directions, there’s a Daredevil Comics #8 (Lev Gleason, 1942) CGC FN+ 6.5 with off-white to white pages up for auction at the November 5, 2026 Golden Age Century Comics Showcase Auction VI #40378.
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