By 1944 Comic books were so popular with men in the American Armed forces that around 44% of men in the Army identified themselves as avid comic book readers. Superheroes following in the footsteps of Captain America became poster boys for American’s fighting in World War II, and because of it, their stories became explicitly tools of propaganda. This was due to the fact that the Office of War Information (OWI) created what became known as the WWB (Writer’s War Board), that although it was not explicitly in the government’s payroll, had its offices and guest editors provided for by the OWI.

the tech giant only shows small “snippets” of in-copyright works. The full digitized books are walled-off, making only certain uses possible. Researchers can fact-check using Google Books, or they can examine the number of times particular words and phrases are mentioned in the corpus each year, but they can’t really read Google’s online version of most volumes.