This section moves beyond any reference to specific political figures or competing political interests to focus on the shared values and interests that are at the core of our Republic, and of a stable, civil, democratic society governed by the rule of law.
Either you believe in it and have the integrity to fight for it, or you don’t.
1775 07-04 Eternal Vigilance Is the Iron Price of Liberty—2025-06-30; Esmeray; propaganda poster. This phrase dates back to at least the 19th century in the US. Although apparently it was not used in relation to the American Revolution, it was popularized in the context of the abolition movement, a noble cause particularly apt today because it spoke to internal divisions within our society that went to the heart of the union formed in the American Revolutionary War period. It reminds us that we have to strive and that we cannot sit back and leave it to others, or fate, or tomorrow to protect ourselves. We cannot make excuses or hope silently that the current storm will blow over. Instead, every one of us must act to save our Republic, our way of life, our dignity, and ultimately our souls. A citizen pays the iron price for liberty every day because no other currency can buy it, no matter how socially or economically advantaged one is.
1776 07-04 Love of Liberty–DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION—2025-07-01; Esmeray; propaganda poster. How I feel; what I see in her expression and her character. The part of superhero mythology I believe in, or want to believe in, and feel dismayed to find lacking today: a shared respect for and love of liberty, and a desire by people to be the best version of themselves civically.
1777 07-04 América Libre—DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION—2025-07-02; Esmeray; propaganda poster. Translation: América Libre Free America. Alludes to the Cold War era and Cold War America (“Cuba Libre”), when Americans—for self-interest, and because of their genuine moral beliefs and simple human compassion—hoped for a better fate for another country. It reflects my belief that we do care about one another, nationally and internationally; and we should. I’m not saying it’s clear what the right course of action is internationally, or that we need to agree on it. I’m just saying human respect and support are good things, and nurturing them makes us all better off; whereas tearing down other countries and breaking off ties with them for the sake of doing so, is ultimately a self-destructive, dangerous, and self-impoverishing act. And especially, at this time, when Americans are so divided and our institutions of government are so paralyzed, we should not be disdaining the rest of the world or looking down on it. We should be trying to learn from it—in my view, the parliamentary model of democracy, although faaaar from a panacea, has lessons for us in how to make our politicians more accountable by making it harder for them to blame other Americans for problems instead of trying to fix them.
1778 07-04 Americans will always fight for Liberty… 2025?—2025-07-03; Lancelot; propaganda poster. Compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_Will_Always_Fight_for_Liberty. This one is a deep prayer and a call to action rooted in a previous time that required Americans to rise to a challenge, and reminded them then that they could do it because they had done it before. But the crises of the present can only be answered in the present; so we today must exercise our own virtues and willpower to re-earn what our ancestors gifted on to us; rather than telling stories of more glorious days while letting the side down now.
1789 07-04 LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC! Liberty is EVERY citizen’s duty!—2025-07-04; Young Hellinore, Young Esmeray; compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Leading_the_People. Translation: LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC! VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE !, Liberty is EVERY citizen’s duty! La liberté est le devoir de TOUT citoyen ! Expresses the reciprocity between one person’s tolerance and another’s liberty; to live in liberty with other people, we must respect their liberty as well, especially when we disagree with them but can live with their choices for themselves. Expresses that our moral strength is found in duties not privileges and that duty and privilege are opposite sides of the same coin. Emphasizes that there can be no exceptions to citizenship; cowardliness, hubris, and selfishness are bars to citizenship because they prevent one from putting anything above themselves. Expresses that liberty and other human values and interests are universal, and we should look for common ground with others rather than picking unnecessary fights.
1783 07-04 Join, or Die–Educate yourself, Compromise, Be Civil—2025-07-04; n/a; propaganda poster. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join%2C_or_Die. Arguably the first American propaganda image, because it was the first known image to advocate for the unity of the American colonies. Published, and apparently conceived, by Benjamin Franklin in 1754, to urge cooperation by the colonists in the French and Indian War, it was influential then, and a generation later when it—in a hundred different forms by a hundred different artists—became one of the most iconic propaganda pieces on behalf of the American Revolution. Its fundamental message is more relevant than ever, today; and the values it extols are as American as they can be.
1685 07-04 We Can Do It!1686 07-04 LIFE America’s Secret Weapon1687 07-04 Young England Wants to Help1737 07-04 Help China! China Is Helping Us1736 07-04 On Our Side: The Chinese Fighter1738 07-04 This woman is your FRIEND–She fights for FREEDOM1781 07-04 Keep fit to fight1782 07-04 Cadet Nurse: The Girl with a Future1935 07-04 Join the ATS-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Centre (UK black version)1936 07-04 Join the ATS-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Centre (UK Union Jack version)1945 07-04 Defend them, they could be your mothers, your wives, your sisters, your daughters (abridged version)
The images in this first subset (07-04-A) of the Defend the Constitution! (07-04) project more-or-less represent what I originally set out to do with it: Place the characters from ARP into the context of actual, specific historical propaganda posters from World War Two in a way that both related to their role in ARP, and reflected the original character and intent of the propaganda posters they were based on. Hopefully there is plenty of personality in these images, but I don’t think they contain much tongue-in-cheek mockery of the original images or of the streams of intellectual thought they represented. In a couple of images (1736 & 1738), women are portrayed where women would probably have been outside the contemplation of the original poster makers; but overall, the messages here are generally consistent with the messages in the original posters, whether for good (the Allied posters) or bad (the Axis poster); and the liberties taken in using female characters don’t undermine or attack the source material per se.
1685 07-04 We Can Do It!—2025-06-02; Chava; motivational poster (J. Howard Miller 1943); compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Do_It! This poster actually became better-known as a result of a postwar revival of interest, than it was during the war. I liked its association with female empowerment, and the absence of any traditionalist trappings trying to shoehorn women supporting the war effort into an unequal or subordinate role to men. It’s just a matter-of-fact call to women, encouraging them and asking for their help and support. Chava seemed the obvious candidate for this poster as a physically-strong foundry worker in her own right.
1686 07-04 LIFE America’s Secret Weapon—2025-06-02; Chava; magazine cover (Norman Rockwell 1943); compare https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/07/rosie-the-riveter/. Notes: Deliberately switched magazines and style because I think of Life as iconic for WW2 images and I wasn’t interested in a Norman Rockwell vibe per se. Life had a few color covers although it was very rare in that era; but I liked Chava’s red color too much to make it B&W. As with 1685, I like the fact Rosie the Riveter is taken on her own terms without trying to limit her by proscribing her role or what it might mean; and knew instantly this one was right for Chava. Here we see an everyday moment from her life, that in no way distinguishes her from men in a stereotyping way.
1687 07-04 Young England Wants to Help—2025-06-03; Young Hellinore, Young Pentecost; motivational poster (F.T. Chapman c. 1939-1941); compare: https://go-leasing24.info/practice-areas/bergen-county-dyfs-lawyers/#google_vignette. Based on a poster from a US-based charity supporting Britain in the early years of World War Two urging American children to help in supporting Britain. I changed it to English supporting Dutch because the two characters are English, the English supported the Dutch in WW2, and in the lifetime of the two characters, the English supported the Dutch revolt against the Spanish. Although I generally disfavor children being encouraged to participate in warfare, e.g., being recruited for underage units like the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, excluding them from the sense of community encouraged in wartime would be alienating and devaluing. I think this poster suggests an appropriate route for helping without infantilizing them or emphasizing their undeniable role as particular victims of war.
1736 07-04 On Our Side: The Chinese Fighter—2025-06-04; Fang; educational poster (1944); compare: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/side-wwii-propaganda-posters-russia-1924405148. As indicated at the provided link, this is one of at least four posters in the “On Our Side” series along with British, French, and Russian counterparts. Like 1738, the original seemed to be part of a broader effort to educate Americans about the geography and nationalities involved in the war by explaining who our allies were. This image became a way to use one of the pilot images of Fang I really loved, despite the difficulties of getting accurate insignia on the plane itself (discussed elsewhere). In the original series of images, the flags of each nation were separate from the images with people; and the angle of the image made it plausible no insignia would be visible on the plane.
1738 07-04 This woman is your FRIEND–She fights for FREEDOM—2025-06-04; Hong; educational poster; compare https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/This-Man-is-Your-Friend-Chinese-1940s-WW2-Poster-by-Lueshis/102507112.LVTDI. I confess, when I first saw the original image on which this one is based, I took it as being of a piece with the wartime Life magazine article indistinguishable from phrenology or Aryan race theory, trying to explain how American readers could tell a Japanese person from a Chinese one just by looking at them. However, like 1736, this was one of a whole series of posters portraying European and Asian allies on an equal footing, presumably as part of an effort to educate Americans about who our allies were. This series was a bit bland artistically, but of the limited historically-authentic options available for portraying Asian characters positively on Allied propaganda, I decided to take it. Handily, the bar at the bottom of the poster also provided an elevated surface for Hong’s left boot without including any background from the underlying image, which would have been inconsistent with the original composition. Like many posters of the time, human figures were isolated from their original backgrounds before being included in posters.
1737 07-04 Help China! China Is Helping Us—2025-06-05; Hong; fundraising poster (James Montgomery Flagg c 1940-1942); compare: https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/p17208coll3/id/1014. This (like 1687) represents one of the numerous US wartime fundraising campaigns for various allied causes. United China Relief (“UCR”) brought together seven different China-relief organizations in the US dating to the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and was later amalgamated with others into an umbrella organization that was an antecedent of the United Way. Given the frustrating difficulty with placing Hong and Fang into historically accurate contexts using the AI discussed elsewhere, I thought about making them actresses in movie posters, but the convention of the time in the US was to have white actors portray significant roles regardless of the character’s putative nationality; and in an effort to avoid attracting more Japanese attention than necessary (and perhaps to keep the left-leaning Chinese film industry more generally apolitical), the Nationalist Chinese movie industry was discouraged from overtly portraying warfare against the Japanese. Because the UCR’s purpose was to raise money for China, UCR images tended to portray the Chinese as sympathetic victims as well as fighters; but the image on which this one was based managed to fully convey the fighting spirit of the Chinese, in a way that to me (from the determined expression on the Chinese mother’s face and the soldier marching instead of recuperating despite being injured and not-quite-uniformed) suggested behind-the-scenes partisan resistance—which is how I imagined Hong participating in the war effort, sending radio reports on Japanese troop movements back to the Chinese army.
1781 07-04 Keep fit to fight—2025-06-06; Lancelot; motivational poster; compare https://www.dpvintageposters.com/posters/war-citizenship-public-causes/world-war-ii/american/heath-and-welfare/keep-fit-to-fight-original-american-wwii-air-force-physical-fitness-poster-no-3_9324. I wanted to find an appropriate but not boring or stereotyped platform for introducing Lancelot, perhaps the most traditionally male hero character likely to appear in ARP; and I decided for symmetry, to avoid diminishing women by comparison given my clearly-revealed preference for pinup, cheesecake, and similar depictions of women, that all of his appearances in this series had to have an aspect of beefcake: The more-unrealistic-while-pretending-to-be-realistic, the better. There are a number of US wartime posters of men that seem to modern eyes, at least, to have an erotic undertone, especially recruitment posters which from context strongly suggest that undertone is homoerotic. There was a fantastically unexpected US poster emphasizing hygiene depicting three hunky soldiers showering naked at a jungle encampment. But unfortunately, the AI wouldn’t let me even get close to doing it justice. This image was as close as I could get to that vibe, and I think it gets the job done.
1782 07-04 Cadet Nurse: The Girl with a Future—2025-06-07; Kadidia; recruitment poster; compare:
https://goldenageposters.com/products/1944-be-a-cadet-nurse-the-girl-with-a-future-jon-whitcomb-wwii-full-size?variant=44536213242136. This poster introduces Kadidia, in the form of the uniformed, determined nurse to the left, but provides only minimal information about who she is or what she represents. (More fulsome introduction of Kadidia to follow in subsections B, D, and F.). The reason for including this poster, despite its fairly uninteresting composition is really because, in the first phase of this project, when I was trying to be very true to historical antecedents, I was surprised by the near-total absence of minorities from any of the US World-War-Two posters I found online. This is notably in contrast not only to images from later US wars, but to earlier ones—at least in World War One and the Civil War, there was a clear and direct appeal to blacks to support the war effort. (Late in my research, after finishing this image, I came across a “Together We Win” image showing people of color fighting alongside a white soldier and I’ve kept that in case the reception for these posters is warm enough to persuade me to do another set.). I also found a US image portraying Japanese-Americans quietly cooperating in their own segregation and detention; and a couple of British images with minorities, one analogous to the US “Together We Win” poster, and another intended to recruit blacks from British colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Apparently before it was ever used, however, the British decided not to recruit black soldiers because they didn’t want to arm and train them given the anti-colonial sentiments gaining traction within the Empire. I would categorize the original of the Cadet Nurse poster as ambivalent on the issue of race; and did not find any online commentary to clarify the artist’s or the program’s intentions. The idea they could be black women is supported by the fact the Cadet Nurse program, apparently quite rarely for wartime government programs, was amended at the insistence of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to prevent racial discrimination, eventually recruiting more than 3,000 minorities including even Japanese-American women recruited from the US relocation (essentially concentration, although not as deadly as the Axis variety) camps.
1935 & 1936 07-04 Join the ATS-Women with a will to Win-Apply at any Army Recruiting Centre (UK black & Union Jack versions)—2025-06-08; Hellinore; propaganda poster; compare: https://www.alamy.com/vintage-ww2-recruitment-poster-with-female-ats-member-in-uniform-union-jack-flag-flies-behind-women-with-a-will-to-win!-join-the-ats-apply-at-any-army-recruiting-centre-1939-1945-image342804140.html?imageid=16439DED-FF10-4602-991A-74F85C0BBF85&p=66052&pn=1&searchId=eecbd4edf63c33347e7f7b028a6f8218&searchtype=0. I was thrilled to find a poster so emphatically directed towards independent female patriotism and personality, showing an assertive woman doing something other than supporting a man or looking for a man, that didn’t go out of its way to allude to traditional women’s roles. [1936 only: It was also a lot of fun pushing the adult-Hellinore in-your-face-bling-priestess image to yet another level, like a professional wrestler and valet rolled into one, in this and a couple of subsequent posters combining religious fervor with patriotism.]
1945 07-04 Defend them, they could be your mothers, your wives, your sisters, your daughters (abridged & unabridged versions)—Explicit version containing fascist imagery at 07-04[X] Defend them, they could be your mothers, your wives, your sisters, your daughters at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman. 2025-06-09; Penance & Chastity; propaganda poster (1944); compare: https://history.blog.fordham.edu/?p=257. Translation (English to Italian): Defend [all-female] them! Difendile!; They could be your mothers, your wives, your sisters, your daughters Potrebbero essere le tue madri, le tue mogli, le tue sorelle, le tue figlie. The original of this poster depicts a rape in progress, more explicitly than I could imply with AI or upload to DA without worrying about being kicked off again; but the image of the enemy menacing women is not at all uncommon in the period. The enemy is represented by a black man in the original, with obvious racist overtones. Nothing subtle or nuanced about the message there. I comment further on the racial issue in 1946; for historical accuracy, I was reluctant to shy away from the racist component; but in addition to worrying about the very real risk of the image being taken offline, and feeling a bit queasy myself about actually implementing the poster, racism among humans is not an overt theme of the first volume of ARP. Ultimately, I decided to execute it this way because it focuses more on the vulnerability and suffering of the women and thus the gender aspect of the underlying poster, which is more relevant to the themes and characters in the first volume of ARP.
