The New Adventures of Hitler
The New Adventures of Hitler was a highly controversial comic series written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Steve Yeowell which first appeared in Cut, a Scottish arts magazine in 1989 before being reprinted in Crisis in 1990.
Publishing history
The New Adventures of Hitler was a satirical and surreal (one scene has Hitler opening a cupboard to find Morrissey singing Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now) strip based on the claims of Hitler's sister-in-law Bridget Dowling that Hitler had lived with her, her husband Alois Hitler, Jr., and her son William Patrick Hitler in Liverpool from 1912 to 1913. It first appeared in Cut, a Scottish arts and culture magazine and became instantly controversial, and some interpreted Morrison to be a Nazi [1] due to his use of Hitler in what was essentially a humorous story.
The resulting controversy saw Pat Kane, the lead singer of the band Hue and Cry as well as one of the magazine's editors, threaten to walk off the magazine and indulge in a public war of words with Morrison over his intentions with the strip. The debate widened to cover freedom of speech issues and became a nationwide news story when the tabloid newspaper The Sun got hold of the story. The New Adventures of Hitler completed its run in Cut but the controversy continued when the story was reprinted in Crisis in 1990.
Crisis was a spin off from 2000 AD which printed more adult-oriented work and The New Adventures of Hitler fitted in with the themes of the magazine. However the controversy which had surrounded the story in Cut continued with the strip's reprinting in Crisis. The story ran from Crisis in issues 46-49 and a proposed collected edition by IPC never appeared. Morrison himself had planned to set up his own imprint to self-publish some of his work, including The New Adventures of Hitler, but nothing came of the idea. [2]