Government Issue won’t exactly ease your troubled mind about things like, say, nuclear warfare or how the economy works, but it will give you a good chuckle at how the government used comics to educate the public for decades. Then again, it might just ease your mind a little bit. In fact, it actually is educational in many spots and has a lot of information (some dated) packed within its pages. It certainly proves the government had a wide-ranging agenda to convey.
 
Government Issue collects Unites States government-issued comics from seven decades and incorporates some of comics’ biggest stars (creators and characters). Editor Richard Graham, a librarian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has been collecting these government comics for a while now, and he presents them here in their glory.
 
Topics covered range from the obvious (drug abuse) to the odd (sardines), and several of the stories have a certain workmanlike static quality to them (“We have to tell this story, so let’s tell it”), but some of them transcend their limitations. It’s quite interesting to see what a government wants you to read, though, and this well-curated collection is certainly no exception.