Cartoonists in the good fight of WWII

Starting in October 1940 with the Italian invasion, Greek cartoonists launched their own battle of resistance in the country’s newspapers, ridiculing the enemy – and Benito Mussolini most vehemently – and raising morale. Some of these cartoons were made into fliers and scattered in public spaces, while cartoonists were also employed to draw uplifting illustrations on correspondence paper that would be sent to soldiers fighting at the front, Natassa Kastriti, the senior curator at the National Historical Museum, writes in Kathimerini. The need for the message to reach every member of the public overrode a ban on satirizing heads of state that was imposed by the Metaxa dictatorship in 1936, she explains.