[crashryan]

Just found this in The Washington Post archive: the guy who produced this comic.

MALCOLM ATER, 77, DIES
(Published in The Washington Post, 5/13/92)

Malcolm W. Ater, 77, the founder of Commercial Comics in Washington in 1946 who published comic books for political campaigns, government agencies and private industry until retiring in 1991, died May 10 at a hospital in Shepherdstown, W.Va. He had cancer.

Mr. Ater was a Washington area and Falls Church resident for 44 years before moving to West Virginia in 1991. He lived in Shepherdstown.

During his years as a comic books publisher, he produced works for more than 50 major political campaigns. Over the years, he wrote, edited and published educational comic books, produced promotional packages for the Ford and Carter administrations and edited magazines for such groups as Kiwanis International and the American Cancer Society.

He published more than 2 million copies of the educational comic book "Dennis the Menace Take a Poke at Poison" for the federal government. That book appeared in the early 1960s. He also had done comics featuring Smokey Bear in the 1950s.

A 1971 Washington Post story called him "easily the dean of propaganda comic books in the capital." The story quoted Mr. Ater as saying that his comics "each have a message or a person up for sale -- we specialize in propaganda."

In 1950, Life magazine did a profile of him and grumped, "As if radio, TV, sound trucks, matchbooks and skywriting were not enough, the politicians are assaulting the senses of the electorate this season through yet another medium, the comic book."

Mr. Ater was a native of Concord, Ill., and a graduate of Illinois College in Jacksonville, Ill. He was a Navy veteran of World War II. He got his start in comics in New York in 1946.

Link to the book: J. Millard Tawes For Governor