Casualties of the Propaganda War

Umberto Eco, tr. Geoffrey Brock, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Harcourt, 2004), pp. 233-4.

Since it would clearly have been difficult simply to dispatch a platoon of SS or Blackshirts to occupy New York, we had, for several years already, been waging war in comic books, from which the speech balloons had disappeared, replaced by captions beneath each picture.  Then--as I must have seen happen in various comics--the American characters simply began to vanish, replaced by Italian imitations, and in the end--and this, I think, was the last, most painful barrier to fall--the famous mouse was killed.  The same adventures continued as if nothing had happened, but from one week to the next, without any notice, the protagonist ceased to be Toplino [Mickey Mouse] and became a certain Toffolino, who was a human, not a mouse, although he still  had four fingers, like all Disney's anthropomorphic animals, and his friends, though also humanized, continued to go by their original names.