Despite a long tradition of scholarship on the Turkish republic and its nation-building project, the political implications of popular culture and its associated visual imagery have been largely overlooked, even derided as a less-than-serious research question. If one reflects on the country’s rates of literacy estimated from its first census in 1927 and another in 1950—between 8 and 10.5 percent and below 32 percent, respectively, this oversight and even such dismissals are intellectually inexplicable not only for the early republican and single party eras but for the multi-party and Cold War ones, as well. In traditional studies of nationalism, however, wherein ideas of literacy and print capitalism are foundational, how might we explain a thorough—albeit contested—nation-building project when well over half the population remained illiterate after two and a half decades? In my research on identity construction in Turkey, I have turned to approaches found in the fields of cultural studies, visual studies, and critical geopolitics to engage with this historiographic oversight and theoretical problem. In doing so, I have selected for research the specific medium of comic books. Bringing together research questions in the scholarship of both popular culture and critical geopolitics, geographers focused on questions of a sub-field now known as critical geopolitics to identify and analyze the idea of nationalist superheroes as revealed in Western comics. While relevant heroes and titles typically occupied only a portion of the comic book marketplace in countries like the US, I demonstrate how the nationalist superhero genre became and endured as the mainstay of comics in Cold War Turkey. In doing so, I account not only for sales figures but also how particular sub-genres of the Turkish superhero comic book spoke to a plurality of past and present predicaments faced by both Turkish and Turkic peoples, giving way to nationalist heroes both of mythic pasts and of the emerging Cold War itself. While the Kemalist republic’s curriculum centered almost exclusively on the life, legend, and lessons of its singular founder, the fictional pantheon of comics heroes safely and entertainingly augmented the wider Turkish national narrative, providing citizens with yarns of adventure, heroism, intrigue, and even romance. While these heroes are today regarded more so with nostalgia than nationalistic reverence, they remain highly regarded, inseparably linked with Cold War recollections, and relevant as their invented eponyms continue to be bestowed upon many of the nation’s newborn males.