Hold Up Your End! War Fund Week

This poster by American artist W. B. King exemplifies the visual rhetoric of World War I fundraising campaigns. A nurse in full uniform holds aloft a banner inscribed "War Fund Week / One Hundred Million Dollars," while an explosive burst erupts above. The composition employs bold typography and figurative illustration—techniques emerging from newspaper advertisement design of the era. By 1918, the visual language of American comics and commercial art had crystallized: simplified forms, dramatic perspective, and the graphic integration of text and image to convey urgent narrative messages. Such posters were distributed widely, leveraging the mass-media aesthetic that Sunday newspaper pages had pioneered to mobilize public participation and financial commitment.