Comics Rainbow: War Heroes

Happy Veterans/Armistice Day everyone, may this day of remembrance for the end of the Great War as well as a general appreciation for all those who serve find you well.  With that pleasantry both stated and in mind I’m going to be talking about war comics today on Comics Rainbow, specifically the war comics of DC but first; a bit of comic book history.  After the end of World War 2 superhero comic books seriously tapered off in popularity with a handful of exceptions like Batman and Superman powering through.  It’s not exactly clear why this happened but the best bet would be the major shift in the tastes of comic readership heralded by the end of the war.  Prior to World War 2 the comic reading public actually skewed older, hence the emphases on pulpy violence like The Shadow, but when World War 2 came most of the comic reading public shipped off overseas and the new readership was much younger. 

However, by the time the war ended that new readership had aged and suddenly had new heroes: their fathers and brothers returned from World War 2.  So, at the dawn of the ’50s there was an explosion of war comic books, the 5 big ones being produced by DC comics and written by inventor of Flash and Lady Cop Robert Kanigher.  As the ‘50s dragged on the 5 major comics (G.I. Combat, Our Army At War, Our Fighting Forces, and Star Spangled War Stories) began to develop a roster of reoccurring characters that ended up permanent fixtures of the DC Universe as the superhero craze reemerged in the ‘60s.  Those are the characters I’ll be giving the full spectrum look at today; shades, shames, successes and all. 

Calling Balloon Buster the “most hated” DC war hero is a bit of a stretch.  I don’t think that any of the DC war heroes are genuinely hated though there area few problematic ones later on this list.  It’s more that Balloon Buster is the least liked, he’s the character least revisited and the character least well remembered or discussed.  His most famous aspect is that he’s the descendant of the far more interesting DC western hero Scalphunter, which at the very least does make Balloon Buster a native American war hero but when you’ve got more interesting Native American pilots like Johnny Cloud to compare with it’s a less impressive feat.  

At the same time his setting/adventures just weren’t that great fodder for stories.  Balloon Buster is an American bi-plane pilot from World War 1 who takes his name from all the German war dirigibles he presumably busted.  As I mentioned Balloon Buster isn’t really a bad or hated character so much as he’s not really a character at all, he’s just your very basic war pilot who lucked into remembrance thanks to his more famous relative, pretty much making him the war comics equivalent of the Green Hornet.

Unknown Soldier, taking his title from the American war monument memorializing a nameless serviceman referred to as the unknown soldier, was one of the later entries in the DC war comics canon, not appearing till 1966 when DC was working to transition some of their more popular war comics to something more superhero inflected.  As such the Unknown Soldier is more in line with someone like Nick Fury or James Bond rather than the other soldiers on this list but that’s actually what I really love about him.  The whole pitch of the character is that no one knows what his real face looks like but he’s such an absolute master of disguise that he can impersonate anyone and has been called upon to do so throughout the course of the war. 

What I love about the Unknown Soldier is a combination of his brief run and the fact that he’s basically military Batman.  The superhero inflections of the characters conception were actually kept to a merciful minimum, as his enemies were only ever Nazis and nothing in the realm of actual super villains like some folks on this list.  However, the Unknown Soldier’s disguise abilities and preparedness did border on the superhuman, which basically makes him a very low level superhero being thrown into the most high stakes missions and scenarios of world war 2, forever trapped between the mission and his own conscience and the very uncomfortable knowledge that despite his incredible skills he usually can’t save or directly help most of the soldiers he interacts with.  By the point of Unknown Soldiers’ creation the ‘60s were already heading for their ending and the more thoughtful storytelling of the ‘70s and that really shows with this character.

This probably won’t win me any favors.  The Blackhawks are one of 3 incredibly popular and long-lived DC Comics war heroes and are arguably the most pervasive and enduring of the bunch.  They were originally conceived as a group of rogue pilots made up of people actually from the various Axis nations of World War 2, fighting against their own countries due to the villainy they visited upon the world.  All that is very well written and enjoyable and excellent but it’s only a small part of the Blackhawks’ history and identity.  At the time of inception the Blackhawks proved massively popular so when DC did decide to transition some of its war stories into a superhero like space they started with the Blackhawks, giving them a full on island base and plenty of super villains to actually face.  

None of this worked and the Blackhawk superhero years are honestly some of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever read.  However, it did prove very popular and led to a whole slew of Black Hawk superhero comics, with the team eventually swapping out their flight suits for the weird open chest uniforms they’re wearing here.  The only good thing that came out of this era was the character of Lady Blackhawk, a female member of the crew that eventually became a lot more compelling and interesting when she joined the female superhero team the Birds of Prey.  As much as I like the classic Blackhawks comics where they actually fought the Nazis and were somewhat interesting their long and embarrassing stints as superheroes has tarnished their reputation in a major way for me. 

Here’s another choice that probably won’t win me any favors.  Enemy Ace is #2 on the incredibly popular and long-lived war heroes list only with a slight wrinkle: he wasn’t fighting for the right side.  Framed as a Red Baron type German bi-plane pilot in World War 1 Enemy Ace, real name Baron Hans Von Hammer, is probably one of the most interesting and complex comic characters ever written.  Setting him as a German in World War 1 is an interesting move but also a pretty smart one as it allows the series to sidestep the issue with him fighting for the Nazis.  What really works about the book is Ace’s unique blend of gloomy cynicism and aristocratic distaste for the whole affair even though that detachment doesn’t keep him from murdering his way through wave after wave of British pilots.  

The whole idea of Von Hammer is that he’s the product of war, a kind of living death that almost seems to exist beyond the morality of men.  He’s not being presented to us for judgment or to be killed, simply as some who was, the end result of so much death and murder.  He does have a moral code of chivalry, which helps sell him as a character we can engage with, and the fact that there really was no “right side” in World War 1 goes a long way in defining the gray area Von Hammer occupies.  There was also an amazing graphic novel in 2001 entitled Enemy Ace: War in Heaven written by Garth Ennis, that revolved around Von Hammer being persuaded to join the Luftwaffe in World War 2.  It’s an incredible read fits Von Hammer’s character well to the real world incidents of the German aristocracy of World War 1 discovering the true horror their war had wrought in the death camps of Nazi Germany.

Gravedigger, real name Ulysses Hazard, is one of the few entries on this list to come out as late as the ‘70s.  Despite coming out so much later on in the run of DC war heroes he’s easily one of the most interesting and incredibly underutilized characters in the whole war canon.  His essential pitch is “Captain America without the soldier serum,” in that he started life as a weak child who suffered from polio but through “sheer force of will” managed to train himself to a point of extreme physical fitness.  Upon joining the army, however, he was disappointed to find himself segregated into an all black unit that was then tasked with menial work, in particular literal gravedigging.  Frustrated with the situation he invades the pentagon demanding a better assignment, which he of course gets instead of a court martial because this is a comic.  From there he became codename: Gravedigger, a one man guerilla army against the Nazis in Europe and essentially World War 2 Rambo.  That’s a brilliant pitch for a World War 2 character and a lot of his stories are absolutely excellent, though the idea of giving him a scar shaped like a cross did feel a bit like needless overkill.  Still, Ulysses ‘Gravedigger’ Hazard deserved more screen time and if DC ever wises up to the massive World War 2 market this should definitely be one of the characters who gets a revival. 

Let’s save our outrage till the end on this one.  During World War 2 the standard type of tank used by the Americans was a Light M3 Stuart tank, named after confederate general J.E.B. Stuart.  So, in 1961 when DC was trying to spice up their war stories they decided to have the ghost of J.E.B. Stuart be sent back to haunt the tank and defend its inhabitants by the ghost of Alexander the Great.  Why Alexander sends him back or why he has power over the ghost of a confederate general is never really made clear, all we know is that the general is at first reluctant but is eventually won over by the fighting spirit of the tank men and their willingness to fly a confederate flag from their tank.  

Yeah, there’s a reason this went under the “flawed but interesting” segment of the rainbow.  I actually really like the idea of blending together spooky ghostly elements with a war story like this and I honestly wish a lot more comic adaptations would embrace the kind of “who cares, it’s cool” mentality of classic comics like this when it comes to ghosts and the otherworldly.  On the other hand having a confederate battle flag flown proudly into combat by a confederate ghost strikes me as kind of completely insensitive and wrong given the current climate of the world in 2015.  They’ve tried to retcon the idea with Jeb being forced to protect an African American crew but it never really came together.  As much as I like the basic idea of the Haunted tank it might be impossible to reconcile it, though there was a very bizarre story where the entire crew switched to an M4 Sherman tank and the ghost of union General Sherman took over guarding them so maybe if they stuck with that approach things would work better.  As it stands I don’t blame DC for letting the Haunted Tank lapse from continuity. 

Let’s be clear here, Sergeant Rock isn’t just the most beloved DC war comics hero, he’s basically the face of this entire sub-section of comics.  No character more embodies the ever changing and vast miasma of work that was this entire genre better than Sergeant Rock and the men of Easy Company.  Imagined as an everyman sergeant in the US army fighting his way through western Europe Sergeant Rock and Easy Company have fought there way through pretty much every vision of World War 2, from the clean heroism of the ‘50s to the weird sci-fi infected war of the ‘60s, the harsher spaghetti western type view of war in the ‘70s, to the grand scale of the ‘90s, and the grimy and bloody vision in modern day.  If ever there was a more perfect embodiment of the platonic form of the soldier it hasn’t been invented yet, Sergeant Rock fits basically any situation and works for any battle and the distinctive soldiers of the Easy Company he commands work just as well.  Ask for any kind of World War 2 story and I can pretty much guarantee you there’s a Sergeant Rock adventure for that.

The downside is that with that longevity there have been a lot of mishandlings of the character.  He spent some very ill advised time running the Suicide Squad, DC’s expendable blacks ops super villain squad, as well as an incredibly disappointing 2000s comic that transposed Rock to the Iraq War.  With the sole exception of Enemy Ace none of the DC war heroes have actually worked outside the wars that spawned them.  Additionally, given Rock’s length of existence and stories they did tend to repeat after awhile.  I love the Sergeant Rock stuff but it was like a running gag that every 20 issues or so Rock would have to spend an issue blind or with no hands or something.  Still they’re amazing reads and stand tall as legends of the genre for a very good reason. 

And now it’s time for the really weird stuff, not the Creature Commandos though I’m saving them for a rainbow of their own.  G.I. Robot is one of those absolutely brilliant ideas that DC never quite found a place for but was too amazing to give up on.  As such there have been about 5 different iterations of the G.I. Robot, each one equipped with its own little nickname and never once actually called the G.I. Robot.  No, G.I. Robot, it was eventually revealed/retconned, was actually the name of the military program dedicated to creating robotic soldiers.  It’s never really explained why the program was shuttered given how well the G.I. Robot works but given that the whole rigmarole is the product of nearly 20 years worth of intermittent writing and a whole ton of authors working on the concept it’s impressive anything makes sense at all with this character.  What actually does really work with G.I. Robot are most of his stories, specifically the 2 months worth of stories featuring him in Star Spangled War Stories in 1962.  I’m not sure if DC has ever collected all the G.I. Robot comics but if you ever get the chance I highly recommend them as they’re a weird yet compelling blend of speculative sci-fi, superhero adventure, and wartime action.  

Viking Commando is probably the most obscure character I’ve ever featured on here.  The star character of the 1979 6 issue mini-series All-Out War he’s kind of exactly what the name suggests: a Viking unstuck in time and dropped right into the middle of World War 2 where he’s become an allied commando through circumstances that are not entirely clear.  Like a lot of these characters Viking Commando really only works because he does though his story does involve one of the few portrayals of the Norse Gods ina  DC comic continuity.  Continuity is one of the weirder elements here as the Viking Commando’s story actually becomes a highly valued member of the army by the end of his story and even received a major publicity push in Life Magazine.  Not only that, it’s been confirmed that the Viking Commando exists in continuity with Superman, Batman, and Green Lantern.  This is why I absolutely love the idea of broader shared continuity in comics, can you imagine going to history class and having to learn about the time displace Viking warrior who became a US commando to fight the Nazis?  Most of these war hero adventures are kept quiet but Viking Commando is a superstar soldiers.  I really hope he went into politics afterwards and became like Viking Senator, though we’ll never know as his ultimate fate was never revealed. 

Finally, I’d be remise not to mention Mademoiselle Marie, the only reoccurring female war hero from DC’s big 5.  She was a French resistance fighter and a total bad ass who could blow away Nazis for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Actually, something that made Mademoiselle Marie really unique is that she often served as the lynch pin for major war comic crossovers.  Even though DC was publishing all these war stories they rarely had their characters interact but when they did, usually with Sergeant Rock teaming up with other heroes like Haunted Tank or the Losers Mademoiselle Marie served as the connecting hero, the switchboard of the Western front.  Even though she appeared at the tale end of the ‘50s her stories really didn’t favor the craziness that would come to infect the war comics of the ‘60s, though in pre-crisis continuity it was established that she had a daughter with a British spy named Alfred Pennyworth, which would make her the toughest woman in the entire Batman canon.  

Next week: we had back to the Superman canon for something Action packed 


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