Over this last weekend Amazon released an original
blockbuster streaming series entitled Man
in the High Castle, an adaptation of the Philip K. Dick story of the same
name about an alternate history in which the Axis powers won World War 2. I haven’t watched it yet but I’ve heard
a lot of good things so far and I’m already a pretty big fan of alternate
histories in general. However,
alternate histories are actually pretty rare outside of literature. There are plenty of historical farces
but as far as alternate futures crafted by changes in history that’s actually
pretty rare and the ones there are usually come from comic books.
Which leads us to today’s subject, the
most enduring and popular alternate history in comic books, the world of Uncle
Sam and the Freedom Fighters. The
heroes of an alternate timeline entitled Earth-10, Uncle Sam and his Freedom
Fighters live in a world where President Roosevelt suffered a fatal heart
attack at the height of World War 2 and the resulting instability cost the
allies the war. Now working in the
underground Uncle Sam leads a small team of super heroes in a never-ending
insurrection against the Axis Empire.
Quality Comics developed Uncle Sam, the comic book hero, off
the famous recruiting poster in 1940.
At the time Sam was basically just another super powered hero fighting
the Axis powers in the pages of pulp comics everywhere. Sam actually lived out most of the ‘40s
in relative obscurity, as was the case with a lot of heroes in the golden
age. Back then magazine comics
were cheap to produce and the booming new market that formed out of wartime
stimulus made it easy for any given publisher to produce any old superhero
story and shill it out for a profit.
However, that market didn’t prove indefinitely sustainable so when the
‘50s rolled around a lot of the little producers like Quality or Fawcette
comics went bust and ended up purchased by the only survivors of the classic
era. Thus DC Comics ended up
purchasing Quality and all of their characters including Uncle Sam and the
Freedom Fighters. However, at the
time DC was already producing a ton of its own comics and didn’t really feel
the need to reintegrate the Quality Comics heroes into the greater stable of
heroes so the Quality Heroes languished in obscurity for another 20 years.
I’ve mentioned before that the ‘70s were an amazing time for
comics and a big part of it was that’s when the fiercest and most imaginative
competition took place. See,
Marvel comics had spent the ‘60s building up a powerhouse reader base so come
the ‘70s they started expanding their breadth of material and market share more
and more, including some very lucrative TV deals. DC, feeling threatened by Marvel’s boom, decided to radically
expand their stories horizontally, branching out into all kinds of new genres
like horror and fantasy. However,
in addition to creating new heroes like Warlord or Beowulf DC also decided to
integrate characters they’d purchase from rival companies into the greater
mythos like Captain Atom, Shazam, and the Freedom Fighters. Rather than having these heroes just
appear in continuity DC decided to create an intricate web of parallel Earths,
with each Earth reserved for a different collection of purchased heroes. Shazam and his fellow Fawcette heroes
were from Earth-S, Captain Atom and the Charlton heroes were on Earth-4, and
Uncle Sam and the Quality comics heroes went to Earth-X.
This was all revealed in the pages of Justice League #107-108, which had become a blockbuster comic for
DC in the ‘70s. The first
crossover featured the heroes of the Justice League on Earth-1 and the Justice
Society of Earth-2 trying to meet up for a social gathering but, due to a
teleporter malfunction, get shunted to Earth-X and must help Uncle Sam and the
Freedom Fighters depose the Axis rule in order to return home. It’s a damn good story and it’s pretty
fun to see the JLA and JSA interact with weird heroes like the Human Bomb,
Black Condor, and Doll Man. Like a
lot of crossovers at the time the two-part story spun-off into a Freedom
Fighters solo series in 1976 written by Gerry Conway and Martin Pasko with
artwork by Ric Estrada. I’m
already a huge fan of ‘70s comics and Uncle Sam is one of my favorite
characters of all time so I’m a bit of a biased source on this one but the ’76 Freedom Fighters comic is absolutely
great and I thoroughly recommend it, even though it kind of obfuscated the
issue even further.
The Freedom Fighters were eventually retconned in the pages
of 1984’s All-Star Squadron, the
whole point of which was to retcon golden age heroes. It was revealed that the Freedom Fighters were originally
denizens of Earth-2 who had banded together to stop Pearl Harbor but failed. Disheartened by their failure the
heroes chose to migrate to Earth-X in an attempt to make up for their defeat by
aiding America in its darkest timeline.
This origin brought the team up to 1986 when DC universe destroyed its
entire Multiverse with the event Crisis
on Infinite Earths, a maxi-series that was meant to streamline DC
continuity and allow a general reshuffle to make the universe and its
characters more manageable. From
the Freedom Fighters were mostly absent from the history of the DC Universe,
appearing intermittently as a sort of adjunct group to the Justice Society, who
were enjoying an insanely popular run in the early 2000s. There was a brief appearance by Uncle
Sam in the ‘90s Spectre comic where
his origin was explained a spirit summoned by the founding fathers of America
but that’s never been too firm of a definition for his character in recent
years. Eventually, DC decided to
shake-up its continuity once more in 2005 with the event Infinite Crisis, in which the original Freedom Fighters were all
killed and Uncle Sam went missing.
Then things went weird.
See, while DC spent its 2005 restructuring its universe for
the 6 or 7th time, Marvel was raking in high book sales and major
headlines with its event comic Civil War. Civil
War earned a lot of money for a lot of reasons but a big part of it was how
much controversy it drummed up by paralleling real world incidents such as
terrorist attacks and invasive government surveillance and action. Desperate to get their hands on those
sweet controversy dollars DC decided to rebuild the Freedom Fighters from the
ground up as a sort of dark parallel to events going on in America at the time
and boy did they mess it up.
It
started with Battle for Bludhaven, an
absolutely abysmal mini-series that introduced the idea of a war between Uncle
Sam’s true America and the machinations of quasi-villain Father Time, a vaguely
immortal weirdo with the visual look of Colonel Sanders who runs some weird
SHIELD-esc agency. A lot of the
comic is a blend of bizarre and unfiltered weirdness based on notes by Grant
Morrison without really digging into what makes his ideas work. For instance, the series cast Uncle Sam
as a Christ figure, returning from death to summon a team of disciples with
revamped hero Firebrand filling the John the Baptist role.
The actually interesting idea at the heart of the comic was
that Father Time was dressing up his army of super powered henchmen in the
names and colors of previous patriotic heroes and that’s what’s drawn the
attention of Uncle Sam. That idea
is at least an interesting concept to explore which plays on the idea of legacy
in the DC universe. The rest of
the story is a bizarre mash of “topical” commentary about Katrina and the
Patriot Act blended up with out of place weirdness like President Gonzo, the
mechanical bastard, or the Cosmigods and mathemagicians. I still enjoy the series for it’s
peculiar brand of politically infused mania but a lot of folks don’t care for
it and I don’t blame them. The new
Freedom Fighters never garnered the controversy or attention DC was hoping for
and quickly passed into the background, taking the same place as their
predecessors on the DC Universe’s C-list.
The 2011 New 52 relaunch ended up returning the Freedom
Fighters to their natural habitat and made it abundantly clear how much they
probably should’ve stayed there.
DC had already hinted at an alternate Earth Freedom Fighters prior to
the relaunch in the pages of 52 and Countdown, which established the return
of the Multiverse and the existence of the Freedom Fighters on Nazi controlled
Earth-10. In the wake of the New
52 and Grant Morrison’s Multiversity,
it was confirmed Earth-10 was the new home of the Freedom Fighters only now
with an added new twist. This
Earth-10 also featured Nazi versions of the Justice League, led by a conflicted
Superman who had landed in Nazi Germany and was raised by Hitler himself.
This world views the Hitler years and
the holocaust much the same as America regards Slavery or the Trail of Tears
today; an unfortunate period of our history that need not reflect poorly on the
present. Meanwhile, Uncle Sam has
forged a new Freedom Fighters made up of those the Nazis tried to exterminate:
Phantom Lady is Romani, Black Condor is African American, the Ray is gay, and
Dollman and Dollwoman are Jehovah’s Witnesses. Even though this was one of the weaker issues of Multiversity it’s probably the most well
developed and interesting take on the Freedom Fighters since their initial
appearance, finding a great way to turn the alternate history into a dark
mirror of how we vacuum seal tragedy today, hiding behind the distance the past
affords us.
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