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Monday, November 23, 2015

Panel Vision - History of Uncle Sam & The Freedom Fighters


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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