WHEN REVIVALS AREN'T REVIVALS

BY MICHAEL B. MCDANIEL

     The world of comics is always changing, isn’t it? An example of this might be the new Captain America (or Cap/Bucky as I like to call him). Is Captain Marvel a chick with an afro, a pink Kree posing as a superhero, or a Skrull whose been programmed to think he’s Captain Marvel? Sometimes the Flash is Barry Allen, sometimes he’s Wally West, and sometimes he’s Jay Garrick, and even sometimes again he’s Bart Allen (but only for about 13 issues). Green Lantern is John Stewart or is he Kyle Rayner this week? As comic readers, we are all subjected to changes constantly whether it be the slight kind like that of a costume tweak or the broad and sweeping flavor where years of continuity are swept aside because of the whims of an some editor who wants our hero to resemble what he was 20 years ago when he was a kid. Sometimes these changes honor those men who crafted those characters before them and sometimes they poo all over those same characters without regard to what was going on before they got the privilege to be associated the comic.
     As a kid, I often strayed away from the wall-crawling, super powered types and found myself drawn to the Nazi-killing exploits of Sgt. Rock, the Unknown Soldier, and the Haunted Tank. Something about those guys carrying their machine guns and blowing up the tenants of National Socialism really captured my imagination. I mean, are they’re better bad guys than the freakin’ Nazis? They had skulls on their uniforms for God sake!
     Marvel had their versions of these World War Two heroes too but they never really caught my eye like a tank commander with the ghost of James Ewell Brown Stuart riding shotgun. I mean, I named my first born son after the real life Confederate Cavalry Commander and my fascination with WW2 and the American Civil War started in the pages of comics. So if I say that I was enthralled by the exploits of these characters, take it as gospel.
    As I monitored the news from the San Diego Comic Con, I was excited to read that both the Haunted Tank and the Unknown Soldier would once again be gracing the pages of comics. My elation turned to disappointment when I realized that these were the NEW and IMPROVED versions and not the classic revivals that I have hoped for. Often DC allows their Vertigo imprint to use and re-think old characters into contrived and lame re-imaginations of classic ones. This comes from the critical success of comics like Alan Moore’s “Swamp Thing” and Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” which were not lame at all. In those cases, the retooling really worked and it was as if the gods fashioned these themselves and handed them down to Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.

      The Unknown Soldier in case you aren’t familiar with the character was an operative for the OSS who had no super powers or amazing gadgets but rather used combat training and disguise kit to battle Nazi Forces behind enemy lines. Appearing first in ‘Star Spangled War Stories’ issue 151 from June/July 1970, he became so popular that by the book was renamed the ‘Unknown Soldier’ starting with issue 205 and ran until issue 268. During this time, he would make other appearances which included fighting alongside the likes of Batman in the pages of ‘The Brave and the Bold’.   In the mid 1990s, he got the Garth Ennis treatment in a Vertigo mini-series and met modest success. Perhaps one of the reasons the success was limited was the series was set in the modern day with flashbacks to the end days of WW2 and the turbulent sixties where he seemed to be a typical war-mongering fascist tool of corrupt and evil government. Now that was original!

     DCs new grand idea for new comic entitled ‘The Unknown Soldier’ is to have the main character be a pacifist doctor named Moses Lwanga from Uganda? The series appears to have little or no resemblance to the original. The official blurb reads as follows:

“Welcome to Northern Uganda. In 2002, it’s a place where tourists are hacked to death with machetes, 12-year-olds with AK-47s wage war, and celebrities futilely try to get people to care. Moses Lwanga is a pacifist doctor caught at the center. But when his life is threatened, Moses suddenly realizes he knows how to kill all too well. What is this voice telling him the only way to fix what's wrong with the country is by slaughtering those responsible? And what is Moses’ connection to another past bandage-wrapped warrior?”

     Officially, my response is WTF? What does this have to do with the Unknown Soldier? I know I should be patient and wait until the comic comes out to read it before I pass judgment but I can’t help to be annoyed at this trend of reviving a classic character as something else altogather. Often times that not they become a member of a different ethnic minority which I guess the powers that be behind these vehicles must speculate that this will translate to more sales?  (See Spectre, Blue Beetle, and Firestorm). In all of these cases, their books have been either short lived or lack interest to merit a series of their own.  My question is this: Why can’t they bring back the Unknown Soldier and base it in WW2? Look at Jonah Hex’s latest book for example. You don’t see an Asian cowpoke running around collecting bounties calling himself Hex. Quite the contrary, you have the real deal (with half of Clint Eastwood’s face as seen in the early issues of the current run.) Readers have responded to this and it enjoys modest success in a genre dominated by union-suit wearing superheroes.

     Hot on the heels of this announcement was Vertigo’s announcement of a five issue mini-series of “The Haunted Tank” using the same formula. Originally appearing in the pages of GI Combat # 87 from May of 1961, The Haunted Tank was comic about the ghost of JEB Stuart being dispatched by Alexander the Great to look after his namesake Lt. Jeb Stuart who was a tank commander in WW2. The exploit s of the tank appeared over the next three decades and the tank and crew were even featured in the pages of “Crisis on Infinite Earths”. The series lasted until 1987 when it was cancelled at issue 288. Since that time, the Haunted Tank has made only a sprinkling of appearances. Set not in the days of WW2 but in the war torn deserts and streets of Iraq, here is what the writer of the new, soon-to-be forgotten series Frank Marrafino had to say in an interview over at Newsarama:

“This Haunted Tank is an M1A1 Abrams blazing across the sands of Iraq at the starting bell of the 2003 invasion. Again the ghost of Civil War General Jeb Stuart shows up to act as a spectral combat sage. No longer satisfied with only being a cryptic Caucasian Confucius, Jeb now takes a more active role but the frightful efforts of this plantation-raised, slave-owning, defender of the Confederacy are not entirely welcome by the black tank commander whose name is... Jamal Stuart.”

     Once again, the formula of reboot strikes here and another part of my comic childhood is soiled in the name of supposed progress or an ill attempt by the writer to be topical or get some attention for himself. Maybe they’ll be an painful Archie Bunker moment or two in the series with the Galloping Ghost of the Confederacy using  the “n-word”  and being corrected by Jamal that only “gansta rappers” or Chris Rock have the license to use that word. All of this might be better served as a Saturday Night Live skit rather than a comic!
     As a rule of thumb, if comic companies decide to use an old characters that hasn’t seen their own publications since the latter part of the Reagan or elder Bush administrations they should have the courtesy of using that character rather than some politically correct/rethinking of that character. Anything less and they should change the name to something else. Mainly because that’s what it is…something else!