This comic marks the first appearance, one of the few, of the Viking Commando, a viking warrior transported accidentally through time to the Second World War, and watched over by a Valkyrie maiden who wishes he was dead so she could carry him away for all eternity. After reading Robert Kanigher's fairly nuanced treatment of PTSD in Sgt. Rock yesterday, this odd little tale made for an interesting juxtaposition. Let's mix a war comic with vikings and see what happens. Very odd.
And then there's the story "Brother with Wings," about an African-American fighter pilot who has a couple of fortuitous interactions with the Haunted Tank - a tank that flies a Confederate flag all the time. While I appreciate the attempt at some subversion in this story, Lt. Bannister's quip that, having been rescued by the Haunted Tank, he's been "freed a second time" is just uncomfortable. Couple this with the depictions of Japanese soldiers in the comic, and all of a sudden it becomes starkly clear how far we've come in just under 40 years. The stories in this issue, were they conceived today, would communicate in a very different tenor, one hopes.
Unlike my foray into romance comics, I haven't found something that's really spoken to me yet. Yesterday's Sgt. Rock was pretty well done, but Rock's personality reminds me too much of Frank Miller's Dark Knight, and though the attitude may have been somewhat revolutionary in the 80s, it's cliche now.
Tomorrow we move on to another of the giant-size war comics DC put out in the 70s, and then we'll finish the week with a Vertigo re-think of the Haunted Tank. I'll be interested to see if there's any acknowledgment of the problematic celebration of the Confederacy that is all-but absent from these older comics. Onward!
No comments:
Post a Comment