War Comics

Uncle Sam has a furrowed brow. His eyes have lost their twinkle, and his skin, his clothing, indeed his entire disposition is worse for the wears of war. He looks wearier than he once did—almost ragged. Yet his visage is severe and resolute, although he no longer points fingers. "Get off that throne!" he proclaims, with lips sealed. In his hand is a pistol. It is pointed at you.

This image appeared on the cover of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (Leslie's Weekly) in December 1917.¹ The paper predates the Civil War. During World War I, it produced an entire series under the heading "The War in Pictures," of which the gun-wielding Uncle Sam is a part. Uncle Sam imagery typifies the historical role of comics in capturing wartime civic responsibilities, iconographies of war cultures, and the simple truth of armed conflict and violence. These factors, and more, have origins in the nineteenth-century editorial cartoons of Thomas Nast, such as one picturing Uncle Sam riding atop a snail (labeled "45th Congress") with a scowl on his face and the payroll for the Army and Navy in his arms. By World War II, Uncle Sam was a reincarnation of the American Spirit (from a soldier slain in the Revolutionary War) and a character of Will Eisner's National Comics in the early 1940s, then later a supporting member of the 1970s series Justice League of America. Two of Uncle Sam's earliest superpowers were Liberty and Freedom, the roots of what Martin E. Marty might call the civic religion of an American way of life. Put simply, comics are not only embedded in histories of war; wars, too, mingle with the rhetorical history of comics.

Each book under review here engages comics and their artful portrayals of everything from tired stereotypes of Americanism to the diffuse traumas of war. Each book also shows how comics shift the register from demonstration to documentation. This essay is therefore concerned with how comics serve as records of war. However, these books do not approach records solely as bare facts or accounts of bygone proceedings but also as proofs of consequences and implications. To throw war into comic relief is to call combat to mind, to revisit it, and to etch its impressions into visual-verbal form. Comics make up a tradition of showing forth what otherwise might not be said or seen, blending reality with fantasy and humor with humorlessness. I argue that comics of warfare constitute records of pain, propaganda, and combat experiences had by those on the home front and those on the frontlines. But to see these records is, first, to see what Hillary L. Chute calls the "visual idioms" that make up the graphic matters of comics and their rhetorical expressions.

Pardoned Expressions

A comic license allows for frank and even profane depictions under the cover of the expression "just joking." Comics, too, are pardoned for portrayals of truths that seem to transcend, if not descend into, harsh realities. As Chute puts it: "Comics is not illustration—it is not about accuracy in rendering—but rather is a type of expressive language" (72). This is particularly the case in times of war, which epitomize SNAFU.²

Graphic imagery is endemic to warfare. Chute traces it back to scenes from the Iliad imprinted on vases during the Attic period of ancient Greece. More specific to the United States, World War II brought the so-called Golden Age of Comics. The Cold War saw magazines regularly featuring cover pictures like one from Time on July 2, 1951, which shows the...