UNCLE SAM

By: Jason Henderson
Date: Wednesday, October 04, 2000

Uncle Sam sees it all, and in Steve Darnall and Alex Ross' Uncle Sam, the breathing icon is going insane.

A Revolutionary veteran named Shay, facing bankruptcy for joining the war, starts a second revolution and is crushed by Washington's troops, and He is there.

Union soldiers imprisoned at Andersonville are forced to subside on filthy water, dying in droves as those who near the wall are shot. And He is there.

Blackhawk Indians make a last stand against an encroaching enemy that has made four hundred paper promises and broken all but one: 'They said they would take our land, and they took it.' And He is there.

Flash to Kent State. The 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Dearborn Auto Strike, in which Ford workers fell to police shotguns. The hubristic Okies who stripped the land of its topsoil and then choked on clouds of dust for ten long years. Land in the filthy streets of Manhattan where people spit on the man in the star-spangled hat.

It's killing him slowly.

Uncle Sam is no stranger to comics. I still remember when he was a regular character in DC's Earth 2 redux of the 1970s and 1980s. He was sort of a withered Captain America who exclaimed, 'By cracky!' while pummeling Nazis with bony fists. In a more innocent time, Will Eisner and Lou Fine presented Sam as a handsome superhero who graced the cover of National Comics. But first, Uncle Sam was an icon of political cartoons and posters; an icon with a face and body like Abe Lincoln and a costume out of a vulgar pageant. France had her Lady Liberty, regal and Amazonian. Russia had a bear. We had a joke, and we loved it.

Steve Darnall and Alex Ross' Uncle Sam is the story of Sam himself, stricken with dementia, crawling through metropolitan streets while haunted by voices in his head. He thinks that perhaps he is Uncle Sam, the spirit of Liberty, but can't be sure. He spouts random sound bites from political history, bellowing, 'The people have a right to know whether or not their president is a crook!' He goes to an election rally and attacks an Uncle Sam on stilts while listening to the fascist speech that underlies the speech the Senator actually gives. He warps forward and back in time, observing and occasionally trying to defend the country he represents, trying to explain what went wrong.

Uncle Sam is written by Steve Darnall, who has a wonderful, eloquent voice, capable of poetry and full of frank idealism and rage. To some extent he's trying to make an argument for idealism itself, railing in the crooked senator's voice at 'you cynical, apathetic, ignorant, beaten-down sheep!' He reaches deep into the classics to frame his story, even giving Sam a trip through the inferno guided by Columbia and then by a stoic Russian bear. It was pure joy to see Dante re-imagined this way.


The images from Alex Ross, meanwhile, are haunting and realistic in that way that one supposes could have been done all along, but that few if any (none come readily to mind) did. Ross' technique is the logical extension of the paperback illustrations that talented painters used to feed themselves paintingDoc Savage and The Avenger presented in such hyper-real tones that the covers had a grandeur beyond the pulp stories they adorned. In Ross' work, you get those illustrations, but then Doc Savage walks off the cover and has coffee with his team. What could be a gimmick is always deftly handled with Ross; he gives us rugged painted men and women in actual stories, and one wonders how far he might actually take it. I can't wait to see Ross do Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Together, Darnall and Ross have concocted an interesting work that lands squarely in the realm of postmodern comic art, which has been marked by a constant dialogue between the work itself, the reality it reflects, the works by which it is inspired and the preferably experienced reader who reads it. There could be no Uncle Sam without the World War I posters that nailed his look, but also not without the comics, where we grew accustomed to the character as a character. Today's post-modern comics are so self-aware they make readers' heads spin and don't work otherwise. It would be impossible to enjoy Astro City without an awareness of comics as stories of perfect people, and it would be impossible to enjoy Uncle Sam without an awareness of hero comics as bully pulpits for American pride

Uncle Sam is not a political manifesto as such; Darnall and Ross don't seem to have any sort of call to action in mind. One presumes they're leaving the solutions to future Lincolns and Jeffersons. The book is more a tract, a protracted, lyrical observation that the icon of freedom might very well go insane if forced to confront reality, which is really a simple observation that ideals are perfect whereas reality is not. Darnall suggests sadly that libertyby which he seems to mean democracyhasn't really had a chance to succeed, because it was killed as soon as the Revolution ended and the new State destroyed Shay's Rebellion. The United States careened for a while, trying to fight for liberty, but ended up fighting for power. I'm not sure what Darnall would have one do about all this, but I'll give an A for a lovely and informative rant.

Of course Uncle Sam is all fairly obvioushow common, one might think, to tell this story this way. 'Look! It's Uncle Sam, arrested and thrown in jail! Uncle Sam beaten by police!' Bad performance art and off-off-Broadway come to mind. But Darnall has chosen his image on purpose. He's chosen a superhero, one of the first superheroes to be drawn as such. Of course Uncle Sam, the image, is simple and vulgarthe iconography of Uncle Sam is meant to be immediately accessible to anyone and everyone. Of course he's common, because he represents the collective strength of common men. And if Darnall and Ross' presentation is vulgar, it's because that's where we live. In the end, Uncle Sam is a political cartoon, because it can be no other.

Trade Paperback from DC/Vertigo. Written by Steve Darnall. Art by Alex Ross.