Real War Stories

Let's get serious, for a moment, about the funnies. Start with the funny page (or pages, if you're lucky) of the local paper and move on down to the rack of flashy pulp enshrined at every 7-Eleven store on earth. Comics are, next to television, among the massest and crassest of the mass arts. And, freed from the expense of TV production and thus relatively free of TV's brain-police, comics are often much closer to the bone of public consciousness than their more respectable kindred arts.

Let's start by recognizing that, like too many things, and more so than most, the comics are a boy's world. At the pre-teens entry level of Archie and crew, Lulu, Rollo the Rich Kid, etc., there is room for the little girls. But by the time you graduate to the harder stuff of superheroes, gender-role stratification has set in with a vengeance. There are female characters, damsels in distress and such. And you do get the odd superheroine and supervillainess, the latter often a thinly disguised "dominatrix" and both usually endowed with bizarre, torpedo-like breasts.

The pattern holds right on through to the post-graduate world of the daily newspaper comics. A recent survey found that the typical reader of the funny pages is a full-grown, adult, white male. That may be a little surprising at first. It was to me. But when you think about that fact, perhaps with feminist sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich's book Hearts of Men in one hand and the funny page in the other, a lot of things become clearer.

For instance, a startling number of the daily strips revolve around a husband who just wants to get drunk and shoot pool (Andy Capp), play cards (Snuffy Smith), sail around with the boys (Hagar the Horrible), or just get drunk (Leroy Lockhorn and Thursty Thurston). For these guys, all that stands in the way of idyllic, alcoholic bliss is a nagging, overbearing wife who is forever spending his beer money on useless things, like clothing, and carping about trivialities, like the rent.

These strips obviously don't depict the real lives of most male cartoonists or readers. Dagwood does that. They are instead a clubhouse for grown-up boys where fantasies of escape, revenge, and a pitifully shriveled sort of freedom can be acted out daily. The operative image here is Hi Flagston sweating behind the lawn-mower. Across the backyard fence, the reprobate Thursty lies stretched out on a lawn chair surrounded by foot-high grass and weeds with his poor, beleaguered wife bringing him an endless stream of beers. Hi looks over with some disdain, but considerably more envy.

The burnout of Andy, Hagar, Snuffy, et al. (and the brown-out of Dagwood and Hi) is the sad, constricted, adult-male mirror image of superhero comics' adolescent-male visions of omnipotence, imagination, and open-ended possibility.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE fever of adolescence and the lure of the living room couch falls that other great American boys club, the military. It, too, looms large in the world of comics. Of course, there's the peacetime army of Sad Sack and Beetle Bailey. But more compelling is the blood-and-guts of the convenience store (and, now, specialty shop) pulpers -- G.I. Joe, Sgt. Rock, and other comic warriors of the whole death-or-glory platoon. The ultra-violence of the superheroes' fantasy world can, arguably, be viewed as harmless catharsis. But the war comics are more ideological, giving explicit lessons in Cold War psychosis, martial virtues, and the whole politics of testosterone.

In the Reagan era, those books have enjoyed a resurgence. Their ethos has increasingly infected superhero-land as well. That's especially troubling when you realize that the comic book audience, weighted with adolescent and late-teen males, is also the prized target audience of Pentagon demographics.

The Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO) recently put two and two together and came up with Real War Stories, a first-rate comic book, done gratis by first-rate professional comic book artists and writers and distributed by Eclipse Comics. It tells the true stories of a black sailor who wanted high-tech training and ended up on a nuclear weapons sub, a Vietnam veteran still coming to terms with the horrors he witnessed, and a female soldier who experienced only dead-end assignments and sexual harassment. It also tells of a C.O.'s alternative service adventures as a forest-fire fighter and the appealing non-conformity of a contemporary non-registrant resister. The last real war story is from El Salvador, as told by a Salvadoran refugee.

The images in Real War Stories are as strong and memorable, and sometimes as graphic, as those in its reactionary counterparts. The stories are compelling, comprehensible, and surprisingly unpreachy. It's by far the best and most effective movement-initiated infiltration into pop culture I've yet seen. It combines quality, accessibility, and artistic integrity with an urgent message aimed right where it's needed.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.