I thought I’d review a comic book.
Unknown Soldier, in fact, was not bought by me, but by Watsonwil, who lost a bet with me that Dubya would be waving around evidence of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein by October last year. I won the bet, and he sent it to me. It was a fine gift. Garth Ennis is the writer (of Preacher fame), and Kilian Plunkett (someone I’d never heard of before) does the art. Its published by Vertigo, and was originally published as a 4 issue miniseries in 1997.
The front cover does a good job of telling you the essence of the book’s content. In the foreground is the Soldier: a man with his face warpped in tight bandages, almost like a lobster-tail armoured helmet, rather than in the usual “Harvey Dent in DKR” stripes of gauze across the face. A smoking gun is in the man’s right hand, and his back, a grubby brown and seamed trenchcoat, occupies most of the page. In the background is an American flag, draped downwards and sagging, stained and heavy with mud. Yes, the character has been subjected to “the Vertigo makeover”, and it is a good one.
I remember the Unknown Soldier from my youth: perhaps from a team-up with Batman? I was never really interested in war comics as a kid - Sgt Rock and Easy Company bored me, probably most of all because of Kubert’s scratchy art. The Unknown Soldier of my youth was even more disinteresting - no powers, no costume, disingenuous and improbable disguises. I vaguely remember reading in Who’s Who that the character was killed off, having assassinated Adolf Hitler at the end of WW2.
In this book, however, the Unknown Soldier has survived the war, and his post war history is sordid and bitter. The Soldier’s past in fighting America’s enemies is recounted by a variety of people who encounter him, and are on more than one occasion nearly his victims. The Soldier plays a pivotal role in Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua. He is driven by an unshaken belief in his cause and American righteousness. While one of Batman’s more interesting aspects is his committment to his war on crime, the Soldier is another step beyond: he is ruthless, terrifying, and unstoppable. He has his hands bathed in blood and grit.
This is all conveyed with a styled vision by Plunkett. His art would probably be unremarkable save for two things: first, it is evident that he took an enormous amount of effort in his lay-outs (something I admit I didn’t notice until I read the notes at the end of the book). Second, his facial expressions are excellent, and he plays up to Ennis’ hard core script. While the Soldier himself looks positively demonic, with possessed eyes and belligerent postures, it is the facial expressions of the other characters which to a great extent entertain in this book. Plunkett does a nice job, overall.
The other characters are cannon fodder or vehicle for the Soldier’s story, but each have their own individual foibles and personality. Agent Clyde is a ramrod stiff CIA agent, and his own personal values, his self-induced haunting, and wry humour make him endearing. Screwball is a female assassin, and for all her insanity she is kind of, sort of likable. Bradley, the Vietnam vet, is someone you respect, even as he tells you (through Clyde) to “sit the fuck down”. Even the old WW2 soldier, Joshua Markewicz, beset with Alzheimer’s disease and bedridden, is a likeable old coot. Ennis is good at characterisation. Many of these characters have only a few pages devoted to them, yet they stay in your head even as the story movies on. They are (with the exception of Screwball) ordinary people confronted and scarred by the horror of what they are involved in, and by the horror of what the Soldier is, and what he embodies.
Ennis is an Irishman, and I think this enables him to tell this story without the limitations of patriotism. The book is critical of American foreign policy. One sequence has the Soldier confront the the Shah of Iran, in which he coerces the Shah to sack the Iranian prime minister Mossadegh after he nationalised BP. Ennis describes this as leading to the rise of Islamism in Iran. Other interventions in Vietnam and Nicaragua have similar unfortunate long-term results, none of which seem to faze the Soldier.
“Why are we here?” asks Clyde.
“Because one man, in the right place, at the right time, can make a difference. And win a war. That is why we are here,” says the Soldier.
I highly recommend this story. Ennis uses grim humour to highlight the fundamental theme of his story, to good effect. It has a great ending, which leaves you wondering on more than one level, and is even, in a roundabout way, educational. 8 out of 10.