JODY MACGREGOR dons his pop culture goggles to look at the way recent American comic books have been dealing with the US-led conflict in Iraq. Don’t be surprised if it’s not quite as gung-ho as you might expect…

On the cover of the first issue of Captain America, he punched Hitler right in the face. It was an arresting image that proved popular with the kids, and war and comics have been linked ever since. Popular series like Commando Comics, Sgt Rock and Our Fighting Forces sometimes ran for longer than the wars they portrayed, telling the same tales of heroic fighting men gritting their teeth and squaring their jaws. In 2005, Marvel Comics started publishing the latest in this long line of war comics, Combat Zone: True Tales Of G.I.s In Iraq.

Although Marvel went out of their way to draw attention to the fact that its writer, Karl Zinsmeister, had been an embedded journalist in the war, what they didn’t point out was that he was about to become President Bush’s Assistant for Domestic Policy. The series was a shameless piece of propaganda about the effort the US troops spent protecting civilians, with extended sequences of commanders agonising over their every decision broken by bizarre moments of hyper-detailed artillery porn demonstrating the strength of American firepower. Nobody read the series and it sank like a stone, cancelled at the fifth issue.

In the two years since then, the way war has been seen in comics has been very different. First there was Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart’s The Other Side, which told the twin stories of a US Marine and a volunteer in the People’s Army of Vietnam. The American protagonist reacted to being drafted by attempting to catch V.D. and then claiming he was gay to avoid service, plus he hallucinated ghosts and heard his gun tell him to kill during training. He was an antidote to the bold Sgt Rock of the old days, who would frequently storm bunkers bare-chested and take out aircraft with small arms.

After The Other Side was published to critical acclaim, the floodgates were open. Comic-book readers are now spoiled for choice when it comes to satirical commentaries on America at war. Rick Veitch’s Army@Love posits that in the near future, further unpopular wars in the Middle East have forced the US to reinstate a kind of draft, targeted at those who most profit from its wars – the corporate sector. When the Army’s ranks are swelled by middle-aged advertising executives, the way they do business changes dramatically. A propaganda campaign orchestrated by brand managers who excel at media manipulation and mass coercion succeeds in selling the idea of military service the same way advertising always does with tough products – by making it sexy. An entire generation of randy youth and bored spouses begin to see a trip to the war zone of ‘Afbaghistan’ as the new Spring Break.

Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman’s Shooting War also tackles the subject of propaganda. It presents the war in Iraq from the point of view of a video-blogger who works for the fictional Global News and is manipulated by both sides into showing graphic footage of shootings and beheadings. The zealous Americans he’s embedded among strap on masks with images of the cross before they enter battle, as if they’re crusading knights.

Taking the idea of savage satire further than anyone else is Kyle Baker in the series Special Forces. That’s ‘special’ as in ‘school’. The backstory is that an Army recruiter, the kind of guy who hangs around the mall trying to convince under-educated and unemployed kids how great a job it is getting shot at, is given a quota to fill with the threat that if he fails he’ll be the one sent to Iraq to make up the numbers. Desperate to avoid that fate, he hurriedly recruits all the misfits and morons he would otherwise turn away, sneaking them through the tests no matter how unfit for service they actually are. In a detail based on an almost-unbelievable true story, he even manages to recruit an autistic boy.

What the current spate of war comics have in common is more than just their starkly negative portrayals of Team America’s ideals and the effects of their crusade. These comics go a step further than movies or books about the same subject; not one of them is simply against the war, yet still pro-troops. They share a common depiction of soldiers as lunatics or fools, whether hallucinating basketcases, horny kids or zealous fundamentalists.

Comic books, like all the art forms we perceive as merely trash culture, offer us a glimpse into the shadows of the collective unconscious. Things that would otherwise stay hidden under the rocks in the dark of the mind are thrust into the light in a transitory medium no one pays much attention to precisely because it’s a transitory medium no one pays much attention to. Rushed out to make deadlines and often edited only lightly if at all, comics are a kind of automatic drawing, unfiltered and raw glimpses into the subconscious of mass culture. Although the creators may not always be aware of how blatant their subtext seems, their preoccupations seep through.

Captain America, frozen after punching Hitler in the face and thawed out to protect America from the red menace during the Cold War, is conspicuous by his absence. He’s not fighting in America’s wars any more. He did not punch Saddam Hussein in the face. The last war story told with Captain America was Civil War, a series in which he lead an underground movement against attempts to have superheroes registered as Weapons of Mass Destruction. At the end of that series, after he surrendered to prevent further collateral damage from the fighting, he was assassinated. That’s where the fictional embodiment of America’s spirit of wartime heroism is. He’s dead. They killed him off because not even America believes in him any more. And anyway, he was a Democrat.

Satire and irony however, appear to be alive and well.

CAPTAIN AMERICA, SPECIAL FORCES, SHOOTING WAR, CIVIL WAR (TPB) and THE OTHER SIDE (TPB) are available now through specialist comics retailers.

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