Comics Grinder

Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition. Steve Darnell and Alex Ross. New York: Abrams, 2024. 121pp, $25.99.

Guest review by Paul Buhle

The Special Election Edition came out just in time, more or less, for the most disappointing election in recent US history. Or just in time to drive the main point of this extraordinary comic home: the utter confusion in what the US has been, stands for, might be, remains very much the national saga. No matter what any politician (maybe not Bernie Sanders or AOC) says. The bilge of the politicians’ messaging still makes for indigestion and the worst may be ahead.

Never mind, let’s focus on the comic. Darnell (the scriptwriter), Ross (co-plotter, so called, and illustrator, joined by Todd Klein on Lettering) caught me flat footed in the original 1997 printing. Like any other radical historian of the 1960s-80s generation, I was not likely to expect anything so riveting, no immanent critique of “Americanism,” from the mainstream comics industry. Sure, gay and lesbian superheroes had been added, not to mention the popularity of noir comics with heavy social implications. Uncle Sam was another geography.

So much so that its real value, and I hope real impact, is difficult to characterize. The tall fellow in the funny suit with suspenders emerged in the nineteenth century, definitely boosted by the tall (and homely) Abe Lincoln but goes back to earlier self-celebration. You might say that it borrowed a little or a lot from the “Columbiad” celebration of the marvelous creature (actually a semi-clothed female) entering the New World with perfectly innocent intent, an image displaced by icons from the neoclassicism of the Roman Empire: the heraldic eagle, counterpart to the “Senate” on “Capitol Hill.” Uncle Sam was more the fighting type, of course, but he had God on his or our Side.

Thus the First World War posters set the pace, with actor James Montgomery Flagg as model for Red Cross fundraising and recruitment messages, not to mention contemporary sheet music illustrations and magazine covers. We have been stuck with the guy ever since, actually recreated as a comic book action hero by none less than Will Eisner in the 1940s.

This book’s Uncle Sam is anything but clear-minded or resolute. He’s homeless and hapless, a broken old man wandering through a deeply sick society. The cruelty of the present for this pathetic dumpster-diver drives him back to a real and imagined past, or many pasts. He finds himself, for instance, in a modest domestic scene with a kindly wife during the Revolutionary War. She explains that George Washington is a slaveowner protecting his own fortune. Sam, a healthy looking Sam in his 30s, can only say what he will say again and again, “I pray this war will make us better. All I know is that I can’t let it make things worse.” Off to battle, presumably. Too soon, he finds himself in a modern USA where “I walk past a nation that’s covered in equal parts of dirt and despair.”

The voices inside his head won’t go away, like Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of State on Native Americans, “We must frequently promote their interest against their inclination” as they are sent on the notorious death-march Trail of Tears. Sometimes, it’s John Brown who is quoted, sometimes journalists describing the inhuman behavior of white mobs assaulting a black prisoner later on in the nineteenth century.

Uncle Sam, at the scene of Civil War battles, is particularly beset. Here, if anywhere, is the Good War. My own Great Great Grandfather, an Abolitionist who marched with Sherman through Georgia, making the continuation of slavery impossible, would surely have said so. And yet it did not seem to bring the purge of racist sins that idealistic Americans hoped for, quite the contrary: the excuse in advance for other wars with idealistic claims entirely false.

A survivor of the Dust Bowl, looking remarkably like the wife of the first Uncle Sam, can only say, “We had it coming.” Rip away the top soil for short term gain and what else should be expected; the craving for constant expansion provided its own rationale and rationalizations.

And so Sam grinds onward into the 1980s and his apparent appropriation by the New Right where public manipulation becomes almost open: “If there’s one thing I learned about you, the American people…it’s that you…fear change.” Sell them emotional security, sell them the image of liberalism as the enemy, and any protester can be bashed on the head, jailed, even slaughtered.

In Sam’s head, he is still marching to the tune of Yankee Doodle, while in reality he sits in jail, referencing MLK, Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti.  Sooner or later, he gets to the slave pens and is released as harmless, only to meet Miss Britannica, Sam’s original.

The horrors relived from here to the end of the book are less words than pictures, and less horrific in images (with some exceptions) than in the messages being driven home, page after page. An Empire acts like this or it wouldn’t be an empire.

Paul Buhle