Up until the 1970s it was still possible to imagine former Civil War soldiers as heroes of western fiction, the most memorable being Jonah Hex. I feel reasonably certain that whenever comic books portrayed Confederate (or former Confederate) soldiers as heroic, they weren't necessarily endorsing any political stance of the Confederate States. It was simply a response to the well traveled literary trope of "brother against brother" with which Americans-- or at least Caucasian Americans-- chose to portray the Civil War.
One of the most unusual uses of the "courageous Rebel" in my experience appears in MILITARY COMICS #33, in the lead BLACKHAWK story. The titular hero and some of his companions crash land in war-torn China, where they have an odd encounter with the descendants of the American Civil War.
Naturally, the Johnny Rebs come to the aid of the 1940s crusaders against a platoon of cruel Japanese, and the story ends implying that this isolated group of former Americans will be "repatriated" by virtue of their animus for the Japanese march of conquest. Oddly, the writer calls the "Civil War" a new name: "the Old Confederate War."
No comments:
Post a Comment