In the first installment of RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS, I said:
...I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures.
I wasn't particularly seeking to validate my take on Miller's "megalothymotic" tendencies when I got around to reading the second of his serials about futuristic soldier Martha "named-for-wife-of-first-U.S.-President" Washington. Some years previous I'd read the introductory arc of Martha stories, GIVE ME LIBERTY, and the last arc, MARTHA WASHINGTON SAVES THE WORLD. Both were very good adventure-stories, but without rising to the level of modern myths. However, WAR, the middle arc, not only satisfies my criteria for mythicity but also shows the artist adroitly frustrating many of the political labels comics-critics have affixed to him.
WAR commences with the status quo set up from GIVE ME LIBERTY. Martha, a Black American raised in the squalor of Cabrini-Green, joins the Pax Army of Future United States, less out of patriotism than expedience. The young woman proves to have exceptional military competence, which comes in handy in a period when America is being broken apart by a horde of secession movements. (My favorite, seen in GIVE ME LIBERTY, was a group of gay Nazis, the Aryan Thrust, whose motto was "America's future is white-- and male-- and gay.") In LIBERTY, Martha keeps a usurper from taking over the Pax government, but at the start of WAR, it's clear that there's something rotten in the United States. While she's fighting in the field, Martha's equipment repeatedly fails, and the soldiers she encounters pass rumors of strange invisible beings called "ghosts."
She survives a battle but gets wounded, during which time she apparently hallucinates her friend Raggy-Ann, a mutant she liberated from Pax before she died. Her injury puts her in the hands of an old foe, the Surgeon General, one of several robots-or-cyborgs presumably modeled on some unscrupulous original. While in the Surgeon's power, Martha beholds another friend she believes dead, her Apache-chief boyfriend Wasserstein, who "ghosts" into the installation to let her know he's still alive.
She's rescued from the Surgeon by a superior officer and taken to the orbital satellite Harmony as security. There Martha finds that even this superlative construct is suffering from constant breakdowns that emphasize Pax's attrition. Sure enough, no sooner does Martha arrive than the Ghosts strike. She pursues the Ghost craft into an irradiated zone, where she meets a bunch of mutants who, surprisingly, don't try to eat her.
Then, by dint of her relentless quest into a domain that ought to kill her with radiation poisoning, she finds her way to a mysterious redoubt-- the home of the Ghosts, whose membership does include her old friends Wasserstein and Raggy-Ann, both still alive and part of a movement to overthrow the illegitimate Pax government. Martha is converted to this movement when the Surgeon General uses her radio transmitter to send missiles to destroy the redoubt-- after which Martha leads an assault upon her former superiors.
I return to the popular canard that because Frank Miller has produced stories about violent heroes, he must perforce be a fascist. But the amusing thing about WAR is that all of the things that Miller critiques about Pax are the same things liberals always attack about conservatives: pointless militarism, an "old boy network" (which ties into the rottenness of Pax technology), the reduction of the marginalized (like mutant Raggy-Ann) into property, and the use of religion to justify government policies.
In contrast, the unnamed government that Martha brings forth is defined by dissent: the fact that even those governing constantly disagree with one another but manage to unite for the common goal of improving the world. For all the current tendency of Ultraliberals to shame people about American history, be it over slavery or colonialism, they overlook that American politics are infused by the desire to improve life. Miller, the alleged "fascist," incarnates this American spirit in a far more intelligent manner than any liberal comics-writer of the past few decades.
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