I had not planned to honor Veterans' Day with a post on an old war comic-- assuming "honor" is the proper word-- but it just so happened that a few days before Vets' Day, I came across a comics-essay mentioned that one of the first, if not the first, comics titles to take place during the Vietnam War was this very short-lived feature. So, after I read all seven appearances of this feature, I decided to devote a post to DC Comics' first Vietnam-based feature.
I don't think the Vietnam conflict had become hugely unpopular with the American public in 1966. Nevertheless, this feature seems to have taken an odd path compared to DC's other war-books featuring continuing characters. For one thing, the hero, Green Beret Phil Hunter, is almost entirely a loner, one who comes to the aid of other American soldiers but is no longer a member of the armed forces. Though Hunter's tour of duty is up and he has refused to re-enlist, he declines to return to the U.S. Captain Hunter has a Rambo-like mission: to find his lost twin brother Nick, a serviceman who went missing in Vietnam. The U.S. government seems totally okay with Hunter not only retaining custody of his uniform and combat gear, but with pursuing his lone-wolf mission with no oversight. Inevitably he ends up fighting endless supplies of hostile Vietnamese, generally termed "Charlies."
Some war comics have reflected on the ethics and politics of wartime encounters, but even if HUNTER had lasted three times its seven issues, I don't think its creators would have had anything to say about Vietnam. Robert Kanigher, who's credited with scripting all but two stories, probably conceived the basic setup, since it's marked with his over-the-top sentimentality and formulaic tendencies. Hunter is largely a superman, more often seen wading into a half-dozen opponents and thrashing them with his fists, rather than simply shooing them down. Kanigher was sometimes capable of conjuring up some decent pulp poetry, but HUNTER is one of his hack-serials, driven by the very mediocre gimmick that Phil Hunter believes that he has a psychic link with his twin, guiding him to his lost brother. I don't get the sense that Kanigher was very invested in the narrative, which may be the reason why he wrapped up the series in issue #105, wherein Phil does find and rescue his brother Nick. But just in case Hunter's adventures grabbed a few readers, the last story also promotes the exploits of the twins' WWII-serving father Lieutenant Hunter-- and this Hunter's Nazi-busting activities with his team, "Hunter's Hellcats," enjoyed a much longer run than HUNTER.
While Kanigher had no interest in engaging with the politics or culture of Vietnam, he did include one support-character who qualifies as a near-myth. This was Lu Lin, a curvaceous Vietnamese femme who volunteered to lead Hunter wherever he wished to go in Vietnam, to repay him for having saved her life. For most of the narrative, Hunter is suspicious of this inscrutable Oriental, and constantly wonders if she's an agent of the Vietcong, planning to lead him into a fatal trap. Hunter also forms the annoying habit of referring to Lu Lin as a "kewpie doll," and I suspect that this was his deflection from the expression "china doll"-- which even Kanigher may've realized would not track with an Asian who was not Chinese.
Lu Lin's lack of emotion and fatalism really bug Hunter, and a few times he kisses her just to see if he'll get a reaction-- which he does not. Lu Lin is thus of a piece with many pop-cultural depictions of Asians, at once half-condescending and half-admiring, and I would not be surprised if Kanigher modeled the character on figures like Milt Caniff's Dragon Lady. There's also a slight vibe of the conqueror-trope-- kill the male soldiers and then sleep with their women-- though neither romance nor genuine sexual actions are even implied. Indeed, in the final story, Lu Lin-- though she proves herself loyal to Hunter in every tale-- simply disappears from the story with no farewell, remaining as unknowable as in her first appearance. Because I think Kanigher liked the trope of "the woman whose nature is her mystery," I think Lu Lin taps ever so slightly into that myth-trope, and gives the HUNTER strip a slight distinction beyond being DC's first serial venture into the Vietnam Conflict.
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