Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Real American Heroes

John Hawkins at Right Wing News as a post about the upcoming Frank Miller graphic novel pitting Batman vs. Al Qaeda.

This topic has been making the rounds of numerous blogs, but I linked to John because he included the incredibily illustrative graphic.

My responce to the Frank Miller anouncement is pretty simple: "What took so long?"

Shouldn't stuff like this been coming out back in 2002? There should be dozens of similar titles already. By this point, every major owner of animated or illustrated content should consider it a point of pride to have had all of thier major stars take up the banner and fight for America. I'm not just talking about obvious heroes like Captain America. If you had told me on September 12, 2001 that by 2006, American icons like Captain America, Batman, Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, the X-Men, and Spiderman were not fighting for the cause of freedom I wouldn't have believed you. I would have imagined that the only possible situation that could occur in was that we had lost the war and were now worried about not offending our new Sharia loving masters.

Is that what is going on?

A repeated question I've asked myself since late 2001 has been, where is GI Joe? Isn't now the time for celebrating real American heroes fighting for freedom against evil terrorist organizations determined to rule the world? Shouldn't that sound alot less implausible today than it did in 1982? Where are the Joes? Don't get me wrong, GI Joe Reinstated is nice and all, but by comparison to Al Qaeda, Cobra looks like a bunch of life affirming law abiding pansies. Isn't it time to acknowledge the real threat? Does anyone else who is a fan want to know where Hawk, Duke, Scarlett, Flint, Lady Jane, Shipwreck, Dusty and the rest were on 9/11, and what they did on that day? Does anyone else want to know what they've been doing since then, as well as see the stories of the new generation of Joe heroes? Does anyone else think that this could be the perfect vehicle for telling the story of the War on Terror? Doesn't it seem logical to think that such a series would be one of the hottest, if not the hottest selling comic books in years? It's not like that you'd even need to dumb down the horror of the story, or its moral ambiguities. If you can have a series like Ultimate X-Men, then surely you can have a mature story for far less gratouitous reasons.

Does anyone else see in that GI Joe timeline evidence of our men and women being betray by higher ups, especially say 'round about 1991? I'd like to hear the Joe's honest take on how they were used in the '90's. I for one find GI 'Eco-Warriors' to be abuse of the product line, and down right offensive and distasteful. Surprisingly, however, my views are not given nearly as much weight as the views of people who would find GI Joe fighting Al Qaeda distasteful - even though I'm customer and they are not.

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