From the front
‘Unknown Soldier’ benefits from the writer’s firsthand knowledge.
When comic book writer Joshua Dysart got the green light to update the old DC character Unknown Soldier by placing him in Uganda’s civil war, he found himself wrestling with a subject that he could not adequately research, because very little had been written about the conflict. So he traveled to Uganda to see firsthand the horrors of war and to meet its soldiers – some of them children – and its victims.
The result was a blend of feature journalism and contemporaneous historical fiction in the form of a comic book series, which helped to fill a western informational gap on the war.
A Yale University professor said Dysart, 38, depicted the civil war “leaps and bounds better than virtually every journalist” had, and outdid many researchers as well. Dysart was asked to lecture on the conflict at the Universities of Ohio and Miami, and his work was covered on the BBC, NPR and CNBC Africa. The New York Times devoted an issue’s lead space in its arts and entertainment section to the comic book.
Meanwhile, Dysart’s ongoing run of “Unknown Soldier” manages to remain an entertaining comic book despite its haunting setting, with engrossing characters and a suspenseful, well-paced narrative that weaves a love story into its representation of war.
The LBC
Dysart will sign copies of “Unknown Soldier” while sometime collaborator Mike Wellman, manager of The Comic Bug store in Manhattan Beach, signs copies of “Kids of Widney High” Saturday, Feb. 20 at Comic Expo 2010 inside the Long Beach Convention Center. (For more see longbeachcomiccon.com.)
Wellman will also sign his “Gone South” southern fried girl-vampire comics, which he recently optioned for motion picture rights.
Long odds
Comic book publisher Vertigo, a brainy imprint of the powerhouse DC Comics, approached a number of writers, including Dysart, when the company decided to revamp the Unknown Soldier. The character dates back to the 1960s, when he appeared as a World War II soldier with a face covered by bandages.
Dysart, a WWII history buff, thought about pitching a storyline with the bandaged hero in his traditional setting, but using greater realism than was found in the comics of the ‘60s. But in the end he settled on Uganda as a setting, although he knew that the war there was a tiny blip on the mainstream American radar screen. He pitched a multi-comic tale about a Uganda-born physician who returns to the country to be helpful, and is hurled into a world of insane violence, crushing oppression and impossible choices.
He figured the other writers’ pitches would focus on the Iraq war, or the war on terror, and the job would go to one of them.
“I did not expect them to green light a story about a war nobody had heard of, with characters that were exclusively African, and a main character who is forced to kill children,” Dysart said. “But it’s good to take a long shot sometimes.”
To his surprise, Vertigo said yes.
“Then I started to really think about it, ‘Oh, here comes another white guy to tell a B.S. story about Africa,’” Dysart said. “The responsibility really floored me all of a sudden. I regretted the pitch at first.”
Then he started his research in earnest, and found so little had been written about the conflict that he would have to go to Uganda and research the conflict firsthand.
“It was the only one way to do this right,” he said. “I had no other choice as a responsible storyteller.”
Horrors of war
It was 2007 and a ceasefire was in effect. Relative peace reigned in some areas for the first time in two decades.
Dysart went to one of the largest AIDs hospice/clinics in Africa, Mulago Hospital in Kampala. He went to a medical clinic camp where many wounded children were treated.
“People were still coming in after stepping on landmines,” he said.
He met with children who were fighting in the Lord’s Resistance Army, and soldiers who fought on the other side. He talked to child soldiers who had escaped their army and were struggling to return to a nonviolent way of life.
“The kids imparted all kinds of different stuff,” Dysart said. “They were having trouble finding an economic place – reintegrating into a peaceful society is a fundamental issue with child soldiers in general – and they were dealing with the trauma of reintegration. That’s the real struggle.
“I’ve always felt the ending of wars is much more difficult than the beginning of them. The entire younger generation of the Acholi [ethnic group in northern Uganda] was affected by the war.”
Dysart found “shockingly easy access” to the war’s intimate results, its seas of displaced people, a camp for war-affected children, a clinic where people experienced “the greatest suffering of their lives.”
“All doors flew open. I would meet somebody and 10 minutes later I would be eating dinner with them. It was part of a therapeutic process. They wanted to share this with somebody, wanted to be part of the larger world,” he said.
“Most white people they saw were nonprofit workers, food truck drivers, doctors – if you say you’re basically a tourist it just blows their minds,” he said.
Dysart returned with an education in the war and a deep feeling for the people swept up in it, and he began writing his “Unknown Soldier” run.
He hoped to create a “genuine education tool” that would also entertain, and he pulled that off, with the help of rich, warm illustrations by Alberto Ponticelli.
Wide acclaim
“Unknown Soldier” hit the stands, and reached far beyond the confines of the comic book stores and the geek media. The morning after the Times story was published, Dysart awakened to a flood of attention.
“There were 900 new e-mails in my folder,” he said.
He heard from a Danish consulate, people from the United Nations, media outlets and nonprofit entities including UNICEF.
“I couldn’t begin to address them all,” he said. “That morning I was invited to the book fair in Miami.”
Despite the attention from the media and academia, the comic book hardcore has given “Unkown Soldier” little support.
“It’s the second lowest selling book by Vertigo right now,” Dysart said.
He believes that the positive criticism outside the comic book press is the only thing that has prevented Vertigo from canceling his “Unknown Soldier” run.
Dysart first made waves in the comic book world when he co-created and wrote the “Violent Messiahs” series in the late ‘90s. Since then his has written for heavyweight titles including “Swamp Thing,” “Conan” and “Hellboy,” which was created by comic book superstar Mike Mignola of Manhattan Beach.
Dysart is scheduled to work on a graphic novel adaptation of the 2003 Neil Young album “Greendale,” sometimes described as a “rock novel” that follows the lives of a small town American family.
Kids are alright
Wellman took a liking to the subjects of his “Kids of Widney High,” a singing group composed of mentally and physically disabled students from a special education high school in L.A., after he saw them perform.
He put on his editor and publisher’s cap, and oversaw a project in which the kids wrote their own eponymous 36-page comic, which was then illustrated by notable artists from the South Bay and beyond.
“This wasn’t some occasion where a celebrity rock band casually said, ‘Oh, we’d like you to make a comic book,’” Wellman said shortly after the book’s release. “The Kids of Widney High were hands-on from the very beginning, telling the stories they wanted to tell.”
Every word of dialogue in the book was taken from extensive interview sessions with the eight members of the group and then compiled into “a story of adventure and triumph,” Wellman said.
Comic book artists on the project included Robbi (“Maintenance”) Rodriguez, Rafael (“Sonambulo”) Navarro, Rikki (“The Monacle and Jimmy Specs”) Niehaus, Chuck (“Black Metal”) B.B., Chris (“Bainst”) Brandt and Neal (“Negative Burn”) Von Flue.
Von Flue and his wife Dawn Von Flue are creators of a 40-foot mural showcasing Hermosa history on the western wall of Cantina Real restaurant on the Pier Plaza. The Von Flues also created an art-deco tile mermaid at the Neptunian Woman’s Club of Manhattan Beach. ER