Truth Red White and Black 4 Featured Reviews 

“Truth: Red, White, and Black” #4

By | June 22nd, 2021
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

The cover of issue 4 of “Truth: Red, White, and Black” features a massive silhouetted super soldier holding a German soldier over his head a feat of superhuman proportions. The only feature of the super soldier not silhouetted is glowing white gritted teeth, which gives the figure an ominous air. The German soldier by contrast is rendered in full color and intricate detail. His expression is one of pure terror. His arms and legs flailing. The background is red and white patriotic stripes. The use of silhouettes on each of the covers serves to exaggerate the fierceness of the figures and dehumanize the subject, just as the scientists and superior officers are dehumanizing the victims of these inhumane tests. They are nameless, faceless, anonymous extensions of the US government. This is how Uncle Sam sees these black soldiers, as black shadowy beasts and nothing more.

Cover by Kyle Baker
Written by Robert Morales
Illustrated and Colored by Kyle Baker
Lettered by JG and Comicraft’s Wes

In the tradition of ORIGIN, Marvel reveals the shocking secret history of Captain America! In 1940 there was a man who had many of the same qualities as Steve Rogers – save for one, the color of his skin – and TRUTH is his story!

In issue 4, the creative team continues to put the spotlight on the emotional toll the secret super soldier experiments took on the families of the soldiers. This is something a lot of war fiction neglects exploring; most war movies and books focus on the battles themselves. Those are important, but it neglects the pain of those left at home. If they do depict the return home, they often fail to show how the family of the soldiers are traumatized by the war. The focus is almost entirely on the soldiers adjustment to civilian life (which is highly important) and not the pain of their civilian loved ones. Even if they are spared the trauma of losing their loved ones to actual combat, their absence from home and the seemingly endless wait for word from the front can be highly traumatic as well.

The super soldiers see their first combat and it is grotesquely rendered in violent, intricate detail. An entire splash page depicts countless soldiers engaged in up close, chaotic mayhem. Dozens of soldiers are fighting in all different directions at once. as the super soldiers are multitasking, with the shading and splashes of green, teal, and beige. In the panels that follow, the newly minted super soldiers get their massive hands dirty, forgoing their weapons and crushing the Nazis with their bare hands.

Sociopathic Damon Larson (who since the experiments has swelled to six or seven times the size of an average man) gleefully takes delight in killing his first white man, admitting that he has killed before the war, even killing children. In a silhouetted panel that further dehumanizes both killer and the casualty, he hoists the average sized German soldier high up off the ground with just one hand. But a grenade blast interrupts his moment of pure, blissful schadenfreude. I can’t help but think of the lyrics of the song “Love Love Love” by the Mountain Goats: “Raskolnikov felt sick, but he couldn’t say why / When he saw his face reflected in his victim’s twinkling eye / Some things you’ll do for money and some you’ll do for fun. / But the things you do for love are going to come back to you one by one.” Raskolnikov is of course the murderous protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s classic massive tome Crime and Punishment. That lyric always stuck with me since I first heard it in my apartment in Calgary in 2006. There is a twisted, warped love between a killer and his victim and the stain of that most final, irrevocable of acts will stay with someone forever. In all my scholarly research on PTSD, it is evident that perhaps the most traumatic thing a human can experience are not the things done to us but the things we do to others.

In the aftermath of the battle, the ruins of this country town are rendered with only a handful of earthy tones, without much variation between hills, ruins, and even the skin tones of the new super soldiers. They have almost literally become part of the landscape of the region they just decimated. The diminutively drawn, impish Lt. Merritt is small by average standards. He rails against the massive super soldiers, with puerile racist drivel as though he too has been injected with the super soldier serum and has also swelled to six times the size of an average male. This issue is full of big reveals, one which brought me chills. You’ll know what I’m referring to the second you turn the page. It is visually stunning and may leave you cheering quietly to yourself.

The injustices of blatant racism, white supremacy, and dehumanizing experimentation in the comic, all which have their own real life historical basis, make you wonder if the Allies really were that much better than the Nazi scourge we justly waged war against. The Nazis were worse, with their death camps and widespread extermination of the Jews, LGBTQ community and others. But we’re not off the hook either. The immoral plague of slavery isn’t that far off from 1942, or even 2021. And shortly after the war, the United States started project MK Ultra (also called Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke) which featured experiments on human subjects (many which were unwitting and unsuspecting black and brown prisoners) against their will. These experiments consisted of dosing unknowing subjects with mind altering drugs in an effort to master mind control and physically and even sexually abusing these poor people. But even in more recent times we have the grave injustices of the multifarious abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, committed by US soldiers who proudly took pictures of it. I applaud the work that Morales and Kyle are doing, using the fictional Marvel Universe to expose real, historical injustices. To paraphrase the great Neil Gaiman, fiction is truly the lie we use to tell the truth.


//TAGS | 2021 Summer Comics Binge

Devin Fairchild

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