Uncle Sam (1997) | Graphic Novel

Uncle Sam is by Steve Darnall, Alex Ross, and Todd Klein

During times when confidence in the U.S government is steadily declining, the people tend to zero-in on the potential causes and jump to a conclusion. At the end of the day, they’re right when they say that modern corporations and politicians are to blame. At the same time, that’s a vague generalization that leads to very little change. Uncle Sam seeks to find the root of the problem, and it may have accomplished its goal thanks to one brief scene.

Uncle Sam #1 & #2 (collected in a 2009 reprint) tells the story of a homeless man named Sam who is “clad in star-spangled rags” (Uncle Sam), and speaking in “presidential sound-bites” (Greil Marcus) as a way to make sense of where he is and the state of the nation. His dementia-caused wandering takes him through a (mostly) chronological journey of America’s rough patches, while his real one has a back-drop of the end of an average political campaign.

Darnall takes readers behind the curtain of the political process, while still keeping an appropriate, spectators distance from it. He doesn’t take readers into a political headquarters because this deception shouldn’t be considered privileged information. It still may be shocking to some. It is for Sam. As he wades through history, the dichotomy of the nation takes shape. Darnall draws a realistic, but optimistic picture, the nation has made progress, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Copyright 2009 DC Comics/Vertigo

Ross, who co-plotted Uncle Sam, paints the picture beautifully. Having said that, I only have Kingdom Come to compare Uncle Sam to, and Kingdom Come just looks better. Maybe it’s by the necessity of the story, or maybe it’s personally easier to find little DC superhero details than little American history details. Objectively though, there’s a certain lack of physical depth to the environments and backgrounds in Uncle Sam, but that shouldn’t deter anyone because every panel still looks like a gorgeous cover, and they’re almost worthy of becoming a full-size poster. Sam is nearly life-like, and if he wasn’t the book would fall apart.

America is a tough country to root for, and it always has been. That’s Uncle Sam’s key revelation. America didn’t go downhill a century, or even decades after being established, but as it was being established. Specifically, cleaning up Shay’s rebellion (remember Shay’s Rebellion?)

Copyright 2009 DC Comics/Vertigo

Darnall and Ross create a clear line between where we are, where we’ve been, and where America will always return to. While “America” has a certain “comfort zone,” they’re proud of the progress the country has made and are simply asking for vigilance.

Sam’s journey reminds us that the citizen makes all the difference.

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Deliverance (1972) | Spoiler Review

First and foremost, thank you to Archer creator Adam Reed, and his writers and directors on the show, for potentially introducing people to this film. Second, I'm not very knowledgable about the subject matter explored in this film, but I felt like it's not brought up as often as it should be.

Some films are timeless, like Heathers and Natural Born Killers, and the themes they depict will never change. Some are dated, like bad kids movies that rely too heavily on pop-culture and slang from the year they're made. And some films, like Deliverance, have to be re-examined and re-interpreted every five to ten years to see how society has changed.

Deliverance is about a canoeing trip four friends take on the Chattooga River (or at least that's the river they filmed) that turns into short bout for survival when two locals decide to threaten and sexually assault two of the friends. What's unexpected about this film is the assault occurs and is handled as you would expect, especially for 1972. Ed (Jon Voight) is bound to a tree and forced to watch Bobby's (Ned Beatty) attack. The violence of the scene is nothing compared to the psychological trauma shown by the actors and imagined by the audience. However, we're given some insight when the four decide that the best way to handle things after killing the two locals in self-defense is to bury the bodies and never speak of what happened again. There's an instant belief and acceptance that the police would never buy their story, and while we've made significant progress since then, as far as the police being able to gather evidence and piece together an accurate narrative, that belief and stigma still lingers.

So, the question is can men who have suffered similar trauma talk about it more openly today? Well, forty-four years later, things have gotten better, but not everyone is aware of that. We talk a lot about feminism and equal representation for women in media because they're still fighting for what they deserve, but what about equal representation for every kind of man? Basically for all the progress that's been made, all the extremes have gotten more divided, and that's because not everyone is aware of a situation like what's depicted in Deliverance or that a piece of popular fiction even tried to educate people on male rape and the worst way to handle it. According to Tony Porter, who works with men on issues of, basically, what it means to be a man, the best way to tackle this issue is to teach men how to express themselves constructively after a traumatic experience. In the age of social justice, not every group that needs help is getting it, and it's partly because of a lack of popular representation in the media, so can we change that?

Getting back to the film itself, it's incredible. It's well-acted, beautifully shot, and the characters are, unfortunately because of what happens to them, a breath of fresh air from the usual stock characters who would normally be in a movie like this. They're incredibly well-rounded individuals, even though they basically all hold the same beliefs on what masculinity is. If you can put yourself through Deliverance, I highly recommend you watch it.

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