Cringeworthy Comicbook Moments: Hansi

[espanolbot]

Trigger Warning: rape

A lot of you know the cover,



But how many of you may have read the comic... might be significantly smaller. I'm going to hold up on my notes until the end of the comic, but I'm going to give a little intro here first.

Back in the 1970s the comicbook company Spire released several comics intended to spread evangelical Christianity to the young people of the time. These ranged from comics about innercity preachers teachin' folk to stop stabbing people and takin' crack...



To cases of what could basically count as AntiSoviet propaganda, more on that later.



What most of you might not know, and what I learnt only recently, is that the comics is actually based on the account of an actual woman's life. Of her growing up in Nazi Germany before moving to the US after the war and being reintroduced to Christianity via her foster mother. I haven't actually read the book, though I have a feeling the comic isn't THAT an accurate adaption, considering Hansi in the book looks like this,

While Hansi in the comics looks like THIS,



Let's get started, shall we?





































































Scans from here: http://www.carpsplace.com/spire/Hansi.pdf

Okay, Notes.
- Interestingly, Hansi doesn't actually seem to release that Nazism is bad in the comic for reasons other than it being "anti-Christian". Which is itself somewhat misinforming as although they were attempts to indoctrinate Nazism into the state religion of Germany and Austria, AND numerous priests were killed for speaking out against them, the majority of most Nazis were nominally Catholic (for the love of God don't take this to mean all Catholics are Nazis!).

- Is it me, or does Hansi come off as being kind of stupid in this? She seems very easily lead by whoever makes her life easier.

- Also, Hansi being the ONLY woman who isn't raped by Soviet soldiers (a very real thing that happened as revenge for the things the Nazis did on in their Eastern Front) kind of seems a bit... I don't know. Obviously I don't think that she should have been, but it seems something in the same line as her not loosing tons of weight and her hair remaining perfect through the whole ordeal. Some kind of skeevy "the protagonist most be pure!" thing going on...

- Although Allied soldiers didn't go to the extremes of their Soviet comrades when it cames to occupied Axis territory, and it's perfectly safe assumption that the guys she met were perfectly nice, "taking advantage" wasn't something purely used by the Russians did. For example, what happened in American of Japan for example.

- More a comment on the art this one, but does anyone else find Hansi's deadeyed staring and expressions kind of creepy? Also, she doesn't seem to age. Seriously, she looks the same in the late Thirties as she does when she arrives in the US in the... 70s? 60s? It's hard to tell.

- Re: Hansi's emmigration to the US must have been a pain if the "were you ever a member of the Nazi Party" thing was already standard in the visa forms was standard by that point.

- Again, being a Nazi and being a Christian aren't mutually exclusive, despite what the comic seems to be saying.

- The punctuation seems to be added more by the handfull than I'd expected. Remember what Terry Pratchett said about people who used multiple exclaimation points?

- Remember Folks, America is good because it's a Christian nation, while the Soviets will steal or wreck your stuff, rape your women and put you in a labour camp! Man, it's a good thing America didn't get up to anything bad during the Cold War, otherwise I'd suspect that this is unevenly weighted propaganda!

Seriously, I'm a guy who likes America for the most part, and it's baffling to me that the message in this comic is less about who Christianity gives people hope etc. but more that you don't feel like a complete person unless you're both Christian AND American, while at the same time lecturing people on their consumerism either for the purposes of saying less "consume less" and more "You don't know how good you've got it!". Agh!

Alternate link: http://espanolbot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/cringeworthy-comicbook-moments-hansi.html

Comments

[mrosa]

No, the Nazis are giving children books to read besides the Bible! Someone declare war on Hitler before they're brainwashed!

What is sad is that this does have a grain of truth - movements like Fascism, Nazism, even Bolshevism cared about releasing the youth from the rigid constraints of religion to allow them greater freedom of expression. This is a point Hugo Pratt, who grew up during Mussolini's Italy, makes in his autobiography. It's also ironic that Ayn Rand, alleged philosopher, champion of capitalism and scourge of communism, only enrolled in a Russian university to study philosophy because the Soviets lifted the ban on female students.

I read this comic book in the past but it's so insane it's always a joy to re-read. Also, that city priest, as corny as he may look, he shows more courage than most superheroes do nowadays.

[blake_reitz]

I like that Hansi's emigrates from 1944's Germany to 1969's America.

[q99]

Hah, I didn't catch that.

[blackruzsa]

I know right? I assumed she emigrated like, ten/twenty years later, but...

[icon_uk]

It was a very, very slow boat.

[lieut_kettch]

Too easy. The challenge is finding a Spire comic that isn't cringeworthy. I remember my uncle having a whole stack of the Archie ones. Makes me wonder how Spire-verse Archie would've handled Kevin Keller.

[penguinzero]

Isn't it obvious? Archie would have mentioned to Kevin that there was this book called the Bible and that there was a guy named Jesus who, surprisingly enough, loved Kevin. And Kevin would be enlightened, having never heard any of that before, and the next time we see him he'd have a wonderful girlfriend.

(Ugh.)

[lieut_kettch]

This crack just writes itself, doesn't it?

Kevin: You don't understand! I can't change who I am! And I love MEN!

Archie: There's only one man you need to love, Kevin! And that man is JESUS!

[mrosa]

I love how people throwing themselves at tanks in protest is something to be sneered at, and not a massive display of civic courage. Each bit of this comic is pure gold!

[arise]

I really, really need to read The Gospel Blimp. Like right now.

I kinda like the art despite myself, though. I think maybe it's the colours? idk.

[espanolbot]

[fungo_squiggly]

Oh man do I love the look on the guy in the red shirt's face.

I guess he's supposed to be all "Jesus is keen!" or something, but he looks more like he's thinking "What the fuck, man?"

[philippos42]

No, he really is saying, "What? How did we get here?"

I've read that one. It actually has some intelligence, which I guess you can credit the original Joseph T. Bayly story for.

[korilian]

These guys made some pretty extreme anti-catholic comics as well. I'm not entirely clear what their stance on Jews is, but I'm not surprised their problem with Nazism seems to be more to do with Atheism than their murdering of Jews, gays and so on...

[philippos42]

I thought the extreme anti-Catholic stuff was Jack Chick and "the Crusaders." (But that's like, massive nightmare conspiracy horror crap.)

Al Hartley was more about being upbeat and positive, wasn't he?

I don't know, it's been a long time since I read these.

[espanolbot]

The thing is Nazism wasn't an atheist doctrine like Communism, yet they seem to be depicting it as such.

[cricharddavies]

It's complicated. (Most things are.) Some Nazis viewed themselves as Christians, some (like Bormann) were vehemently anti-Christian. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchenkampf for an overview of the subject.

[jaybee3]

Wasn't Nazi-era Germany majority Protestant rather than Catholic (particularly in the area around Berlin/Prussia and present day East Germany)?

I don't know. This is pretty cringeworthy but it's pretty tame by comparison to Jack Chick. I 'm just surprised people actually BOUGHT them with money.

[espanolbot]

The southern part, such as Bavaria is definitely mostly Catholic for certain.

[philippos42]

Yeah, but Bavaria and Austria, where Hitler was from, were very Catholic. So due to his ethnicity, I guess, he had a sort of base in the Catholic hill people. Or something. I don't really know.

[blackruzsa]

Yeesh. And is it bad that the worst part of this was Hansi's pretty but horrifying face?

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

I'd guess 70s, since there's a "Speed Limit 55" sign.

I'm having trouble following the logic of "Look at all this food and everywhere I see diet." Would places with an abundance of food be the exact places where more people need to diet? I'd also expect a Christian-or anyone, really- to be more concerned with "Look at all this food and everywhere I see hunger," but since I'm not a Christian, maybe I'm missing something.

[lencannon]

Fuck Anita Bryant.

well, later.

[auggie18]

Took the words right out of my mouth.

[skemono]

Good thing God didn't move her to the US until after 1954. Without the pledge of allegiance saying "under God", we'd be no better than the Nazis!

[jlroberson]

Oh dear me, John crack. I'm sharing.

I remember these and the Archie ones were ALL over when I was growing up in SC. And no one thought anything of it. That's what being in the Deep Evangelical South is like. I mean, I was freaked out by it but few others were. There it seemed normal, apparently. One reason I had to get out.

This one is SO INSANE. And it really shows you how much ugliness is concealed underneath Hartley's style that seems more blatant with Chick's work. They're really the same--it's just Chick seems so cute. Which makes it...SO much worse.

And she never ages. So her great love is a pedo, at a glance.

PS

[jlroberson]

And the Nazi woman who tells Hansi about the "new god"--obviously meant more to represent 1970s feminists than anything from the Nazi era, to Hartley.

[cleome45]

I think "The Cross and The Switchblade" made it to the big screen. Pat Boone was the minister and Eric Estrada was the gang banger. Woo!

[halloweenjack]

WRT the incidence of sexual assault by US troops in Germany, the best that can be said is that it was probably significantly less than that by Russian troops. (The myth that Americans simply didn't do that sort of thing was repeated in comics by, of all people, Garth Ennis in one of his War Stories.) A couple of things stand out in the Wikipedia summary: that American troops sometimes rationalized their rapes as prostitution by leaving the victims food (which puts a different spin on the soldiers serving Hansi breakfast in bed) and this: "The black soldiers of America's segregated occupation force were both more likely to be charged with rape and severely punished."

[espanolbot]

Huh, that's weird Ennis got that wrong, he's normally very hot on accurate research on that kind of thing. Like incidents of Allied soldiers flipping out and machinegunning captured Nazis in liberated concentration camps, when I posted that here a while back people said that he'd made it up for the purpose of clumsy moralising when actually...

[doilycoffin]

I'm not sure why, but the "An American!!! And he's chewing gum!" part cracked me up

[donnblake]

With regards to the Pledge bit- rationalizing it as "okay, because we're also saying God," seems a bit odd, to say the least, but ideas of nationalism and patriotism are things that Germany did have quite deal of- I'm not sure, nervousness? Guilt? Aversion?- about. For example, it was a big surprising deal when people started waving German flags at the 2006 World Cup. In Germany. I could definitely see people who had lived through the rise of the Nazi party finding the Pledge of Allegiance unsettling.

[blunderbuss]

I always love in these comics that apparently NO ONE has ever heard of Jesus or Christianity until they're told about it by a preacher. Because someone would really think that the bible was 'some sort of Jewish book' when Christianity has exited in Europe FAR LONGER than the US has even existed.

Oh, and the soldiers demanding more bibles. Not extra ammo, not food, not body armor, bibles. Yes, that's totally what I'd be pining for in the trenches. :P

[jaybee3]

It's not just in comics. You can find websites/ministries for some of the most fundamentalist sects that say there are something tens of millions of million Filipinos who have NEVER heard the word of Christ (despite it being an 80% Catholic country) or that there are little to no Christians in Egypt or Ethiopia (despite the literally millenia history/presence of the Orthodox Church in those countries).

[espanolbot]

Saying people can be ignorant about religion kind of goes without saying. Like how that shooting in a Sikh temple a couple of days ago may have been due to the gunman assuming that they were Muslims, and then Fox had to get an expert in to explain how Sikhism and Islam are in fact completely different religions.

And then they got another one in to ask whether the attack was Anti-Semitic, which, again, doesn't work as Sikhism doesn't share a root with Judaism either.

[espanolbot]

Well they were trapped by the Russian winter after Stalingrad, they needed something to burn to keep warm.

[maseiken]

"Who is i-?"
"BREAKFAST!!!!!!!"

Dude's really into his job.