Haunted Tank #1

[cyberghostface]

"The Haunted Tank is back in action, but this time it's an M1 Abrams in modern-day Iraq! African American tank commander Jamal Stuart has his 21st century war ride in full battle rattle and is ready for anything - anything except the whistling-Dixie combat guru ghost who shows up uninvited! Of course, this isn't the first time the spirit of Confederate Civil War General J.E.B. Stuart has helped guide a tank. In times of war he makes himself available to assist his descendants in battle. Jamal Stuart, meet your forefather! It's the newest chapter in the legacy of a long-time DC icon from writer Frank Marraffino (The Dark Goodbye) and artist Henry Flint (OMEGA MEN)." -- Vertigo

Warning for racism

Comments

[lordultimus]

Ah.

Well.

This is uncomfortable.

[mazway_75]

It was when it was published in 2008.

Even worse now.

[victory_or_death]

To quote 'Hamlet' (Act III, Scene III, Line 87):

NO!

[donnblake]

Okay... I'm not saying there's *no* potential in this. A black soldier in the US Army might very well find themselves serving at a base named for a confederate general. It wasn't until 2020 that the US military soft-banned the flying of the stars and bars from military buildings and vehicles. So putting a black tank commander face to face with a personification of those currents in the army- yeah, maybe there's something that could be done there.

Not seeing it so far, mind you.

[mazway_75]

There's potential too in getting the ghost to face up to the whole "Confederacy was never about slavery" thing being absolute crap, it was ALWAYS about slavery and that it wasn't honor etc.

Not sure it'll pull it off.

[beoweasel]

I feel like if he was the ghost of a Confederate General that had died before the war was over, he wouldn't need to 'face up' at all.

The idea of the Confederacy fighting for states' rights and protecting themselves from 'North Aggression' was invented after the war by former Confederate veterans and politicians (named Alexander Hamilton Stephens) to rehabilitate their image and paint themselves as noble heroes rather than failed insurrectionists.

Stephens himself, while championing Lost Cause rhetoric after the war, had originally made his position abundantly clear at it's onset with the Cornerstone Speech, which declared that the CSA was founded on the principal of white supremacy and black enslavement.

[tcampbell1000]

You're right that the Confederacy was absolutely founded on white supremacy and black enslavement, but I don't think self-justification was a postwar invention. Insurrectionists have almost always seen themselves as cultural defenders. Stephens and such just shifted their rhetoric to focus on that pre-existing sentiment and away from more obviously outmoded concepts like "Slavery will always be, it's just the natural order of things... they're happier this way, really: granted their freedom, most of them would starve like abandoned pets." The song "Dixie" cropped up in the 1850s, not the 1870s.

But you're also right that Jeb Stuart and any other general of competence would've known all aspects of what they were defending.

One issue with this comic is that it kind of rushes past the notion that Jeb has been haunting tanks for a while, so I'm not sure if the concept here is supposed to be "Confederate general's views slowly evolve over a century of American tank-fighting" or "essentially unchanged Confederate general meets the 2000s." If it's the latter, then this dialogue probably undersells how much of an issue Stuart would have with "the Negro" in command of an army and taking his venerated family name. If it's the former, then his "War of Northern Aggression" rhetoric and willingness to at least debate a person of color would make more sense, but that'd mean we skipped over most of the potentially interesting parts of the story.

[plastefuchs]

So, why did that dude have a Confederate flag in his damn bag?

[cyberghostface]

Same reason why a lot of people from the South still have it I guess.

[gnarll]

Gotta admit, I liked the "A mistake has been made" face. But I am not American, so its not as close to home.

[tripodeca113]

You know out of all of DC's characters that could benefit from a critical examination and analyses, the Haunted Tank is certainly up there.

On the other hand it's about a ghost which drives a tank, which doesn't really lend itself very well to mature subjects.

[beyondthefringe]

Technically, the ghost only haunts the tank. He doesn't drive. Luckily.

Now, the whole part of the concept where it's haunted by a Confederate general, and the tank flies the Confederate Flag--that was dodgy in the '60s and certainly wouldn't work today... but I'd LOVE to see a good writer take the concept and use it to seriously address issues of race in the military, both personally (with the crew) and systematically. Especially with the crackdown on displaying Confederate iconography in the military, push to rename certain installations, and so forth.

I don't recall being overly impressed with this particular take on the subject, and these scans don't really help either.

[beoweasel]

I feel like modernizing the setting and switching the tank to an Abrams ends up kind of killing the joke. In the original comic, the tank that Stuart commands is an M5, which the British had dubbed the Stuart after Jeb Stuart.

[tcampbell1000]

That's kind of a cool pun, but I don't think it was the most important aspect of the series. For a lot of people including myself, model names and nicknames of tanks are fairly obscure trivia (my eyes tend to glaze over when people talk about cars, even).