Not many monthly comic books come with a glossary, but not many comics are like Unknown Soldier.
The series, written by Joshua Dysart and illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli, is set in Uganda and includes a reference guide with more than 20 entries, including background on the brutal rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army; the peace activist Abdulkadir Yahya Ali, who was killed; and the Acholi, an ethnic group from the northern part of the country.
Unknown Soldier, published by Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics, is about Dr. Lwanga Moses, a Ugandan whose family fled the country for the United States when he was 7. He returns as an adult in 2002 with his wife, Sera, also a physician, hoping to put their medical skills to use in a part of the country that has experienced civil war for 15 years. He finds a world filled with violence, boys used as soldiers and girls punished for innocent acts like riding bicycles. Along the way he also encounters an Angelina Jolie-type character in Margaret Wells, an actress and activist.
This hardly seems like the stuff of traditional comic books, but Unknown Soldier is a regular series; a collected edition, which reprints the first six issues, will be in bookstores beginning on Aug. 26. Dr. Moses, the title character, whose face is wrapped in bandages, is actually a reimagining of a DC protagonist from 1966 who was disfigured during World War II, wrapped in heavy bandages and sent on espionage missions.
No one is more surprised than Mr. Dysart that Uganda is the subject of a comic book. A self-described history buff, he said that after 9/11 he became obsessed with researching religious extremists. He found references to Joseph Kony, the notorious commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and thought him fascinating. So after a World War II-centered pitch was turned down, he focused on Uganda, expecting a similar answer. “But it was green-lit, and then I was terrified,” Mr. Dysart said during a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles.
Karen Berger, a senior vice president at DC Comics and the executive editor of the Vertigo imprint, said, “When we explore something at Vertigo, we want to explore something that has not been done before in comics.” She added, “The beauty of the series is that not only does it explore questions like do you fight violence with violence, it also explores how the people of Uganda have been affected by this way of life.”
With his pitch accepted, Mr. Dysart visited the public library, pulled all the books he could find and combed the Internet. “There was a thin Wikipedia page,” he said.
Mr. Dysart decided that “if I was going to deal with the absolute worst aspect of these people’s lives, I was going to have to go there.” He visited Uganda in early 2007, months after a cease-fire was declared the previous summer. Mr. Dysart spent time with the Acholi and visited the cities of Kampala and Entebbe.
But the access embarrassed him, he said; he felt undeserving of being allowed to visit an AIDS hospice, for instance. “It was overwhelming how ready they were to welcome me and open up their lives,” he said.
He returned from the trip with more than 1,000 photographs that Mr. Ponticelli could use as references for the illustrations.
The critical response to Unknown Soldier has been positive. The Onion gave it a B+ and called it “both relevant to the real world and viscerally exciting.” The comic was also nominated for best new series in the Eisner Awards, the industry equivalent of the Oscars.
Sales estimates from ICV2.com, a Web site that covers the comics industry, indicate that the book, whose 11th issue is on sale this month, faces a tough market. While the first-issue sales were a modest 16,000 copies, the ninth sold 7,500 and was No. 207 out of the Top 300 comics in June.
By comparison, the top-selling Vertigo title that month, Fables, about storybook characters living in exile in Manhattan, sold more than 23,000 copies. But Vertigo’s monthly titles are often propped up by their collected editions. Those fare better in bookstores, where they have a longer shelf life.
Unknown Soldier is unflinching in its depiction of violence, and that comes across even more strongly in the collected edition, without the monthly break between issues. One particularly horrific scene deals with the disfigurement of the title character: an inner voice navigates him through the violence, but when he reaches his breaking point, he hacks at himself to try to silence it. That gruesome episode came from Mr. Dysart’s imagination; some details he learned from his trip, he said, were too awful for the comic.
“I interviewed a reformed child soldier who was forced to bite to death a woman,” he said.
Mr. Dysart, whose next project for Vertigo is “Greendale,” a graphic-novel adaptation of a 2003 Neil Young album, to be published in June, said Unknown Soldier would eventually move past Uganda 2002. He wants to explore who finances the rebels, among other topics. He also wants to write about corporate involvement in Africa and unethical pharmaceutical testing on ethnic populations, if the series lasts.
“Whether we can fully compete in a world of superheroes, I don’t know,” Mr. Dysart said. “The medium, sadly, has a limited readership. We’ll see.”
More of Mr. Dysart’s experiences in Uganda can be found at his Web site, joshuadysart.com, which includes photos from his trip, links to news reports about Uganda and commentary to fill in the gaps for fans of the comic.
“It’s very difficult to ask a reader, especially if they think they’re coming to a typical war adventure book, to know about the Acholi conflict,” he said. The blog has also allowed him to write about what he describes as underreporting about the area, as well as the history of the “internally displaced” person camps and to go deeper into the background of child soldiers.
The blog helps alleviate some of his feelings of guilt too. “I witnessed people at the lowest point of their lives, and I came back and turned it into an action-packed war comic,” he said. “We try our best not to be exploitative, but in my heart I don’t know if this is the right way to do it.”
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