Phantoms, Fangs, & Fatigues

War comics as a distinct genre emerged circa 1940 with Dell’s War Stories and have persisted as a staple of comic book publications ever since – and yet they remain marginalized in fandom and academia, especially within the U.S. Early war comics, and many still today, were jingoistic features of action and heroism. Beginning in the 1970s, many also developed anti-war subtexts with emphasis on the senselessness and chaos of war violence. True life war comics have been on the rise since 2005 through the work of comics journalists. “Comic art was an important element in the foundation of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower described” in his 1961 Farewell Address, and characters like Marvel’s Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America, and the Punisher have been premised on military identities and become established icons of a military ethos. The nature and consequences of World War II also inserted hauntings and monstrosities into the war genre. The massive loss of life prompted a resurgence of popular attention to ghosts (and thus an afterlife) – much the way that deaths in the Civil War helped advance the spiritualist movement, and the atrocities and mad science of the Third Reich were analogized in tales of monster-making. Though many of these spectralities were found in popular films of the day (such as A Guy Named Joe or The Canterville Ghost, and King of the Zombies or Return of the Vampire), war-horror began appearing in comic books in the 1950s with "The Haunted Tank." The war-horror hybrid genre would be solidified in the 1970s, thanks to the terrors and controversy of Vietnam, with Weird War Tales. In the 21st century, the war-horror genre has seen remarkable growth, with a variety of supernatural war stories reimagining the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the war in Iraq. At the same time, the public has been dealing with changing ideas about nationalism, patriotism, historical record, and public memory. W. Scott Poole argues that monsters are born out of history and tell us about their historical moment. Thus, with a framework of public/collective memory and engagement with spectralities studies in sociology (which considers how “hauntings” explain injustices, inequities, and socio-political traumas), this volume will consider such questions as:  How do supernatural stories engage with cultural attitudes toward war? In what ways do these stories echo or challenge the popular memories of wars? How do they ask us to think again about battlefield heroism, military ethics, and the politics of sacrifice? What can we learn from attending to war comics? What do comics, specifically, suggest or achieve that war-horror in other media formats could not?