Broken Frontier

Commies beware! Fighting American and Speedboy are back to drag those Reds out from under the bed in Titan's collection of the Simon & Kirby classics, available in book and comics shops now.

Debuting in 1954, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Fighting American has garnered a cult following over the ensuing decades. Its notoriety, as something of a cult classic, no doubt enhanced by its earnest beginnings as a straight Captain America clone strip that metamorphosed into glorious over-the-top farce by the end of its short “Commie-bashing” run. Now Titan Books have issued a complete collection of those 1950s Fighting American issues, alongside the character’s one-issue reprise via Harvey Comics in the ‘60s, giving a whole new generation of readers the chance to sample one of the great oddities of comics pseudo-propaganda.

While it’s difficult to use the term “ripped off” in the context of two creators effectively plagiarising themselves, Simon and Kirby unashamedly lift the origin story of this patriotic, Cold War hero from their earlier work at Timely Comics. The debt that Johnny Flagg owes to Steve Rogers is an obvious one from the very start. Brothers Johnny and Nelson Flagg live very different lives; wounded war hero Johnny is a popular broadcaster while weakling younger brother Nelson is the standard Golden/Silver Age wallflower destined for greater things.

When Johnny uncovers a Communist plot set to bring America to its knees, he is brutally murdered by Red agents. But not before telling his brother Nelson, with his dying breath, of the insidious Commie threat. With the aid of the military’s Project Fighting American, milksop Nelson’s mind is transplanted into his brother’s corpse so that he can assume a super-heroic identity and stop the menace from beyond the Iron Curtain; a plot device that makes so little sense one is left wondering whether the creators really envisaged Fighting American as a humour book from the very beginning.

The greatest irony here is that no matter how extreme the parody as the book progresses, Fighting American’s latter issues are never quite as ludicrous as when it’s approaching its subject matter seriously. The nonsensical origin story, and self-conscious jingoism, in that opening comic is almost as funny as some of the subsequent issues, when Simon and Kirby are going all out for the laughs.

As the run continues, all pretence of playing it straight fades and Fighting American, now partnered with requisite teen sidekick Speedboy, finds himself up against a plethora of bizarre, usually Communist, adversaries. Two-headed criminals, aliens, invisible thieves and an Italian Tarzan, take their place alongside a parade of stereotypical Russian villains including a malodorous Russian Superman called Super-Khakalovitch, Poison Ivan and spies Rimsky & Korsakoff. Of course Joe Simon would later go on to create a number of short-lived characters for DC in the 1960s-1970s that would embody the term “off-the-wall” - like Brother Power the Geek, Prez, the original Outsiders and the Green Team - so those more well-versed with that later work will find the same wild imagination on show here.

Artistically, the visuals represent a more neophyte Kirby with some of his trademark inflections and techniques having reached only their infancy; his bombastic, in-yer-face, pop art and high concept cosmic grandeur still some way off. However, his layouts are still a fun exercise in embracing the inherent silliness of the character while at the same time, almost contradictorily, superficially playing it straight.

The book is prefaced by a foreword from co-creator Joe Simon; an essential introduction from one of the great elder statesmen of the industry. Perhaps, in these days when we all expect our “extras” as part of the overall package though, Titan have missed a trick by not also including a text article on the character’s history and subsequent incarnations, but that’s a small quibble. As a piece of comics history, this collection is a welcome presentation of a series that blurred the lines by both embracing Cold War propaganda and simultaneously satirising it. Potential readers beware, however, that the absolute kindest thing one can say about certain representations of racial and national stereotypes in these stories is that they need to be viewed in the full context of the time they were published…

Fighting American is, no doubt, one of those oft-mentioned series that most regular comics fans have heard of, but few have actually read. This complete Titan collection gives you the opportunity to enter that barmy, unhinged world wherein the “Reds under the bed” are all suitably ridiculous grotesques and the titular character strides heroically across a ludicrous landscape of  high camp silliness. Politically incorrect decades before anyone had even coined the phrase, Fighting American is the printed page’s equivalent to the Adam West Batman TV series on acid. For both its historical importance and uniquely irreverent approach, this inimitably absurd, and outrageously preposterous, volume should be an essential addition to every super-hero fan’s bookshelf.

Fighting American is available now from Titan Books, priced $19.95 in the U.S. and £14.95 in the U.K.