Patricia Highsmash
Monster Logic and the Creature Commandos
by Travis Hedge Coke
“No matter how much we despise what we are and loathe the government war machine that made us this way… we can’t deny the fact that places like this make our loonies look like heroes!”
– Sgt Velcro on liberating a Nazi death camp
Because the average person fears vampires, the undead, and werewolves, the United States military took a severely injured Marine, an Army sergeant facing a thirty-year prison sentence, and a mentally-ill 4-F Oklahoman, and committed months of surgery, experimentation, and retraining to transform them into superhumans resembling – and empowered as if they were – a Frankenstein monster, a vampire, and a werewolf. Sgt Velcro is injected with experimental chemicals and vampire bat blood until he not only craves blood and has fangs, but can fly, transform physically into a bat, and even make his clothing disappear and reappear.
The origin of the military unit known as the Creature Commandos, as it has been given, makes so little logical sense that it gains frisson for canny, adult audiences that may have never been intended by their creators, JM DeMatteis and Pat Broderick. A latter-day US military unit also set in the DC Comics Universe, the original Ultra-Marines from JLA, explicitly promote themselves with a false origin, invoking the then-contemporary movie, Stargate, to deflect from less pleasant (and more illegal) activities, but the Creature Commandos are, ostensibly, a positive, health-forward combination of psychological operations and healthcare beneficence in the aid of winning World War 2.
DeMatteis and Broderick knew the origin, as given, was silly, and the stories which the unit feature in are almost uniformly dark affairs, fraught with the killing of child soldiers, the impressing of unwilling combatants, concentration camps, and genocide, but the absurdity generally seems present to lighten the content and facilitate the moral lessons, more than to ever make us doubt the sincerity or foresight of the US military or government.
It is wacky enough, that even when looked on in that horrible, cruel light, it is still pretty funny.
The vampire is not a real vampire, but afraid of crucifixes nonetheless. The cobbled-together hulking brute is a soldier who stepped on a mine and is so suicidal, now, he hugs a bomb and drop himself out of an airplane. When, Lucky’s suicide fails, the vampire asks if he “chickened out,” and he kind of did.
In James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad that, after a prolonged, glorifying murder sequence in an encampment, it is revealed that our protagonists have murdered the wrong people in their zeal as aimed, mentally-unwell weapons of a colonial American power. This is more a Creature Commandos moment than a Suicide Squad one, to me, inasmuch as the Commandos are less criminally-minded and more blatantly intensely deluded and hyper-violent. Warren Griffith is so unwell he is, while made into a powerful wolf-man, not given any military rank. He is not a soldier or a sailor or a Marine. He is a cartridge. Equipment.
I was only days ago explaining to my niece how folks used to dodge prison time for the dodgiest crimes by signing up a hitch in the military. They want that damage. They want that asshole.
Creature Commandos, under the writing of DeMatteis and then Robert Kanigher, is a humanizing look at a dehumanizing scenario, striking the anti-war/pro-service balance common to DC and Marvel war comics of the time, but with a toyetic charm apt to their home-title, Weird War Tales. Artists like Broderick, Dan Spiegle, and Fred Carillo give life and validity into characters with surnames like, Velcro, or robots with inarticulate faces, and in combination, we understand, without detail, how their vampire could have warranted an extensive prison sentencing or how bloodthirsty their werewolf is.
Short comics by Dave Manak visually cartoon the already contextually cartoonish content into heartening gags, pushing the Nazis to the farthest part of each of his strips without removing them (and war) entirely.
The Creature Commandos spend almost as much time in most of their stories stopping each other from assaulting or murdering people innocent people as they do tearing through Nazis. As a unit in war, they are abusive, corrupt, efficacious, and callous. As individuals, they – especially the non-superhuman normative human tasked to accompany the monsters – understand that for many, combatants and especially civilians, war is determinedly the proverbial rock and the hard place. A civilian under close war is the victim in a horror story.
JAKE, the GI Robot – a late transfer to the unit – being only one year old, infantilizes and humanizes both the inexpressive robot and the brutality which surrounds him.
The silly bloodthirst of our werewolf or vampire, the unthinking brutality of our Frankenstein monster and his resultant regrets, all allow the reader to disentangle reality from story enough to find clearer morals and morality plays, while still reflecting a genuine emotional experience that does not cheapen the true horror or cruelty of the Nazis or World War 2.
We may never know how much was or was not intended, what was happenstance which clicks, and it is better if we, the audience, are uncertain. This layered, refractory approach which audiences are allowed keeps Creature Commandos refreshingly insightful and engaging. Something many more recent adult war comics could look to, in the interest of curbing unthinkingly defensive jingoism or imbalanced gauche edgelord tendencies.
