The unknowns are plentiful in 'Unknown Soldier'
When Joshua Dysart was asked to reimagine the Unknown Soldier, a classic DC Comics war character, he came up with what he calls a “catchy little pitch" — an unknown soldier in an unknown war.
But when his idea got the go-ahead from Vertigo, DC’s mature-reader imprint, “suddenly a wave of panic hit,” he said. His planned setting, his unknown war, was a long-running, real-life conflict in Uganda between the government’s Ugandan Peoples Defense Force and the Lord’s Resistance Army — “probably the least-reported conflict of our generation,” Dysart said. But because it was so underreported, information was hard to come by.
“There was really no other choice than to go there,” he said. And so in 2007, he spent a little more than a month in Uganda, from the urban capital of Kampala to the sprawling IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps in northern Uganda for those forced from their homes by the strife.
“Everyone in the south, they were like, ‘you shouldn’t go, it’s not safe.’" But in the north, where a cease-fire had just been put into place, Dysart said he never felt in danger.
The result of that research: Dysart’s “Unknown Soldier,” which features Lwanga Moses, a Ugandan-born, U.S.-educated doctor caught up in the brutal conflict in northern Uganda in 2002. The first six issues of the Vertigo series are collected in “Unknown Soldier Vol. 1: Haunted House,” set for release Aug. 26.
Unlike the original Unknown Soldier, readers this time know the identity of the man hidden behind the bandages.
“I felt like that had sort of been explored already,” Dysart said. Instead, “the unknown represents a lot of stuff" — from the unknown nature of the Ugandan conflict to the source of the mysterious voice inside Moses directing him to wage a gruesome campaign against the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel army that forced thousands of children into its ranks.
“It’s a very complex conflict,” Dysart said, “and to explore that in the sort of pulpy manner that we do, we had to create a very complex character. The ultimate question here is how do you fight an army of children, particularly an army of children that were brainwashed into this movement.”
It falls upon artist Alberto Ponticelli to illustrate the horrors and beauty of Uganda in “Unknown Soldier.”
“He is just amazing,” Dysart said. “I came from back from East Africa with 1,400 photographs and I dumped all that on the poor guy.”
Ponticelli accurately captures the locales and people of Uganda, but doesn’t aim for photorealism, Dysart said. “He’s never lost his style, his sense of line and weight, his capacity to create action and movement.”
Dysart said he often comes across people who are surprised that a comic book is tackling such weighty issues.
“I look forward to a time when people just perceive us as another medium and understand that we are capable of telling any story that any other medium is capable of telling.”
