‘Uncle Sam’ Remains A Powerful Deconstruction Of American Democracy 27 Years Later

Steve Darnall and Alex Ross created Uncle Sam in the hope that they’d never have to debate politics ever again. “It’s all on the page,” explains Darnall as we discuss the graphic novel’s return to print 27 years after its original publication by the defunct Vertigo Comics banner (now branded as DC Black Label).

A concussive statement on the fragility and preciousness of American democracy, the book — which tracks the dreamlike odyssey of a homeless man who may or may not be the goateed personification of America itself — has never felt more relevant, particularly in the run-up to a historical presidential race set against the backdrop of an ideological schism that has never seemed wider.

“I wish that it would seem like everything just got better since 1997 and this wasn’t somehow a reasonable dissection of the times we live in,” says Ross, whose legendary resume also includes seminal superhero stories like Marvels and Kingdom Come. “But it seems to be a constant in terms of the nature of politics and where the world stands at an odd crossroads, self-embattled. We’re unfortunately just repeating the history that we were characterizing back then.”

“I don’t like to be one of those authors who quotes their own work, but one of the lines in the book that still stands out for me is, ‘The only way to know if democracy works, is to work at it,’” echoes Darnall. “That’s as relevant now as it was [27] years ago — and maybe more so.”

The deep political divide within the United States is what prompted Abrams Books to re-release the title by way of a “Special Election Edition” (now on sale), featuring an illustrated treatise written by Darnall on the history, significance, and evolution of the Uncle Sam figure most of us associate with the famous “I want you” recruitment poster designed by James Montgomery Flagg during World War I. For Darnall and Ross, this anthropomorphized representation of the United States was the perfect character through which to confront “certain unsavory aspects of American history” and ponder whether the American Dream was ever just that — a dream. “We had the chance to make a lot of points and get out a lot of things that had been in our collective heads,” notes Darnall. “It really felt like … we’d seen two Americas. We’d seen the perfect, flawless giant that we were being told to see and then we were seeing the real one.”

To that point, the book is staggeringly ambitious, painting the titular icon as a tortured, Doctor Manhattan-esque figure. He perceives time in a nonlinear fashion, jumping from one failure of the American ideal to the next — all while spouting vapid campaign slogans and quixotic talking points. “There was almost no place where we couldn’t go graphically or creatively with it,” Ross says. “You could really pipe in all kinds of characters and moments that you wanted to jump to because the nature of the narrative was the ramblings of an uneven mind.”

When it came to the artwork, Ross’s hyper-realistic, almost Rockwellian, aesthetic (one that has made him a celebrated name throughout the comic book industry) was the perfect choice for such a uniquely American fable, whose purpose was to separate the blurred lines between romanticized myth and harsh reality. “There was so much of an embrace in the ‘90s of youthful figures, youthful interpretations, [and] reinterpretations of the main lead figures in comics,” the illustrator remembers. “I wanted to buck that system, I wanted to embrace the other direction. I wanted to embrace the grit of a face that’s been lived-in; that has faults and, in particular, no embrace of idealism.”

Adds Darnall: “That was always the thing we wanted to go for, ‘Let’s make sure this guy has all the traits that we might associate with a main character who has no home, may be completely out of his mind, and has probably been walking in the same clothes for years’ … We really wanted to capture a darkness that was emblematic of the Vertigo books of that time, but also to filter it through Alex’s very keen ability to capture that which is real. I like to think we nailed it.”

In a way, Uncle Sam could be described as the anti-Forrest Gump, in that it removes the proverbial rose-colored glasses to view history as it really was — warts and all. As fate would have it, Gump director Robert Zemeckis met with the creators to discuss adapting the graphic novel into a feature film that was ultimately relegated to the purgatory of development hell, “which is par for the course in Hollywood,” concedes Ross. Nevertheless, he later adds that the material is still ripe for an onscreen translation. “I think if you got that Robert Zemeckis movie now, it would be just as appropriate with the same content being portrayed without any changes.”

It’s why he and Darnall aren’t much interested in crafting any kind of follow-up at the moment — not when the original reflects our contemporary predicament so perfectly. “What?” muses Ross, a wry smile playing across his lips. “Would you just need us to change the names in the thing we already did? We told this story that we’re still currently living.”

“We aimed to create a reasonably timeless story,” agrees Darnall. “The fact is, yes, you could put new words from new people into Uncle Sam’s mouth, but the goal would still be the same … We told that story at the time because we really wanted to tell it. I think the character, as an iconic figure, probably has a lot of stories in him and if somebody wants to discuss those, we’d be happy to.”

With a new generation poised to discover the genius of Uncle Sam for the very first time, Ross hopes to convince readers that graphic novels “can be used for commentary in this way,” he emphasizeshasizes. “That the subject matter is ripe for attention, and making any kind of comment on society [or] history is fair game for creative works. Comics aren’t only used for making fairy tales for children. You can comment on anything of our world as you like it.”

In other words, democracy rules.