Creature Commandos: When the "bad guys" are good and what makes a monster

Writers are snobs.

A former colleague of mine once said that. A few years back, I learned just how true that was...and it does not paint a flattering picture of me. A dear friend was arguing that pop culture creations are just as worthy of analysis as literature from the "canon." He said there is neither "high culture" nor "low culture," there is only "culture." Wanting at that time to establish myself as a serious academic and for other literary, pretentious, and downright snobby reasons, I disagreed in a spirited and not-so-nice series of retorts.

Thankfully he forgave me, for I was wrong. He was right.

Not only are the "low brow" of entertainment offerings worthy of analysis, said analysis helps us understand why they are popular in the first place and that in turn leads us to an understanding of ourselves. For we academics to wrap ourselves in tweed jackets and shut ourselves off from this consideration does, in realty, a disservice to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding human nature. Plus, it honestly is fun to take what is ostensibly a piece of flashy fluff, and try to see what else might be ticking beneath the rhetorical surface.

Because there always is something else.

In Half Price Books, I came across a trade paperback collection of a comic book series I had not thought about since I was a kid. The allure of this series, for me anyway, is that the writers chose what have historically been antagonists to be their protagonists. While not an exactly new trope, it does go against the genre constraints of fiction, and it intrigues me to no end.

The collection is called The Creature Commandos. It is taken from a comic book series called Weird War Tales. The story behind the series goes something like this...

It is World War II. Military intelligence determines that there are certain archetypes in the subconscious of all humans from all Western cultures that arouse reactions of horror. Three soldiers are then transformed into these archetypes through processes both scientific and steeped in the occult, such as necromancy. These are the characters:

Sgt. Vincent Velcro--a skeezy guy from Brooklyn, sentenced to 30 years in prison for beating and crippling an officer. By volunteering for the project and pledging himself to it, he is released from prison. In turn, the project turns him into a vampire, complete with fangs, the ability to turn himself into a bat, and the need for human blood.

Pvt. Elliot "Lucky" Taylor--he was a Marine in the South Pacific who stepped on a landmine. He survived by the project stitching his body parts back together stronger than ever...but with gangrene green skin...and no vocal chords.

Warren Griffith--a nice, civilian farm boy from Oklahoma who suffered from clinical lycanthropy. The project just took it the whole rest of the way and made him an actual werewolf.

Later, there would be Dr. Myrna Rhodes, a gorgon (Medusa).

Obviously, these first three are modeled on Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and the Wolf Man.

They become a unit called The Creature Commandos and they are led by Lt. Matthew Shrieve. Shrieve is a regular human, but a stereotypical, John Wayne-ish soldier. Together, they all fight Nazis. In fact their first mission is to infiltrate German-occupied France and destroy a Nazi project that aims to replace major Allied military and civilian leaders with android duplicates.

Silly fun for sure, but as a writer, here is what intrigues me:

In addition to being a "Star Kid" in my early years, I was also a "Monster Kid." Thanks to Svengoolie, I've been revisiting that fun sector of my past. The titular characters of the Universal monster films were antagonists. They are crisis or threat which needed to be stopped in the story. And yet...and yet...the characters who do stop them (or do they?) are utterly forgettable by way of comparison with their foes. So if your antagonists are the most memorable and most interesting, why not place them in a "hero" role and see what happens?

What happens when you write a text where the main character is at least semi-evil? That is what likewise draws me to other comic book series where "bad guys" are the main characters (e.g. Super-Villain Team Up). There are several literary examples as well, but fatigue keeps me from going into detail about those. It takes a crafty writer to offer a "bad guy" as the main character and then write their story in such a way that the reader still wants to see them succeed, even if the what these characters want is less than pure. That's not exactly what's going on in Creature Commandos, but the series still took traditionally "evil" archetypes and placed them in the role of "good guys." How the writer does this leads me to my next intriguing point.

What makes a "monster"? Outward appearance? Actions? Several times in the series, this philosophical question is up for debate.

Lucky looks like Frankenstein's monster, but every time he's forced to kill someone or slay an attacking animal, as was the case with a dinosaur in the Creature Commandos crossover with The War that Time Forgot, he fights back tears, hating himself for what he has done and continues to do out of duty. Warren Griffith is a nice kid, but who he is grows more and more eclipsed by his new bestial nature, a nature foisted upon him, and he becomes truculent and sanguinary. "We're wasting time," he told his compatriots in issue #2, "Killing time."
So who is the more monstrous...Griffith or those who turned him into a werewolf?

Then there's Velcro. He's a convicted criminal and has less-than-appealing personality traits, but even he can see who the real monster on the team is.

It's Shrieve, the leader. To this reader, he is reprehensible with only infrequent sparks of humanity to keep you from fully wishing the character harm. He is needlessly callous, abusive, and demeaning to his charges, constantly calling them "freaks." He is most Machiavellian in this thinking and not above manipulating and if need be expending the others as this panel points out:

And...

 

 
Interesting point. The good ol' US of A wanted to strike terror into the hearts of a truly vile enemy...so they created monsters. What was it Nietzsche said about fighting monsters?

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

The definition of "monster" can be nubilous indeed. Each in their own ways, the seminal texts which inspired these characters explored these themes in both subtle ways, such as Dracula by Bram Stoker, and overt ways, such as Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I can't for the life of me think of a canonical or "origin" text for the Wolf Man, though.

The comics are silly and great fun, but be careful. If you examine them and think about them for a while, you just might see complex ideas at work just beneath the surface of the text.

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