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UNCLE SAM & THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS #1(2007) -a review

The cover looked so promising. Done in the style of a Latin American political poster, it's a sharp design and caught my attention immediately. Picking it up I was hoping for something to restore my faith that DC can make something of the enormous number of great characters it's sucked into itself from other companies over the years. And I've liked the Quality Comics characters ever since first being introduced to them in the early seventies in the Justice League issue that introduced Earth-X, the parallel world where the Nazis won, and these 40s patriotic characters had been fighting them ever since, though even then I wondered how it was that they had all remained young.

I'd also hated the shabby treatment Geoff Johns had given them in INFINITE CRISIS, which I'm sure will be remembered as one of DC's worst mistakes, at least once it finishes; DC seems to have turned it permanent, afraid to commit to the changes they made. Not that they don't have reason. I think I was most appalled when Johns had the Phantom Lady impaled, graphically, right between her breasts. Is this necessary? Is this good? Or is it deeply misogynist? It wasn't helped by having the Human Bomb beaten to death by Bizarro(who seemed for them moment to have forgotten to be "backwards" and had graduated to "homicidally insane). This showed a meanspiritedness that doesn't seem to have abated ever since.

So here, introduced in a previous miniseries, are the new Freedom Fighters, who, apart from the eternal Uncle Sam, have all been replaced. Granted, most of the ones DC killed were also replacements. But now we have a Phantom Lady that's a celebrislut not unlike Paris Hilton, and an Amerindian Black Condor willing to do dirty work for the US military(and when it's mentioned that he has little reason to do so given the US track record with his people, simply tosses off a glib "That was a long time ago"). And we add in a new Red Bee, never an interesting character. In fact, such a silly character that Grant Morrison used him among the inhabitants of the "forgotten characters" world in ANIMAL MAN.

So what do we begin with then? The new Red Bee, the narrator of the story, who fights an...alien insect invasion of Earth. And to keep it away, becomes, well, one of the alien invaders, just so she can develop some new powers. But as I was given no reason to care about her in the first place, the cliffhanger at the end wasn't exactly gripping. And the premise

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