DC has oft-times gone to ridiculous extent to justify its tradition of kid sidekicks and teenaged superheroes. But every so often you come across one that they quietly swept under the rug – specifically the stupidest possible concepts they came up with. This is one such.
Yes, it is the Kiddie Version of DC’s tradition of theme paramilitary units – Easy Company, the Losers, the Haunted Tank, the Creature Commandos, and the lesser lights like the team of acrobatic brother-soldiers who repeatedly got caught on Dinosaur Island. But that wasn’t enough: they needed a young team to whom the Kiddies could better relate. And hence… the Boy Commandos.
Led (or possibly owned, it is unclear) by Captain Rip Carter, the Boy Commandos were not just a standard frontline unit but indeed an elite special missions team, every single one of its members apparently precocious in all the deadly arts. There was Andre, the handsome charming French lad; Alfy, the fat stupid English boy; Jan, the “soft-spoken” Dutch boy with stereotypical page-boy haircut; Tex, who – and I am certain this will surprise you – was a young cowboy who did rope tricks; Percy, who wore glasses and was therefore an intellectual powerhouse; and of course, there was Brooklyn, about whom the less is said the better.
(Except you can’t say “less” about Brooklyn, because thanks to the stupid, stupid need of DC comics writers to desperately tie every little goddamned thing together in their vast patchwork universe, Brookyln eventually grew up to become Dan “Terrible” Turpin, and therefore also eventually became Darkseid as well. I assume that at some point there will be horrible, horrible fanfic about this demonstrating how Brooklyn’s experiences in World War Two eventually led to him becoming Darkseid.)
You can say so many things about this that are righteously terrible things, but let’s put it this way. If DC decided to do a modern-day revival of Boy Commandos?
Oh, yeah! Best comic book ever!
Seriously, when Mark Waid used these guys in Brave and the Bold last year, I simply had to be impressed with his sheer ballsiness and/or lack of common sense. Some things can stay in the vault.
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Looks like someone was trying for Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos with a twist.
If by somebody you mean Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and if by “Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos” you mean “created over 20 years before Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos” then you’d be close to being right. The Boy Commandos have the weird wish fulfillment sensibilities of Golden Age comics – where anyone could be a superhero and it doesn’t seem odd at all that a bunch of 12 year olds should be able to punch Hitler. As an artifact of their time, they’re pretty fun, actually.
As part of a modern comic book “universe” where everything has to be explained and filed and interact with everything else? Not so much – kind of creepy actually. As all of the kid sidekick stuff tends to be since they decided that superheroes had to play by “real world rules” and 13 year old superheroes could get killed by the Joker smacking them in the head with a crowbar repeatedly.
In what I’m sure is not a coincidence, the horrifying topic of child soldiers came up on As It Happens last night. If the phrase “Lord’s Resistance Army” already chills your blood, you don’t need to hear more; if you are ignorant of their activities, you may well wish to remain so.
Rip Carter, eh?
In the modern DC universe, do we really think that will be left as a coincidence?
Fanfic? Who says that Turpin book won’t be put out by DC itself?
MGK neglects to mention that Rex himself killed many a Nazi and Korean with Major Dennis, shame on him.
Is DC child soldier book quota already filled with the reboot of Unknown Soldier? Or does Vertigo titles not count?
Given that virtually everyone and his kid brother in the DC Universe have, at one point in time, availed themselves of the opportunity to punch Hitler, it really does raise the question of how the hell WW2 (or any war, really) could get started.
I can just see some 30s-era European political demagogue sitting down at a table and thinking to himself, “I’m going to invade Lithuania” only to have two dozen time traveling secret agent alien-amazon-all-American super heroes leap out from nowhere and slap him silly.
DIstantFred- As soon as I saw Rip Carter I thought of the revealtion the Rip Hunter was Booster’s son.
Why is it that every time a comic book hero gets close to Hitler they believe that World War Two can be stopped just by punching him? Are they ever surprised that it doesn’t work? “TAKE THAT, MOTHERFUCKER! Hey, what the hell…I just knocked Hitler out, so why do I still hear gunfire and bombs? Could it be that everything I thought I knew about how war worked is wrong?”
I think they just enjoy punching Hitler.
I know I would, even if I knew it wouldn’t affect history in the slightest.
This is no more ridiculous than the implication of the Cub Scout Pledge.
“On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country”
What the fuck kind of shitstorm does the country need to be involved in to require calling in the Boy Scouts?
To be clear: nobody is denying the entertainment value of Hitler-punching. It’s tremendous fun, or so I’ve read. But lamentably it is not very effective at stopping Hitler, so to any and all future Hitler-punchers I would respectfully suggest either killing him and punching his corpse or taking him captive and punching him while he’s in custody. You get to punch him AND decapitate the Nazi regime. It’s win/win!
Actually, every time Hitler takes a punch, he takes it out on an ethnic minority, so those heroes are just making the Holocaust that much worse.
Rex killed Koreans, eh? I think we know how they got their revenge on Rex’s kind.
In that image, I do believe Jan is murdering his fellow Boy Commandos.
Wolf: No, just Andre. Jan apperntly hates the French.
Zenrage, if you believe John Milius the Eagle Scouts stand ready if Cuban paratroopers invade the Colorado.
Wait, I’ve read just about every issue of Final Crisis, and I totally missed anything about Turpin BECOMING Darkseid. The hell?
Sorry, it took me a while to get the reference. I’ve only seen bits and pieces of Red Dawn.
At least they’re not the Dingbats of Danger Street.
Jim – you didn’t see Turpin getting possessed by Darkseid and being forced to submit?