Written during World War II, Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos offered its readers a science-fiction epic that imagined a future liberated from racism and inequality.
In June 1941, Harold Gray's nationally syndicated comic strip Little Orphan Annie made a singular contribution to the war effort: The titular heroine formed a group called the Junior Commandos, a club for boys and girls who wanted to fight fascism. The logic behind the Junior Commandos was that because the United States was in a total war, kids had to pitch in too. Some of the Junior Commandos' adventures were fanciful, such as foiling a Nazi submarine attack off the shores of America. Others reflected the ways that total war had transformed everyday American life: starting up vegetable gardens, buying war bonds, rationing and recycling. The concept of the Junior Commandos took off in real life too, with many actual kids' organizations mimicking the good citizenship promoted in the strip. The Junior Commandos also mirrored the way the war was unsettling gender hierarchies—Annie is the girl in charge (aided by a war widow)—as well as racial ones. A Sunday page that ran on August 2, 1941, featured a young Black boy named George, who helps the Junior Commandos find an old train engine discarded in a quarry, the wartime recycling equivalent of a gold mine. At one point, George says he isn't sure he can be a commando, and Annie responds, "You're an American! We're all loyal Americans…. It's our fight—yours, George. Angelo's… Fritz's… Marie's… mine!" The use of Italian and German names underscored that this conflict was, at least on the European front, an ideological war, not an ethnic or racial one. To drive home the message of national unity in wartime, Annie makes George a sergeant. This article is adapted from the introduction to Jay Jackson's Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos, just published by New York Review Books. Gray wasn't the only cartoonist who thought the idea of a junior commando unit could usefully integrate children into the war effort. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, fresh off their success in creating Captain America, would soon launch two wartime…