Uncle Sam (Vertigo)

"Steve Darnall and Alex Ross find Uncle Sam out on the street, help him to his feet and send him off to confront those who believe that they alone speak for the founding fathers. A timely idea, brilliantly executed."

"This truly subversive graphic novel — more explicitly radical than anything else from DC Comics in recent memory ... a damning account of American political history that also affirms basic democratic ideals."

"If there’s a thrill here, it’s not that the United States can be junked, but that it can’t be. Everything you ever believed in may go up in smoke, and in Uncle Sam, that smoke is the air you breathe..."

"An old man lies crumpled on the sidewalk: he has thin white hair and a long white goatee. He's dressed in a black coat and red and white striped trousers. People pass on by. There's a fly on the old man's forehead. His left arm is stretched out, his fingers curled like a beggar's, but he looks you right in the face. His angry eyes says he lies on the pavement not to ask you for what you've got but to ask you how you got it. He might be a bum, he might be a judge; as you follow his story you keep changing your mind..."

"Uncle Sam is probably the most thoughtfully radical piece of truly popular culture I’ve seen in the last decade or two. Frighteningly intense and ... also sad in the most eloquent way, patriotic in all the ways that mattered, to all the things that one might justifiably be patriotic to."

"The most eloquent use of a superhuman archetype for a great many years, Darnall and Ross have with Uncle Sam produced a luminous and moving study of America's iconographic landscape, at once an indictment and a reclamation of the nation's oldest and most venerable symbol. As a portrait of a fond American dream at last waking to itself, Uncle Sam is genuinely inspiring and deserves to be read more than once. Highly recommended."

"An immensely powerful piece of work: a demonstration of the artistic and political potential of the medium."