#robert kahniger

I don't know what the average person's perception on kid sidekicks is, besides Robin, of course. Marvel never did much with sidekicks, except for Bucky Barnes, and they get left out of nearly every movie version, but back in the day, you weren't a real hero unless you had enough sidekicks to legit call yourself a found family. Batman had Robin, Superman had Supergirl, Wonder Woman continuity snarled her way into getting Wonder Girl, Flash had Kid Flash, Green Arrow had Speedy, Green Lantern had... Tom Kalmaku, I guess. Martian Manhunter had this horrible abomination called Zook who was both a kid sidekick and a weird magical alien and he's the worst character in comics.

Aquaman, of course, had Aqualad, who would much, much, much later be given the proper name of Garth. Like Aquaman, he is capable of surviving in both air and water, due to being a purple-eyed Atlantean. At least I think that's what's going on here. It's not entirely consistent if normal Atlanteans can breathe air or not, with sources even going back and forth on if they have lungs or not. But Purple-Eyed Atlanteans normally can't breathe under water at all, so they have to get shot off to the surface through the municipal baby launcher. Atlantis is kind of a shitty place to live.

It's especially shitty if you're Aqualad, who has a crippling case of ichthyophobia, the fear of fish, which by Aquaman's logic is pretty much every living thing in his environment. Aquaman offers to use his powers to introduce Aqualad to fish in safe, non-threatening manners to cure him of his fear. Aquaman gets a lot of shit from fans, including me in the intro to this post, but the way he helps this poor kid is really sweet. I genuinely think that Aquaman's silver age comics were some of the best of their day, and they came out at the time when his name was being ruined in the public eye by various cartoon shows.

Aquaman's treatment of the lad's phobia is completely successful in, like, less than a day, as is typical for these stories. Aqualad is able to return to Atlantean society, but he makes the choice to stick with Aquaman. And honestly, he should. Aquaman was apparently the first person to treat this kid with any gentleness, after his own parents shot him out of the infant cannon to die of exposure. I genuinely don't know why Aquaman isn't doing something about this massive social injustice. I've said Aquaman too many times and I'm tired of typing that out.

Next we have All-American Men of War, featuring Lt. Johnathan Flying Cloud, a Navajo fighter pilot in WWII. The story of Johnny Cloud is an atypical war story, because the Nazis are just an adversary, but they're not the real source of conflict. This issue is front-and-center about the racism suffered by servicemen of color from their white comrades. John isn't being called "Chief" out of respect, he's called that because he's a Native American and they can get away with it.

DC's war comics were all overseen by Robert Kanigher, who created pretty much all of the characters, and he used this to tell a lot of unconventional stories. He was also a very strong anti-racist and made it a point to highlight and call out racism in his war stories and push for more integration in his casts. The war comics, for most of the silver age, had better characters of color in them than the superhero comics, and especially the western comics.

Johnny Cloud is a complicated character, who identifies strongly with his Navajo heritage and resents being made a mockery for it. He was named for a cloud formation showing a rider on a winged hose, and he has a spiritual connection to that image. He sees it in the air when he flies, and he evades his pursuers by flying into the cloud. I'm in no way qualified to talk about Navajo beliefs or if this is in any way a respectful take. But it reads the same way that, for example, a Christian soldier might invoke God or the Virgin Mary, by which I mean, it's not being made a mockery of.

Come to think of it, Robert Kahniger's war comics might have a more spiritual bent to them. I know he was the creator of the Haunted Tank series, which was exactly what it said on the tin, a series about a tank what is haunted. That one has it's own problems, but we'll speak about it later. Regardless, Johnny Cloud's faith is treated as valid, and it's by embracing that on his own terms that he finally wins the respect of his team. They still call him "Chief" but now they sincerely think of him as their leader.

Finally, we have a real special one: Atomic Knight, or how DC invented Fallout. Gardner Grayle is a soldier in the post-apocalyptic future of 1986, after a nuclear war completely devastated the earth after only 20 days. This is a war that didn't just go nuclear, it went turbo-nuclear, with even small arms and grenades working as directed nuclear radiation weapons. Through just one of those wild coincidences, a set of medieval armor in a museum just happened to be the exact right composition to block this radiation and render the wearer impervious to harm.

This is a wacky series full of post-apocalyptic nuke nazis and giant mutated dalmatians you can ride like horses, but it was always more of a curiosity than anything. DC would make a few other post-apocalyptic series and make a half-hearted attempt at tying them together, but that never came together either. Grayle was later integrated into the main DC Universe, but he only managed to be a member of the Forgotten Heroes, which puts a pretty definitive button on his character.