The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-first century

AUTHOR: Miller, Frank

ARTIST: Dave Gibbons (illustrator); Alan Craddock (colorist); Angus McKie (colorist); Robin Smith (colorist)

PUBLISHER: Dark Horse Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1990-2007

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2009

Publication History

In 1990, the first installment of The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century, titled Give Me Liberty, appeared as a four-part serial, which won author Frank Miller and illustrator Dave Gibbons an Eisner Award. The next installment of Martha’s life, Martha Washington Goes to War, was released in 1994, with Martha appearing older than she would be in the 1995 edition, Happy Birthday, Martha Washington.

“Collateral Damage,” included in Happy Birthday, Martha Washington, was colored by Alan Craddock and initially appeared in Dark Horse Presents Fifth Anniversary Special (1991) as the black-and-white “Martha Washington’s War Diary.” “State of the Art” first appeared in San Diego Comic-Con Comics Issue 2, while the omnibus edition’s “Logistics,” debuted as a minicomic to accompany the Martha doll, an action figure that appeared on store shelves in 1998.

Martha Washington Goes to War was colored by Angus McKie and released in 1995. Martha Washington Stranded in Space came out in 1995 as a one-shot issue, containing “Crossover” and “Attack of the Flesh Eating Monsters,” which was originally published in Dark Horse Presents, issues 100-104. Martha Washington Saves the World appeared in 1999 and features an emerging, full-page style similar to the one seen in Miller’s 300 (1998).

In 2007, seventeen years after Martha’s debut appearance in Give Me Liberty, Martha Washington Dies was released; in the story, Martha dies on her one hundredth birthday. The omnibus edition contains chapter introductions by Gibbons that provide insight into the production, themes, and influences on Martha Washington and inform readers about what happened in the time gaps between serials. The “Martha Washington Scrapbook” contains sketches, photographs, preliminary drawings, posters, and notes not seen in previous editions.

Plot

Give Me Liberty begins with Martha’s birth in a Chicago housing project, followed by her stint in an insane asylum and her subsequent success in the American Peace Force (PAX). It ends with Martha standing sentinel as the traitorous Stanford Moretti commits suicide.

Happy Birthday, Martha Washington chronicles several of Martha’s missions. First, Martha is in bombed-out Manhattan, where she is tasked with assassinating Dictator Beluga. She rescues tax collector Nixon, who laughs at her ignorance: Beluga is already dead, and she is just “collateral damage” (as implied by the story’s title). In “Logistics,” Martha defends the Constitution’s Ninety-fourth Amendment, which forbids the sale of red meat. After leading an invasion of Texas and liberating herds of cattle, she ends up at the local Fat Boy, gorging on a cheeseburger and fries. “State of the Art” pits Martha against a female soldier of the First Sex Confederacy; both combatants are equipped with the same malfunctioning combat suits. The two women strike up a brief friendship as they wait for the battle to end. In “Insubordination,” Martha is on a mission to find Captain Kurtz, a thinly disguised Captain America, in order to obtain a vial of his genetically altered blood. Martha finds Kurtz hugging the Liberty Bell and decides to commit her own act of insubordination, discarding the blood-filled syringe.

In Martha Washington Goes to War, Martha is stranded at “the Killing Fields,” where she runs across a Lone Star Republic soldier with ghosts on his mind. She is again trapped on the wrong side of a bombing raid. When she regains consciousness, she learns Chicago has been annihilated, killing Raggy Ann (a fellow asylum inmate who endured government experiments), Tomhawk Wasserstein (Martha’s Native American boyfriend), and Martha’s mother. While Martha is recovering, Wasserstein’s ghost appears, saying, “We will meet again, my love.”

After she recuperates, Martha is assigned to the Earth-tethered Harmony, a malfunctioning weather-control satellite that comes under sudden attack. Martha pursues the invisible culprits on a defective sky sled, crash-landing in the Valley of Death. Martha chases the Ghosts into the radioactive core, where she discovers a paradise peopled by Raggy Ann and Tomhawk Wasserstein, among others.

While the Promised Land has clean air, pristine land, and tasty food, the Surgeon General has taken complete control of the United States. He hones in on Martha’s communicator and unleashes a power beam that all but destroys paradise. In “Kingdom Come,” Martha defects from PAX and joins the opposition aided by Venus, an artificially intelligent computer. The revolutionary forces destroy the Surgeon General but not before PAX unleashes all its nuclear warheads, most of which malfunction.

Martha Washington Stranded in Space explores the anomaly in “Crossover,” where Martha mistakenly fires on a friendly ship. With the help of Lieutenant Pearl, she rescues a robot named Big Guy, who introduces them to a parallel universe containing an Earth free from war, hunger, and environmental degradation. Martha cannot leave her imperfect world behind, however, and Big Guy takes the explorers back to their own dimension. Martha and Pearl are rescued in “Attack of the Flesh Eating Monsters” by space aliens bent on harvesting Earth’s human population. Martha sees through the charade and discovers Venus is manipulating humankind to unite them behind a common cause.

In Martha Washington Saves the World, Venus tries to teach the willful Martha a lesson by sabotaging her ship. Martha knows Venus is out of control, but her superior officers disagree and send Martha on a scientific mission to observe an asteroid headed for Jupiter.

Martha awakens from “cryosleep” in “Tomorrow, When the World Is Free” and finds her ship controlled by Venus and everyone implanted with B-Chips. Martha is now a human automaton programmed with happiness, her willfulness seemingly erased. She overcomes Venus’s mind control and destroys the asteroid headed for Jupiter with nuclear weapons, creating a shock wave that fries Venus. However, the computer still has control of Earth. Meanwhile, the asteroid’s core is revealed to be an alien space ship.

Martha, Science Officer Nitobe, and Pearl crash-land their shuttle on the artifact. Suddenly, the Venus-controlled Tomhawk Wasserstein turns up and unleashes a bomb that seemingly destroys Dr. Nitobe and damages Galahad, Martha’s ship. Nitobe is transformed into a humanoid construct who reveals that the Juggernaut probe was sent by the creators to see whether their biological experiment on Earth had succeeded.

The artifact speeds toward Earth, and Martha orders Nitobe to crash-land into the Pacific Ocean, creating an electromagnetic pulse that destroys every power source on the planet, which obliterates Venus. After Earth recovers, Martha travels through the Looking Glass anomaly to make contact with the creators. Whatever Martha discovers beyond the anomaly, readers will never know because, when Martha dies, only chaos reigns on Earth.

Volumes

•Give Me Liberty (1991). Collects issues 1-4. Chronicles Martha’s life from her birth in 1995 and her early years in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green projects to her life as a PAX sergeant. This bildungsroman establishes Martha’s heroic identity as she escapes physical and mental torture to discover the value of second chances while recognizing her place as soldier in this dystopic vision of America.

•Happy Birthday, Martha Washington (1995). Collects the stories “Collateral Damage,” “State of the Art,” and “Insubordination,” into a one-shot issue of Martha’s battles. “Insubordination,” a tribute to Jack Kirby, finds Captain America betrayed while trying to save the Liberty Bell, symbolizing the entire nation’s loss of freedom at the hands of a corrupt totalitarian government and leading to Martha’s own insubordination. “Logistics” (1998) originally accompanied the Martha action figure and was added to Happy Birthday for the omnibus edition.

•Martha Washington Goes to War (1995). Collects issues 1-5 of the comic book series of the same name. Continues the story of the future American civil war and Martha’s defection. Objectivist in nature, this volume pays tribute to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), as America’s best and brightest disappear, leaving Martha alone to make choices about good and evil.

•Martha Washington Stranded in Space (1995). A one-shot issue containing “Crossover.” Martha wonders if she can leave her war-torn planet for a utopian otherworld. “Attack of the Flesh-Eating Monsters,” is a satire of science-fiction pulps and questions how far the government should go to unite people.

•Martha Washington Saves the World (1999). Collects issues 1-3 of the comic book series of the same name. Martha battles Venus to save humankind, thereby freeing people and nations to live up to their own enlightened self-interests.

•Martha Washington Dies (2007). Final one-shot edition, illustrating Martha’s one hundredth birthday. As the leader of a resolute band of resistance fighters, she utters her final words: “Give me liberty.”

Characters

•Martha Washington, the protagonist, is a strong, intelligent African American woman. Despite experiencing the worst her dystopian world has to offer, she remains courageous and honest and retains her dignity. As a PAX officer, she wears the blue uniform of the nineteenth-century American cavalry and sports ever-changing hairstyles. She eventually defects and dons the white uniform of the Ghosts.

•Raggy Ann, a psychic schizophrenic, is short and has a large lumpy head that is wired into a government computer. She first encounters Martha in the asylum’s experimental wing. Eventually, Martha finds her wired to a space cannon. Martha loses her but rediscovers her friend in the Promised Land.

•Tomhawk Wasserstein, Martha’s love interest, is a handsome Apache man with long black hair and blue eyes. He betrays Martha when he is overpowered and controlled by Venus. While Martha can forgive his transgression, she can no longer call him lover.

•Lieutenant Colonel Stanford Moretti, Martha’s superior officer and antagonist, is a white man with combed-back brown hair and blue eyes. Martha captures the treasonous Moretti, and on his final day, offers him an honorable way out. She is present when he hangs himself in his cell.

•The Surgeon General, Martha’s nemesis, is a sociopath in a green medical gown, optometrist goggles, a doctor’s head mirror, rubber gloves, and boots. He runs the Health Enforcement Department that declares sickness a crime. After his death, he is revealed to be an army of mechanical medical clones.

•Nixon is a pale brunet and former tax collector. Martha rescues him while on a secret mission to kill Beluga.

•Captain Kurtz resembles Captain America from helmet to tights. He has a muscular build, blond hair, and blue eyes. His genetically altered blood keeps him young and able to withstand most bullets. He helps Martha escape the Nazis overrunning Philadelphia.

•Chief Engineer Coogan is a portly, middle-aged engineer working on the tethered satellite Harmony. His red hair and pale skin betray Irish roots, as also evidenced by his stereotypical love for whiskey. He is kidnapped by the Ghosts and taken to the Promised Land, eventually joining Martha as the engineer on Galahad.

•Venus is a computer program equipped with artificial intelligence that appears onscreen as a blue-skinned female. A creation of the subversive Ghosts of the Promised Land, she initially combats the evil PAX but is soon corrupted. She tries to control humans with implanted B-Chips. Her godlike delusions do not fool Martha, who eventually destroys her.

•Lieutenant Pearl, a Valkyrie clone, is a statuesque, blond-haired blue-eyed warrior with an identification bar code on her cheek. Marketed to the military, the Valkyrie clones first served PAX and then the Surgeon General, but after the latter’s death, this clone becomes Martha’s protégé.

•Big Guy is a “retrobot” of epic proportions, with large silver hands and feet and a head too small for his enormous metal body. A good-natured 1950’s-style machine, he tempts Martha to join him on a utopian Earth.

•Dr. Nitobe is a tall, self-important African American science officer heading the Juggernaut asteroid mission. After his untimely death aboard the alien artifact, he is transformed into a muscular being with onyx skin and glowing red eyes. He is last seen passing through the Looking Glass anomaly with Martha and crew to fulfill the last instructions given by the Creators.

Artistic Style

Give Me Liberty is part of the familiar artistic universe of a DC or Marvel comic. Folded within Liberty’s traditional comic panels are character backgrounds and story-line narratives communicated through mocked-up news magazines, letters, advertisements, and a map of the Nation Divided, grounding readers in this alternative America.

In the omnibus edition, Happy Birthday, Martha Washington, Craddock illuminated “Collateral Damage,” while McKie emblazoned “State of the Art,” “Insubordination,” and “Logistics.” Happy Birthday, Martha Washington includes computer-generated color graphics, lettering, and sound effects.

In Martha Washington Goes to War, Gibbons invested in a mirrored, state-of-the-art computer graphics system, offering McKie the duplicate. Suddenly, readers were treated to a mixed-media style in which photographic bolts of electricity are shot through blurred clouds and photographic skies. Characters walk or fly above filtered backgrounds of Polaroid grass and landscapes, creating a three-dimensional quality.

Martha Washington Stranded in Space features Gibbons’s rendition of the crossover character Big Guy, created by Geof Darrow. Readers travel through snapshots of clouds in the “Promised Land” to star-laden backgrounds of the universe. When Martha reaches the Promised Land, Gibbons’s utopian drawings are mixed with photos and computer-generated backgrounds. Space is also the stage for Martha Washington Saves the World, with several two-page spreads reminiscent of Miller’s 300. Some pages have a collage feel.

Themes

The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-first-century is a bildungsroman of both a single human life and a society seemingly bent on destroying itself even while striving for liberty. Martha is Everywoman: She witnesses the rise of corporate and government power at the expense of individual freedom. She rises from the notorious Cabrini-Green projects to become world savior. Miller’s near-future universe reflects many of the modern world’s problems writ large, including irresponsible food production, unchecked environmentalism, and polarizing special-interest groups. Miller creates a hero that “embodies certain notions of right and wrong.” She is honorable and strives to make the right choices even in the most precarious situations.

Imprisonment is a central theme in Martha Washington, especially in Give Me Liberty, when Martha is betrayed and abandoned in the tropical forests of Brazil. As Gibbons puts it, “Martha had been trapped in . . . the ghetto, a school locker, a mental facility, and a PAX drop-ball.”

In Martha Washington Goes to War, Miller adapts Rand’s objectivism as a central theme, mirroring story lines from Atlas Shrugged. In Martha Washington Saves the World, Miller toys with intelligent design by introducing the Construct, an alien sent to check on the progress of Earth’s biological evolutionary cycle started by the creators.

Martha overcomes mental adversity after a terrifying childhood altercation left her in a catatonic state. Mind-numbing sedation, flashbacks, and hallucinations do not destroy her; on the contrary, they leave her with a highly disciplined psyche. She can outwit and outwait Venus, as the computer crawls along her cerebral pathways.

While Gibbons and Miller often populate the story with caricatures, such as the Reaganesque President Rexall and the tax-collector Nixon, they also project specific human events into Martha’s world. In Martha Washington Saves the World, they re-create the 1997 mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult, as the fictional colony on Japetus, struck with apocalyptic fervor, removes their helmets and suffocates en masse.

Unlike the serial editions, the Washington omnibus is presented in chronological order. Each comic chapter begins with background information, while every thread highlights a hero in the making. Martha is repeatedly willing to lay down her life to save a single being or all of humanity. She rebels against oppression and fights tyranny even when she must become a “traitor.”

Martha Washington represents real-life change, that which occurs along the trajectory of decades. Martha evolves; she grows up, falls in love, fights wars, and experiences loss, and her personality forms across a lifetime. In contrast to the standard male superhero, Martha is a strong black woman who wants to make the world a safer place, where everyone can experience liberty.

Impact

Fresh from completing Watchmen (1986-1987), Gibbons teamed with Miller at Dark Horse Comics, a publishing house that made creator ownership a priority, an advance in an industry in which virtually all the mainstream heroes were owned by corporations and drawn by leagues of artists and writers with homogeneous tedium. Although longtime fans of traditional superheroes, Miller and Gibbons saw this project as a chance to break away from the typical comic book. Martha Washington’s evolving style—from the traditional hand-drawn, hand-lettered patriotic comic book to a computer-generated, complicated computer hero of a decades-long series—highlights the transformation not only of the comic book industry but also of the comic book hero, with a fictional universe eerily close to that of modern society.

Further Reading

Gibbons, Dave. The Originals (2004).

Miller, Frank. Ronin (1993-1994).

Moore, Alan. Promethea (1999-2005).

Bibliography

Gibbons, David. “David Gibbons on the Martha Washington Omnibus.” Interview by Chris Arrant. Newsarama, July 23, 2008. http://www.newsarama.com/comics/080723-gibbons-washington.html.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Gibbons Discusses Martha Washington.” Interview by Shaun Manning. Comic Book Resources, March 23, 2010. http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=25341.

Miller, Frank, and Dave Gibbons. The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-first-century. Milwaukie, Ore.: Dark Horse Books, 2010.

Miller, Frank. “Interview Four.” Interview by Christopher Brayshaw. In Frank Miller: The Interviews: 1981-2003, edited by Milo George. The Comics Journal Library 2. Seattle, Wash.: Fantagraphics Books, 2003.