Fighting the Nazis is one thing. It's soldiers versus soldiers with or without machines. It's the same thing as it always was since cavemen picked up a club. With some moral lectures on freedom versus tyranny thrown in. The nazis were simple. You just had to beat them.

The war on terror? Not so easy. There are comics that have adressed some of the issues, but it's not an easy fight for superheroes.

These current wars are not all about terror. The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Irael/Palestine aren't only "terror". They're disputes over land, power, etc.

Osama Bin Laden and his flock are easy to accept as bad guys, but what do you do? Send some modern Superman in after them and then what? The story ends happily but the conflict goes on in real life.

 It sounds great at first, but a war comic should to some extent celebrate the central ideological points of the fight. Like ending slavery or stopping the holocaust (simplified as that may be).  But how do you stop an ideology where terrorists paint themselves as victims of an oppressive US, trying to lash out in defense of Islam. What is the crucial moral argument of our side?

How do you defeat the ideology of hate that they thrive on? How do you separate the people basically trying to fight for their country or their faction in a civil war of sorts from the guys just in there to get their hate on?

Lashing out at Islam the way we once lashed out at Nazism isn't helpful when there are are a billion moslems who don't see the violence and transgressions committed by the terrorists as part of their faith. Just like christians don't see a connection between themselves and abortion clinic bombers, or socialists like myself see no connection between ourselves and the murderous actions of communist regimes.

Whether right or wrong.

In a fight like this one has to defeat the argument of the enemy. Although I don't think non-violence is helpful in most conflicts, it worked when Gandhi employed it in India. Mostly because the British argued that they needed to rule India because Indians were like children and the British were morally superior and therefore obliged to rule. But the violent and lethal actions by the British Empire against non-violent poor indians destroyed their pious image of themselves and defeated their argument.

And so the terrorists try to paint this image of the West as weak and ineffectual, intolerant and immoral. All this, when the reason the middle east isn't bombed completely into the stone age is because the west has some strong moral reservations against genocide.

When soldiers desecrate the Qu'uran or jokes are made about making moslems eat pork or otherwise pissing on the silly trimmings of the religion that all moslems treasure (it's a very common typer of rhetoric in my country) it doesn't help us.  But it's hard to tell what would.

Moral clarity sometimes seems to be something that has been lost over time, as issues that once seemed so simple are revealed to be more complex. And in a medium where Superheroes are the dominant genre, that moral claity is a necessity. Once we manage to discover what the real moral clarity, the core argument of this conflict is, then we can express it in superhero terms.

For me, such a moral clarity would probably fall along the lines of secularism versus religion, for others it would be Christian versus Moslem, Western versus Oriental, Empire versus underdeveloped nations with much oil, or any of a dozen other dichotomies.

But there is also the issue of whether we're aiming for simple war propaganda or a complex examination of the issues.

By the way, have you read Kyle Baker's "Special Forces."? A very bizarre book. But good.