Ugandan Civil War Stories…The Comic Book

Unknown Soldier is a new comicbook mini-sieries from DC Comics that attempts to tackle the complex history of Uganda’s struggle with the LRA.

Unknown Soldier, published by Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics, is about Dr. Lwanga Moses, a Ugandan whose family fled the country for the United States when he was 7. He returns as an adult in 2002 with his wife, Sera, also a physician, hoping to put their medical skills to use in a part of the country that has experienced civil war for 15 years. He finds a world filled with violence, boys used as soldiers and girls punished for innocent acts like riding bicycles. Along the way he also encounters an Angelina Jolie-type character in Margaret Wells, an actress and activist.

This hardly seems like the stuff of traditional comic books, but Unknown Soldier is a regular series; a collected edition, which reprints the first six issues, will be in bookstores beginning on Aug. 26. Dr. Moses, the title character, whose face is wrapped in bandages, is actually a reimagining of a DC protagonist from 1966 who was disfigured during World War II, wrapped in heavy bandages and sent on espionage missions.

No one is more surprised than Mr. Dysart that Uganda is the subject of a comic book. A self-described history buff, he said that after 9/11 he became obsessed with researching religious extremists. He found references to Joseph Kony, the notorious commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and thought him fascinating. So after a World War II-centered pitch was turned down, he focused on Uganda, expecting a similar answer. “But it was green-lit, and then I was terrified,” Mr. Dysart said during a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles.