The Naval Academy has published a free comic book aimed at attracting minority kids to the service academy. Entitled, Bravo Zulu, the Navy’s codeword for “good job,” the comic follows the lives of five unnamed "plebes," or academy freshmen, as they deal with life at the Naval Academy. But while seven issues of Bravo Zulu are planned and the creator hopes for video game and even animation spin-offs, the Naval Academy’s admirable foray into using comics to attract minority students can sometimes seem unfocused and a bit confusing.
Though the comic has some emotional tug, the story is fragmented, sometimes confusing and it can be difficult to tell the characters apart. Laying the foundation for five different stories in a ten-page comic makes the narrative sometimes difficult to follow. In the story the five students draw guard duty in the crypt of Admiral John Paul Jones, the founding father of the American navy. Suddenly, the ghost of Jones himself appears and shows them their futures as naval officers.
Deborah Franco, the writer of the Bravo Zulu comics, defends her decision to make the comic book characters somewhat difficult to place ethnically. She doesn’t believe that young people today see life in terms of black, white and Latino. Franco is also the director of the Navy’s Fulfill Your Destiny videos (the Bravo Zulu artist, Rudi Liden, storyboarded the videos), which feature real midshipmen from diverse backgrounds. While Franco has never written a graphic novel before, she told PWCW that she’s familiar with the category from “reading her brothers’ Spiderman comics as a kid,” and said she wanted, “to come to the genre fresh.”
The Navy has printed about 100,000 copies of Bravo Zulu and while the Navy has no plans to take the comic to any conventions or use conventional distributors like Diamond Comics Distributors, or Haven, a small press comics wholesaler, to distribute it, they do have concrete plans for the book. The Naval Academy plans to distribute copies to the approximately 200 7th-10th graders chosen from around the country to participate in STEM, the Academy’s Summer Science, Technology, Engineering and Math program. Copies will also be distributed to the 2250 high school students who will attend the Academy’s Summer Seminar, a six-day summer program aimed at introducing high-achievers to the Academy. It also plans to distribute copies to 4,000 to 5,000 children who attend their Summer Sports Camps.
Nevertheless, Haven has actively been trying to get copies without success. Capital Comics—a comics shop within sprinting distance of the Academy—and the more indie-oriented comics retailer, Third Eye Comics, Annapolis’ other comic book store, would also like to get copies of Bravo Zulu. “It would be kinda cool to carry something like that,” says Capital Comics owner Billy Vogt. Steve Anderson of Third Eye also expressed interest, noting that, “we would totally carry it.”
However, the military has proven in the past that it doesn’t need regular channels to get its comics to the intended audience. The military produced Coming Home, a comic created to encourage soldiers with symptoms of PTSD (combat stress) to seek help. More than 220,000 copies of Coming Home have been distributed, mostly through Military OneSource, a trusted resource for military personnel and their families, making this free comic book as popular as any best-selling issue of Spider-Man.
It’s not surprising that the service academies are trying to address the question of student-body diversity. Historically, the academies have had problems attracting minority students, though these problems have been lessening of late. For the class of 2012, West Point is just under 16% black and just under 11% Latino. The same class in the Air Force Academy is 5% black and 8.5% Latino and the Naval Academy’s class of 2012 is just under 7% black and just over 10% Latino, though the Academy expects a record number of minorities to make up the class of 2013.
Bravo Zulu is not the military’s first foray into comics. Bill Mauldin, the first to win a Pulitzer for cartooning, was a cartoonist with the Army for Stars and Stripes during WWII. The late Will Eisner, an acclaimed master of the comics medium and the creator of the classic newspaper comics strip, The Spirit, drew a successful series of comics for the military during and after WWII that were designed to teach soldiers proper maintenance and repair of equipment and weaponry. More recently, the Navy has created comics that it uses in Japan to help locals understand and accept the presence of the American fleet. However, despite this long history and recent successes with comics, there does not appear to be a centralized approach in the military on how to use comics to reach out to the community.
