legion of charlies

Last Gasp 1971
On March 29, 1971 in Los Angeles, Charles Manson and three members of the “Manson Family” were sentenced to death for the 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and four others in Benedict Canyon. That same day in Georgia, William Calley was convicted for the 1969 murders of 22 women and children in Vietnam. Two days later, Calley was sentenced to life in Leavenworth prison, but President Nixon ordered him released from prison and placed under house arrest at his former quarters in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Within weeks of these events, Tom Veitch and Greg Irons began working on The Legion of Charlies, a comic book that incorporates Manson’s power to control the minds of others into a story about Calley coming to San Francisco after his release from prison. In the story, Calley is named Rusty Kali, and he suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, promptly killing a prostitute he has bedded on his first day in the city. After returning to the streets, Kali drops some acid and has a vision about Manson, which changes him into a mindless puppet and “dedicated follower of the word of Charlie!”

Simultaneously, hundreds of other Vietnam veterans across the country undergo the same transformation, inciting a mass migration of Charlie-zombies to a remote retreat in the mountains of Utah. The Legion of Charlies is born on this mountain and they celebrate with a frenzied riot that includes cannibalism as spiritual communion. According to the gospel of Charlie as espoused by Kali, members of the legion can acquire another person’s power just by eating them. Led by Kali, the Legion of Charlies begin a trek around the world, devouring political leaders (such as Spiro Agnew and Chairman Mao) and assuming their powers.

This lethal turn of events does not go unnoticed by President Nixon, who invites the Legion of Charlies to New York for a meeting. But Nixon’s secret purpose for meeting the Charlies is to seize them and take control of the powers they’ve ingested. Unfortunately for Tricky Dick, the spirit of Charlie possesses more celestial power than he ever expected!

The Legion of Charlies is one of Tom Veitch’s and Greg Irons’ finest comic book achievements, which is saying a lot given the exceptional quality of most of their comics. It’s a gruesome parable of violence in America and how the government’s endorsement of ruthless killing parallels the vile madness of an incorrigible murderer. William Calley was certainly not the same type of monster that Charles Manson was, but the U.S. government turned him into an equally deranged mercenary capable of murdering innocent people for immoral purposes. And Calley was just one of the millions of young men whose minds have been (and continue to be) corrupted for the purpose of carrying out government agendas.

The U.S. government is hardly alone in this illness, of course. It is easily proposed that its agenda is often in response to agendas from other nations that care even less about freedom and diversity than America. But that doesn’t make the tragedy of the reality any less important to expose. And more than anyone else in comic books, Veitch and Irons did their best to expose that tragedy with unrelenting honesty.