Wave the Flag part duce

Hey,anyone out there remember when I got up on my high horse about how the U.S. flag was hung wrong back in The Ultimates 2 #13? Well, it looks like they’ve done it again. That is to say, hung the flag backwards!

To recap, in the first instance, the two wrongly-hung flags were strung up on the White House during a Russian invasion of the U.S. — so an argument can be made that it was done by the invading forces as a sign of disrespect. However in this new instance (Avengers, the Initiative #6) there is no excuse.

This time, the “flag” is actually an apron worn by the wife of Sgt. Joseph (“Gauntlet”) Green. (Needless to say, why the wife of a military man would wear a flag apron, that ostensibly is going to get food and stains on it while cooking is the subject for another discussion.) Gauntlet, as we all know is the drill Sergeant over at Camp Hammond, in Stamford, CT where the new Initiative recruits are being trained. As you can see by the image, the flag is being hung backwards (vertically with the blue field in the upper right — rather than in the upper left position).

Now again, you could (possibly) argue that the Sarge’s wife knows the proper way to hang a flag, and that’s why she is wearing this flag replica as an apron. I’m telling you that while I’m not in the military, I am a Boy Scout leader (and I’ve watched a couple seasons of The Unit) so I’m telling you that the Sarge simply wouldn’t allow that wrongly-hung flag replica in his house.

What I’m saying is that the artists (Steve Uy in this case and Bryan Hitch and inked by Paul Neary — a couple of Brits in the case of The Ultimates), as well as their editors (Tom Bervoort and Ralph Macchio) are simply unaware that there are rules for hanging flags, and never bothered to check out to see if the flags were hung correctly.

By contrast, a buddy of mine, John Wilcox, spent quite a bit of his time working as a colorist for numerous comicbook publishers over the years. Once, when a specific restaurant in NYC was cited in a comic he was coloring, he called up the restaurant to find out what color the awning outside the resturant was, simply because he wanted to get it right. But then again, not everyone is as professional as John.