Sometimes I wonder if Sir Broomwell Moppington I, my ancestor, is proud of me. If they saw that I was up 15 minutes past midnight writing about some hero nobody cares about (something I should've done yesterday), would they think "Yes, I like what Broomwell Moppington III is doing". Would they reach out to me? Help me fight crime? Convince me to become a patriotic superhero?
Well, that's the life experience of Bruce Carter III, whose ancestor, Bruce Carter I, fought in the American Revolution before getting killed by British Spies. Now a ghost, he haunts his descendant, bullying him into fighting Nazis (which isn't a bad use of his time mind you - quite the opposite).
Now, these patriot heroes were literally a dime-a-dozen back in the day, to the point where I try to avoid them unless it's a day where I'm out of ideas... yet this one has a costume that stands out for all the wrong reasons. I mean, it's not the worst flag-based costume (that honour would have to go to the ones based off the Confederate Flag for moral reasons), but what even happened here? I can't put it out of my mind that someone was given the prompt "put the American Flag on his shirt" and misunderstood the intent. They included the flag pole for crying out loud!
Despite this egregious setback, Fighting Yank lived through, like, 40 issues, getting by on pure American Spirit alone (no pun intended). In 2001, AC Comics produced new comics about him homaging the works of Jack Kirby and overhauling his costume design - that same year, Alan Moore included him in an issue of Tom Strong, and he'd go on to revisit the character in Terra Obscura. They also redesigned the costume. In 2007, Project Superpowers made him a central character in their series, and for some unknown reason they just didn't change the costume there.