Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #20 — page 46: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a poem, not a cartoon. The speaker—a soldier or veteran—bitterly rejects romantic notions of poppies in Flanders fields. The poem references the famous WWI poem "In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae, which sentimentalized poppies growing on battlefields as symbols of fallen soldiers. Chrisman's speaker counters this idealization harshly. He describes witnessing millions of actual poppies in wheat fields during combat, where soldiers died among them—not beautifully, but horrifically ("wallerin' in poppies"). The poem uses harsh language and colloquial speech to strip away romantic mythology, asserting that poppies are simply flowers, not redemptive symbols. It's anti-war satire rejecting sentimentalized depictions of battlefield death.