If Not Superheroes, What? Part VII: War Comics

Of many formulae for comics, one in particular historically receives short treatment by comics fans. Perhaps unfair assumptions brand a form as a simple delivery vehicle for historical and political propaganda; perhaps a perfectly understandable squeamishness about the subject matter scares readers away from material that, one could assume without actually looking at the contents, seems likely to glorify matters best left in their true form. For whatever reasons, such reservations do a grave disservice to the war comic, a strain of comics in general that has great potential both to buttress and to undermine complacency about the topic of violence.

Much more so than (say) the western comic, the war comic enjoys a polymorphous aspect. It can glorify war or damn it. It can explore themes of character and violence. It can examine history, revealing or distorting it as the necessity of the tale and the principles of the creator demand. It can adapt itself to the fantastic and depart altogether from wars and places recorded in history. It can present as sanitized or nauseatingly real an interpretation of the business of mass slaughter that characterizes the particular human failing of war involves.

It can provide inspiration for those who revel in war or edify those who reject it, all based on the approach. And, depending on the generation of talent pursuing the subject matter, it can treat the topic in an all-ages fashion or in a lurid orgy of gut-churning detail sure to appease the demands of that portion of comics readership that feels cheated unless they see the insides of (someone else's) human bodies splattered all over their outsides.

The Form

The war comic had a long tenure in comics. During the years immediately prior to America's entry into World War Two, such pieces frequently dealt with the era of biplane dogfights in the First World War; a mythology of gallant gentleman flyers, a kind of latter-day knights in flying machines, sometimes prevailed in such work. Pulp literature about aviator heroes, indeed, somewhat predated the comic book per se, and would endure well into the sixties.

With the coming of the Second World War, these shifted into more contemporary material, and war comics, in general, would tend to focus on World War Two, since lines remained clear for that one and one could avoid ugly controversy that attached to later American efforts. War comics would ultimately come to present World War Two more often than other conflicts, partially because post-war consensus generally took a favorable view of efforts to undermine Hitler's campaign to turn Europe into Greater Germany. Nonetheless, nothing inherently limits war comics to such a setting.

To the benefit of the storyteller - but to the detriment of humanity in general - historical wars provide a variety of prospective conflicts in settings as exotic or as nearby as one could want to see in a story. Unlike movies, exotic settings and vivid period costumes do not require increased capital outlays to depict (the raw materials of comics, after all, cost no more or no less contingent upon what someone may choose to illustrate upon them). This means that the cartoonist, within whatever limits his editors might impose, could pick the Persian Wars, the English Civil War, World War II, or any conflict which has left adequate historical traces to provide an image from which artists and writers might create a story on boards.

While almost any setting, historical or fantastic, might appear in a war comic, certain story types have tended to predominate.

The Fighter Ace Story

Although particular settings do not, in general, define particular types of war comics stories, one variety exists as a pronounced sub-genre, having appeared very early in the history of war comics and having persistently endured through generations of war comics.

As far as comics forms go, the fighter ace story has priority - in the sense of seniority - over almost any surviving and contemporary comics form. The outbreak of war in Europe in the 1930s seems to have stimulated an interest in America with the romanticized mythos of the "knights of the air," since a number of World War I aviator tales began appearing in comics as early as the 1930s.

Much of this material took a rather predictable jingoistic and chauvinistic approach to embellishing upon the first era of aviation as a tool of warfare. Nonetheless, to some extent it provided a kind of escapism from the horrors unfurling in Europe and Asia. One can see the escapist element in the salient features of the legendary interpretation of the war culture of the first-generation military aviators.

The whole gallant-in-the-air notion ran contrary to news and rumors about the bloodshed going on abroad. Pilots who ritualistically challenged one another to aerial duels, who showed one another a respect for form and manners across lines of political loyalty, and who treated defeated and captured enemies as guests (at least long enough for the MPs to arrive to transport them to prison camps) ran very contrary to tales of soldiers machine-gunning civilian populations, to relentless bombing campaigns, to tales of starvation (and worse) in POW camps, and to the atrocity-of-the-day generated by an expansionist Germany that seemed to seek validation through body counts.

World War I, therefore, at least initially, dominated the field of fighter ace comics, which would appear in various forms until the seventies (and would occasionally reappear and disappear at moments since then). As late as the 1950s, this earlier era would predominate in pieces such as EC Comics' Aces High.

When America's involvement in the war became unavoidable - assuming some scenario existed which would have allowed us to avoid entering a conflict in which powers attempted to reduce the continents of Europe and Asia to the domain of so few powers that one could count them on a single hand - material began to appear more frequently that explored the contemporary aviator in heavier and more potent military aircraft. By the forties, pieces such as "Blackhawk" would appear (probably, in the long term, the most enduring fighter ace comics concept).

As a rule, however, this subform of war comics tended to dwell on past conflicts, especially as consensus about the propriety of various wars dissolved beginning as early as the Korean conflict.

The Redemption Story

These stories took a variety of forms. Sometimes the redemption involved a simple shift of paradigm, as in the case where an infantryman, feeling like the scapegoat and waterboy for the war effort entire, recognized that cavalry and airborne units also risked their tails to protect his own. The scanned panel to the right comes from such a story; these pieces attempted to put some perspective on the kind of destructive jealousy and self-pity that can wreck lives outside of the battlefield and cost lives on it.

More frequently, however, the redemption story in a war comic would deal with some kind of redemption from personal disgrace, such as tales where a deserter sentenced to death might sacrifice his life to save other troops, and thereby both prove his courage and elude the firing squad. In this aspect, such comics probably touched on a key attraction that could bring people into life-threatening theaters of war in spite of world views and perceived self-interest that would loudly argue against such a course of action; for some, the battlefields provided on last place to validate a (supposedly) wasted life.

The Moral Story

Frequently working along similar lines to the redemption story, the moral story exposed the fallacy in some kind of thinking. A rarer subset, the fantasy war story or science fiction war story, often provided more space in which to explore these themes, but the environs of the romanticized-historical war story would certainly suffice for this.

In such stories, some main character obstinately pursues some folly (such as the notion that the Japanese-American from California secretly serves Hirohito's effort and not MacArthur's). In the end, some revelation exposes the misconception, and, in the process, destroys it - for instance, the formulaic sacrifice of self that often vindicates a falsely accused soldier in tales where some character endures questions about his loyalty or courage.

When such stories experimented with the fantastical - and by the seventies many strange things could happen in a war comic, including the science-fiction ten pager or some tale about a haunted bunker swarming with zombie Germans - this allowed writers to explore some ethical or moral theme where the setting could throw such themes into sharper contrast. For example, consider the illustration here, which ended a Neal Adams / Bob Haney war story where frenzied, psychotic, and jingoistic soldiers attempt to destroy a whole planetful of dangerous aliens, sight unseen, justifying their deeds by characterizing them as inhuman; yet, once better technology thwarts their efforts, they discover a completely human enemy whose science and ethics both outstrip those of the earthling attackers.

The Ironic Story

The aforementioned moral story often concluded with an ironical ending used to drive home the point of the tale, when soldiers discovered some aspect of the war or of life in general did not meet their preconceptions and, in their disillusionment, discovered something (perhaps unwanted) about their own character in the process.

However, ironic war stories could take another form, with no particularly moral aspect attaching to the turn(s) of events that might make all preceding heroism (or lack thereof) somewhat meaningless. For example, in the scanned panel, above, a soldier - the sole survivor of a Nazi raid that left him, mistakenly, for dead - encountered his evident counterpart from among the enemy, and waited until the right time to advance and kill that soldier. In his charge, however, he impaled himself on the German's bayonet, realizing in his last moments that he had watched for some time over a man who had frozen to death before he began his own vigil.

The Fantasy / Horror War Story

After a generation of war comics, writers and artists at DC - and, perhaps, to a lesser extent, other companies - sought ways to liven up material which had begun to show the strain of overuse and concept exhaustion. So, therefore, appeared the fantasy / horror war story. While we can nod to the notion that the term "war" in general describes something fantastically horrible, in this sense the term designates war comics into which elements and themes of war and horror comics have intruded, adding elements of the clearly strange or impossible to a form that sometimes had difficulty competing for the attentions of readers who could find more and better explosions and weirder scenarios in other comics forms. Such pieces include material like the Haunted Tank tales, Creature Commando stories, and a selection of material that appeared in such titles as Weird War Stories, and, sometimes fantasy books (including later entrants into the market such as Heavy Metal.)

Given that many approaches to the form rely on presentation of a particular tone we might call "realistic" in spite of the propriety of such a term in contexts which contain unlikely or impossible events, the fantasy / horror war story sought to undermine just that editorial virtue by introducing elements such as vampires, ghosts, monsters, or prophetic characters who saw and attempted to prevent the horrors that history would subsequently record.

One sees here pieces such as the botched-assassination tale (one example of which appears in the scanned specimen, above), stories which frequently involved successful murders which ended up replacing one despot (say, an imaginary and more temperate version of Hitler) with a more loathsome proxy (the Hitler that history records).

Or, occasionally, one might see the likes of a submarine warfare tale with the added benefit of some sea monster thrown into the mix to complicate matters. Alternately, such stories might feature slain enemies returning as zombies, just as the hero (who may have, through some violation of common or uncommon morals, have come to deserve a setback) thought he had escaped them through their deaths.

To some extent, we could consider these stories horror comics cast in a wartime setting, and decide whether the label "war comics" or "horror comics" fits better by what title features them. The blend tends to a greater conceptual equality than comics like Marvel's horror-themed superhero comics of the seventies, since such pieces added horror tone and paraphernalia to a concept that remained solidly grounded in superhero conventions.

The Technology Story

Owing to the nature of the war comic - frequently dealing with events of decades, generations, or even centuries past - the writers often attempted to get into the minds of soldiers confronting (then-) new technology for the first time.

We have one such example in tales of fighter pilots attempting to force a newfangled jet fighter plane to behave like a more familiar prop-driven craft. For example, the scanned image above comes from a tale where a World War II pilot flies his first mission, in Korea, in one of the new jets, facing some period version of the Mig; and, in the confrontation, realized that a pilot couldn't impose the logic of a propeller-driven Mustang on a jet aircraft.

Such tales, in general, reflect America's rise to the role of a global superpower though factors such as technological advance. The war-driven improvements in aviation generally and in combat aviation specifically, however, do not attach specifically nor uniquely to single powers of the twentieth century.

Occasionally, as well, such stories tread on territory that seems generally to belong to science fiction, not in the fantastic elements - indeed, technology war stories generally depend on well-documented advances for raw material rather than on the imagination of authors - but in their exploration of the impact of what science and technique spawns on humanity.

The Talent

War comics enjoyed, across over fifty years of history, a roster of talent that more or less intersected with the meaningful names of the medium. Kirby did war comics (perhaps his early Sergeant Nick Fury pieces providing the most name recognition today); Eisner did war comics (including his role in creating the Blackhawks); Joe Kubert and Bob Haney spent many years in war comics; and we can include Harvey Kurtzman and the artists of the EC stable (Wally Wood, Jack Davis, George Evans, and B. Krigstein).

With Sergeant Rock enjoying a particularly long ongoing run, from 1959 to 1988, we might mention his creator and recurrent writer Robert Kanigher. Russ Heath contributed some of the enduring pencil-work for this particular feature. For Blackhawk, another recurring, if not quite so continuously-printed feature, Dick Dillin, Howard Chaykin, and David Cockrum would variously attempt the task of bringing his stories to the page.

In the eighties, after the general contraction of the DC line to its interconnected superhero franchise, Marvel would chance the risky waters of publishing a Viet Nam war book called The 'Nam and depicted by Michael Golden. And as late as end-of-century, Kubert would continue material thematically connected to war comics in his graphic novel Message from Sarajevo.

Particularly at DC, though, everyone seemed to get a turn at producing material for its war books while they endured. This makes creating a canon of war comics creators - beyond talent clearly attached to the form, such as Kubert, Kanigher, and Haney - difficult to inventory.

The Fate of the Form

While not precisely extinct, the war comic doesn't currently enjoy much of a hold on the industry market share. Pieces like The 'Nam appear here and there, surfacing briefly before vanishing into the waters of a new comics market mainly given to respect such material as exemplary material of the bygone Silver Age and not as something to treat as viable today.

In one sense, the modern shared-universe / continuity model of the predominant superhero comics has done much to work against war comics. For one thing, the begrimed soldiers of a Silver Age Kubert / Haney piece look, in general, silly attempting to interact with hypermuscled steroid kings in capes. For another thing, war stories rely more on a realistic approach than does superhero material, and the notion of an ongoing war story - with the same soldier fighting the same war for decades although history records a much shorter timeline for the actual engagement - tends, by definition, to undermine its own credibility. The classic ten (or so) page story with a disposable cast seems to work best for war comics, with occasional exceptions such as the Sergeant Rock stories containing a semi-recurring cast, and regular monthly books seldom bother with such variant formats, limiting them to pieces like DC's eighty-page specials of recent years.

Like other dormant or extinct comics forms, however, the war comic allows the telling of some kinds of stories which superhero conventions make difficult. Explorations of character which require the destruction of a protagonist to drive a point home do not work in titles where every story must center around the same character, issue after issue, decade after decade.

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Column 231. Completed 25-FEB-2001.