An occasional column on reprints of vintage comics.
If you prefer history that’s raw, detailed and down-to-earth, two new collections of EC war comics from the 1950s will nicely scratch that itch.
Dark Horse Comics’ “Two-Fisted Tales: Volume 3,” in its EC Archives series, reprints Nos. 30 to 35 of that comic book, with combat narratives that range from battling knights to the Korean War. The tales also include forays into the Civil War and both World Wars. Most of the stories were written by the master cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, who edited EC’s war books (and later created Mad magazine), and illustrated by an all-star roster of 20th-century artists, including Jack Davis, Wally Wood, John Severin and Kurtzman himself.
“Bomb Run and Other Stories,” in Fantagraphics’ EC Library, showcases the art of Severin in more than 30 stirring mini-dramas — nearly all written by Kurtzman.
While EC, which flourished from 1950 to 1955, is probably best remembered for titles like Tales From the Crypt, Weird Science and Mad, its war comics might be its most enduring legacy for their quality and vision.
As the critic Robert Fiore wrote in the book “The New Comics”: “They were like no war comics ever before, rough-minded, deglamorized, and painstakingly researched. Kurtzman portrayed warfare as dirty, frightening, capricious and absurd.”
Kurtzman (1924-1993), his creative passions roused when the Korean War broke out in 1950, was the dynamo that powered EC’s war comics, which also included Frontline Combat. Those books were energized by the same sharp skepticism that fired his parodies in Mad, and he was obsessed by historical detail, creating a kind of comics journalism decades before Joe Sacco’s works like “Palestine” and “Safe Area Gorazde.”
Kurtzman once said: “Doing research was an important thing in my life in the sense that I never was one for history books [in school], but when I got into researching for a purpose, I suddenly found history fascinating.”
His lust for facts aside, what Kurtzman sought to do most of all was put a human face on war, stripping it of the super-patriotism that animated most war comics and movies of the time.
A prime example of his approach appears in the new “Two-Fisted” volume. “Atom Bomb!,” drawn by Wood, is a moving seven-page meditation on the human consequences of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It focuses on an old woman, her daughter and her grandchild. No Howling Commandos here – just quiet, humane drama.
Severin (1921-2012), who served in the Pacific Theater in World War II, was the perfect match for the fact-infatuated Kurtzman. He, too, never met a detail he didn’t like. “I had to draw every damn detail of the goggle and put all the gears and everything in the right place,” Severin said in an interview in “The EC Artists,” which came out last year from Fantagraphics.
Kurtzman and Severin even traveled to Long Island once to a National Guard armory to study and ride around in a tank that Severin was going to draw. That kind of attention paid off.
Severin’s gutsy and gritty pencils – often inked by Will Elder, another early Mad stalwart – always depicted real soldiers who looked as if they were just one more explosion or gunshot away from permanent PTSD. There are no idealized heroes in “Bomb Run,” not even Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant.
Severin went on to a long and varied career as one of the founding artists of Mad, later working on Marvel characters like the Incredible Hulk, Nick Fury and the Rawhide Kid, but his EC war chronicles are among the peaks of his work.
Referring to Severin and Elder, Kurtzman once said, “They complemented each other and did some of the finest stuff in that partnership that was ever done in the genre of war books.”
If only history texts back in high school and college had been one-quarter as gripping as these two EC collections.