Yossel: April 19, 1943!

I don't remember buying Yossel: April 29, 1943, but it's been in my collection for many years, always jumping up at me and imploring me to give it a good hearty well-considered read. I've never done it until now. Joe Kubert is an artist I admired immeasurably before, and after reading this woeful tale of a young boy in the Warsaw Ghetto striving to survive in the maw of the machinery the Nazis specifically built to kill Jews and others undesirables, I admire his talent and skill even more.

Yossel is represented from Kubert's pencil art, and he says in an introduction it was so that the immediacy and power of his pencils would not be lost or blunted by later considered inking. The story itself concerns a young man who is an artist and who is saved by using his art. The drawings here seem to be the very art we are reading about. Here Kubert reflects and imagines what his life might've been had his family not persisted and had not escaped the clutches of the Nazi regime. He imagines in horrific detail what a young Joe Kubert ("Yossel" is a Yiddish form of "Joseph") might've seen and experienced in the bloody horror of the Holocaust.

The grinding details of the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis are sometimes hard to read, and even with all my years on this Earth, I am at a loss sometimes to understand how men could do this to other men, women and children. But it is a lack of imagination on my part, the terrible minds of evil men are brimming with ways to hurt and destroy others. I live in a country which despite its bravado and bluster all too often shows a disregard for the poor, for the outsider in society, but the Nazi state was using its terrible powers to mechanically eliminate and murder an entire culture by killing one by one the people who were that culture. It's still shocking or ought to be. The story of Yossel makes it shocking all over again.

Yossel: April 29, 1943 is a masterpiece and a powerful social document by a master craftsman at the height of his talent and powers, and a book to read by all for the good of mankind itself.

(It occurs to me that the resettlement of the Native Americans to "reservations" was not that dissimilar, at least in its goal to isolate out the different for purposes of making wealth and power.)

Tomorrow some things utterly different.

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The Last Outrage!

The suffering or the Jews and others during the Holocaust is a horror which weirdly fascinates and repels at the same time. The intense practiced cruel cold-blooded murder and torture inflicted on men women and children over the course of years is difficult to fathom, and so some will say it never happened. They prefer a world in which such evil didn't exist or they would like that the hate they themselves feel were more justifiable and the Holocaust makes that impossible. And some just never seem to get it, to understand that such evil is fundamentally different, yet still a part of man. The desire to expunge the "other" is all too commonplace, even in our "enlightened" modern day. 

In the story "The Last Outrage" which perhaps inspired this collection, we are introduced to Dina Babbitt, a survivor of Auschwitz who had made a successful career in animation in the years after the liberation of the camp and the end of the war. She worked on cartoons as varied as Wile Coyote, Daffy Duck and Captain Crunch. But her story begins here with Snow White, which she painted as a mural on a wall in Auschwitz to help lift the veil of suffering from the children trapped there. No less than the "Angel of Death" the sadistic Dr. Joseph Mengele took notice and wished to use her talents to help him record some of his heinous experiments. She painted many portraits of people for the purpose of recording (in Mengele's eyes) their various deficiencies particularly in respect to skin tone. After the camps were freed she left this work and never thought of it more until she learned that a museum in Poland was displaying her works. She wanted them back and the museum shockingly failed to comply. And as a result a long effort, ultimately unsuccessful was waged to get back work produced under such vile circumstances and held with egregious contempt. 

"The Last Outrage" was first published in the Marvel comic X-Men: Magneto - Testament. The writer of this story and the essays in this collection Rachel Medoff  and the artist of this story Neal Adams worked to help Babbitt, but to no avail and she passed away some years ago. Not only did the Holocaust happen, but thanks to the small-minded greed of people like the museum directors in Poland, the suffering it caused continues.

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Gold Rush!

I grew up a Marvel fan for the most part and what I knew of the Marvel Universe like everyone else was found in their countless comics produced over decades. Then at last I wearied of the chase and the comic universe the MU had become was not recognizable. Many years before Marvel had at long last found success in the movie theaters with series like Blade and The X-Men, and later the Avengers cycle. As I drifted farther and farther from the comics the movies became the centerpiece of what I know as the Marvel Universe. And in that cinematic universe much is made of the uber villain Magneto and his beginnings as a waif who loses nearly everything in the monstrous death camps of the Nazis. The films have made an empathetic character out of the villain if not at all times a sympathetic one. That began in this comic. 

Written by Chris Claremont and drawn by the late Dave Cockrum, this X-Men story finds the team in the middle of one of their never ending sagas while inside the mind of Professor Xavier a different battle is going on. We see in his memories a time twenty years before when he was helping Holocaust survivors come to terms with the suffering they'd endured. He meets a man named Magnus and slowly they learn that they both are mutants. The arrival of an up and coming Hydra causes them to fight together to save a young woman who holds the secret of vast gold reserves in her war scarred psyche. It's a good tale, not a great one, but making Magnus a survivor of Auschwitz utterly transform a villain who to that time was largely a cruel enigma. 

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World War III!

At the same time that Atomic War! was being published 1952 and 1953, the Ace Comics brand knocked out a second nearly identical comic book title World War III. The two books had pretty much the same premise, the United States undergoes a devastating sneak attack by the Soviets and atomic power is used repeatedly. I don't get the sense the books were part of the same continuity, but it would be really easy to make them so. If anything World War III had a more sci-fi feel than its companion. The cover to the first issue is one of the most iconic in all the lore of the comic field. Alas the stories beneath are more pedestrian in nature than the wild chaotic  cover.

Aside from the first story which does deliver this feel, the rest of the stories are about counter attacks and are more in the traditional war comics mode save with more futuristic weapons and gear. There are a couple of full-page images which really communicate the sense of destruction an atomic attack could wreak.

The second and final issue of World War III, the series is even more like a sci-fi comic and that's evident by the front cover which reminds me less of a war comic and more of the classic cover of Amazing Stories which debuted Buck Rogers. There are three stories here on land, sea, and air and the plot to all of them deal with men who get little respect from their peers due to age or limitation but who prove themselves more than worthy.

These stories though it must be remembered hail from a time when atomic attack was believed to be imminent and so the images carried more weight. These are delivered as cautionary tales, meant to enlighten and warn as much as to entertain.

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Blazing Combat Four!

And then came the fourth and final issue of Blazing Combat's brief run. Despite compelling stories by editor Archie Goodwin and artwork by some of the finest talents in the history of the comic book business including Frank Frazetta who produced all four covers, Blazing Combat was beaten back off the magazine shelves by a widespread decision not to carry it. It's content was considered controversial, too questioning of matters of war and state and so those in power decided it needed to exist and after this issue it didn't.

"Conflict!" is a story written by Goodwin and drawn by Gene Colan of Vietnam and offers up a complex yet simple war tale of men who are not only fighting the enemy but their own  prejudices. A black medic elicits the ire and verbal abuse of a stout warrior who has little regard to the medic's desire to tend to all the wounded, even the enemy. But circumstances make it such that he medic is all that stands between this racist and his final fate, and despite that we learn that some things never change.

"How It Began!" is a small two-page primer on the history of war tactics in the air. It's drawn by George Evans.

It sets up a story titled "The Edge" drawn by Alex Toth which shows that knowledge of air tactics and experience can be the difference maker in the deadly skies.

"Give and Take" drawn by Russ Heath is a somewhat sardonic tale of capriciousness of war. The things we value lose their edge when life and death are on the line.  Some will dare anything for a taste of home, and they may well lose.

"ME-262!" drawn by Wally Wood  shares some history and shows how narrow in some respects the victory in World War II was. A technical advantage in a fighter plane is not fully taken advantage of by order of Hitler himself and that proves crucial in the air war over Britain and beyond.

"The Trench" is a blood and guts tale of World War I drawn by John Severin and written by Archie Goodwin. Severin gives all his stories in Blazing Combat a vital sense of movement and energy and this one no less so. A man curses his days in the trench until he is forced to moved beyond its relative safety. What he finds changes him perhaps forever.

"Thermopylae!" is lushly illustrated by Reed Crandall and while British soldiers await the assault of Hitler's forces in Greece, a soldier learns of the significant history of the place in ancient times when the Persian Empire led by Xerxes was met by a cadre of three hundred Spartans led by a man named Leonidas. While the three hundred fell their defense still proved successful in its own way and serve to inspire the Brits to hold the place for three critical days.

"Night Drop!" is the final story in the final issue of Blazing Combat. It was drawn by Angelo Torres and Archie Goodwin's last tale shows the brutality of the hand to hand fighting of World War II and how soldiers who are "only following orders" lead to atrocities greater than they can imagine.

Blazing Combat was a magazine that was good because of the stellar writing of Archie Goodwin, one of those guys who was so good so often for so long that he is often overlooked. But I have renewed admiration for one of the finest talents the comics field has ever produced.

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The Calypso Connection!

Captain America is the original World War II hero and in this follow up to the story in which we learn he helped liberate the fictional death camp called "Diebenwald" we learn more about the suffering of Cap's landlady Anna Kappelbaum. In Captain America #245 we discover that she was sexually assaulted by the commandant of the camp, a fellow named Klaus Mendelhaus. She happens to see Mendelhaus and soon after is approached by Nazi hunter Aaron Heller and his daughter. They find  Mendelhaus who seems to be regretful of his many crimes and Anna is unable to kill him when given the chance. Heller's daughter does shoot him down when her father dies of a heart attack. 

This story written by Roger McKenzie and drawn by Carmine Infantino and Joe Rubenstein is a nifty rousing adventure, but somehow its message of folks need to forgive seems a little underdeveloped. I understand that victims like Anna need to forgive for their own sake and not for their attackers, but Mendelhaus seems a little too pat in this story, a bit too sympathetic for my tastes. He's a mass murderer and rapist and those are mighty crimes indeed. 

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From The Ashes!

Captain America is the original World War II hero and despite being created by two young Jewish men and owned by a Jewish family never battled the infamous threat of the death camps directly, though he mowed down many a Nazi in his time. Taking on the "Holocaust" would have to wait until the Bronze Age of comics and issue #237 of the second Captain America series. The talents who bring Cap face to face with the final solution are writers Chris Claremont and Roger McKenzie and artists Sal Buscema and Don Perlin. 

It happens that Cap had just put down the threat of the National Force led by a former Captain America the racist Cap from the 1950's. After the seeming death of Sharon Carter he's looking for a new direction (something Cap did a lot alas) and seeks to back away from his hero identity and find some solace as a private citizen named Steve Rogers. To that end he moves into a new apartment building, one owned by Anna Kapplebaum a survivor of the camps and in particular one which Cap himself had helped liberate. So we finally get to see the Living Legend battle the Nazis on the ground on which they murdered countless numbers. 

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The Fourth Death!

"The Fourth Death" was written by Robert Kanigher, an editor and writer at DC for many years. He was especially well known for his tales of war, those often illustrated by the likes of Joe Kubert, Russ Heath, and Jerry Grandenetti. It is the spirit of Grandenetti that the art of Ric Estrada most reminds me, not quite as liquid but still filled with a kinetic potency artists of prettier images often sacrifice.

Tucked away in the many pages of Sgt.Rock Spectacular #13 this is a story of cold blooded revenge. This is another story of the death camps and in this one the commandant is a particular sadistic individual who seems to gain a great satisfaction in the destruction of his charges. Commandant Aufbach is eager to get his  hands on an escaped prisoner named Baumer and drives his troop relentlessly to find the man who has blotted his record. Find him he does and he wishes he hadn't . Features one of the best final pages in this collection.

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Holocaust!

Joe Kubert is a master of the comic book form. I didn't really begin to appreciate the genius of Kubert when I started into comics as a mere lad because of two things, I was a Marvel fan and I didn't necessarily follow the war comics. Kubert was a DC artist who drew mostly war  adventures of Enemy Ace and Sgt. Rock and many more. 

I fell in love with Kubert when he tackled Tarzan of the Apes when DC acquired the license from ERB folks after Gold Key's long tenure. There was a ruggedness and raw energy to this Tarzan I'd not seen before and I fell head over heels in love with it and with Kubert's art itself. I began to seek it out and often smiled when I found it. I did not smile when I discoverd "Holocaust". 

Rarely has Kubert drawn images with more raw power than the two above. Sequestered inside Sgt. Rock #351 this drawing shows the horror of the death camps in stark four colors. The nakedness of the tragic Jews being led to a factory of murder is heart breaking, but it's the stark reality of the Holocaust. Evil men did evil things to innocent people and all too many stood by for too long before it was stopped. The evil is still among alas. 

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Walls Of Blood!

Blitzkrieg was a different comic book, one which focused on World War II through the lens of the Nazis themselves. The goal was not to be sympathetic to the Reich, but to find new angles to tell stories which had been told in one form or another for decades. In the second issues the focus was on the Warsaw ghetto uprising when the Jewish population which was persistently being shipped to death camps rose up and waged guerilla war for some weeks against the might of the Nazi war machine. 

What I found most striking about this story written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Ric Estrada is how much the story reminded me of the later Joe Kubert masterpiece Yossel, a work which I will get to here in due course. There are a number of structural similarities including most interestingly an escapee who describes for the Jews of the ghetto the horrors of the death camps. Also the hero here is a young boy. Kubert drew a magnificent cover which captures the tension of any uprising of just how it's best to used violence effectively. 

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Atomic War!

It's the end of the world as we know it! No, I'm not talking about the current plague sweeping across our planet and transforming habits and attitudes of generations, I'm talking about an early 1950's comic book title Atomic War! which in that time focused the threat which lingered in the mind of every thinking citizen of this country, the seemingly inevitable destruction of the society as a result of atomic warfare. In the first issue of the four issue series the United States comes under attack by the Soviet Union and atomic bombs drop on New York City, Chicago and Detroit, the cultural, food, and manufacturing centers of the country at that time. The devastation is show in vintage four-color detail. In other stories in the issue the American forces in Berlin are featured and a counter attack is launched from the most northern outposts of the United States. It's fascinating to read stories of different soldiers and fighters in varied regions operating within a single continuity.

That continuity continues in the second issue of the series when we follow bombers on their vengeance flight into Russian territory and the bombing of three cities is accomplished. A hydrogen bomb is dropped on Moscow utterly destroying it. Other stories follow United States troops looking for action and finding it in Alaska dubbed the "Ice-Box" and  U.N. troops defending a bridge in Europe. The tone of these stories is not all that different from typical war stories of the time, but knowing they take place inside a dark world devastated by atomic weapons adds an intensity.
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In the penultimate issue of the Atomic War!'s brief run we continue with the fall out (not literally as there seems to be almost no mention of radiation in this comic so far) of the Russians heinous sneak attack and the reprisals from the United States. The focus is on Europe as we follow a determined commando and his desire for revenge for the deaths of his family when he gives all to destroy a missile base. The series has a vaguely science fiction  feel at this point with futuristic weapons coming more and more into play. Then we shift to the Atlantic and the combat between deadly Russian subs and the Allied ships. A text story features a lone man who stops an enemy beachhead and the issue wraps up with futuristic tanks battling it out in the fields of Europe.

In the fourth and final issue of Atomic War! we are far along on some sci-fi concepts. It begins with an arctic attack by the Russians which brings into play a deadly nerve gas and sci-fi tanks but this forestalled by American pluck, know-how and big bad jets. Another story about an old-timer still leading troops who have little respect for him finds the enemy using "pulverizers" which find sound frequencies to disintegrate metal. A text story features a brave man who catches the enemy off guard and blows up a major installation. During one story a mention is made of a balloon for observation and that reminded me that these stories predate satellites, but satellites are the center of a story which features a master of disguise as he tries ti infiltrate a Russian base intent on launching a satellite into space. And finally we go underwater as an American finds a way to work with his Turkish counterpart long enough to destroy an enemy oil center. And that wraps the series. 

The most amazing thing about these  stories is that despite a feel of classic war stories at times, they all fit within a continuity established in the very first issue and pretty much adhered to   throughout the brief four-issue run. These are advertised as cautionary tales of a war which might happen in that relatively brief time between the close of WWII and the advent of "overkill" nuclear missile arsenals on both sides. The threat was bombers loaded with nukes, nukes which were still considered at some level tactical. That is until we made so many that it became madness to use them. 

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Blazing Combat Three!

Blazing Combat was already a casualty of the war on truth telling when the third issue hit the stands. Despite the fact its commercial fate was sealed by the decision of many in the military and in its periphery organizations to not stock the title and present it for sale. But that didn't make the stories written by editor Archie Goodwin any less good.

This issue features the "Combat Quiz", a regular feature in all four issues of the magazine on the inside front cover. This installment was drawn by Angelo Torres.

"Special Forces" leads off the issue and is drawn by Joe Orlando, though I see the influence if not hand of Jerry Grandenetti in this one. It's a tale of Vietnam and how the war was fought tooth and nail in the rice paddies by specially trained troops against a deadly enemy.

"Scavengers" is a tale of Sherman's infamous "March to the Sea" and shows how soldiers become pillagers and looters and what they do to save their honor. 

"U-Boat" is a story drawn by Gene Colan and takes us to World War II and the Atlantic Ocean prowled by deadly "Underseaboats" better known as "U-Boats". These Nazi craft tear up the seas with their stealthy attacks and in this instance one man falls prey to a admiration for professionalism which is deadly to his allies.

"Survival" is one of the strangest stories in Blazing Combat as it showcases a world of the future battles, or at least the aftermath of same. We meet a man who works and fights diligently to survive, but who perhaps forgets why his survival matters. It's an Alex Toth masterpiece.

The great  Wally Wood joins the rosters of fine artists in the magazine when he contributes "The Battle of Britain" about the Royal Air Force's desperate struggle in the skies to forestall a Nazi invasion. Victory is counted in many ways we learn in this story.

"Water Hole" is a Goodwin story set in the American west with cavalry troops trying to corral a crafty Native American enemy. Our focus is on one young man who finds himself in a confrontation he never anticipated. This story is exquisitely drawn by Gray Morrow.

And finally "Souvenirs" masterfully drawn by John Severin finishes up the issue. This is a tale of a soldier who forgets his main mission, but somehow ends up doing the right thing anyway. Or at least his colleagues think so.

There is only one more issue of Blazing Combat to go and that's next week.

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