Blazing Combat One!

James Warren had a surprise hit when he joined forces with Forry Ackerman and created Famous Monsters of Filmland. That success led Warren to see if he might not be able to recreate some of the great success of EC Comics which had been driven from the newsstands many years before because of general outrage at their most extreme content with little regard for their more literary aspects. He copied their horror format with Creepy and kept it free of the Comics Code by making it a true-blue magazine, albeit black and white. 

Creepy was also a success and that meant more needed to be done perhaps. And Warren liked EC's Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales, two war comics edited by Harvey Kurtzman with a degree of sophistication above the normal ultra-patriotic blather of other war mags. So came into being Blazing Combat, a magazine about war but with a more nuanced story. That story would be written almost exclusively by the late great Archie Goodwin. Due to circumstances beyond the control of Warren and his company the magazine was not a financial success, but it has always been deemed a critical one. On Saturdays in March the Dojo will be taking an issue by issue look at the four mags which comprise the full run. Today we begin with the debut issue.

Beneath a highly energetic Frank Frazetta cover, the first story drawn by Joe Orlando in the mag was titled "Viet-Cong!" and immediately we see that the stories here will be more timely and more suspect of all aspects of waging war. We meet an American soldier who is assigned to advise a South Vietnamese troop as they enter the villages of the country and ferret out the Viet-Cong. Their methods are brutal and the American has reservations about what the United States might be doing. Radical stuff in the mid-60's!

The second story is titled "Aftermath" and was drawn by Angelo Torres. This set more safely in the past of the American Civil War and shows two soldiers from both sides demonstrating humanity and savagery as the war demands.

The third story is titled "Flying Tigers" and is drawn by veteran war artist George Evans and tells how this famous entourage made their bones and became a legit force under General Claire Chenault.

"Long View" is beautifully illustrated by Gray Morrow and takes us to World War II in the Pacific Theater and shows the strain and stress of one squad as they have to perform a deadly mission for the good of the overall effort. This one is rife with emotion and speaks to the brutal nature of warfare.

"Cantigny" drawn by Reed Crandall is set in World War I and features a soldier who is going home but who is a little disappointed he's not even seen the enemy. Of course during the story he does just that.

There's a one-page "Combat Quiz" drawn by Alex Toth followed by the American Revolutionary yarn about the unpredictable battlefield success of "Mad" Anthony Wayne. This one was drawn by Tex Blaisdell with help from others.

The mag closes out with another WWII story drawn by John Severin, an artist who aside from DC's Joe Kubert is likely more associated with the genre than any other. In this story of a Sergeant who tackles battle with a brutality which is perhaps unjustified in the end.

War is not some happy-go-lucky lark as seen in Marvel's Sgt.Fury comics or even dark fables of humanity as seen sometimes in DC's later war books, but here we bet a sense of the immediacy of war and the fragmenting of the human spirit it causes. There's a sense of reality here that is not evident from others, and that reality makes the stories more powerful.

More Blazing Combat next week.

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