The recent reading group subject, Charlton's Fightin' Navy, set me thinking again about the role of authentic hardware in war stories...for that matter, in all comic stories. I've always enjoyed drawing hardware--cars, planes, trains, ships. When I was working professionally I tried to draw reasonably accurate hardware and I tried to match it to the story. For example, in Infinity, Inc. Obsidian's civilian identity was a lower-class kid with a low-wage job in a machine shop. I had him drive a beat-up old Plymouth Valiant because in those days that's the sort of thing a kid with no money might have been able to afford. But I often wonder if that was just silliness. Would the story have been any less effective if the kid had driven one of those Steve Ditko cars, the ones that look like they were built from cardboard boxes?
War stories are full of hardware. Tanks, ships, planes, guns. It seems it's the editor who decides what level of authenticity to demand from his artists. Bob Kanigher's books generally had believable equipment, though the degree of finish varied. Russ Heath was at the extreme. His hardware was always very specific and meticulously rendered. Harvey Kurtzman is famous for insisting on realistic hardware in his war books. He nevertheless gave his artists quite a bit of leeway. Wallace Wood and Jack Davis practically caricatured the vehicles they drew, though you could always recognize them. British war comics like Commando are obsessed with hardware to the point that it overwhelms many stories. The hero is often reduced to a silhouette in the canopy of a painfully-detailed airplane, with a balloon tail to remind us he's there.
On the other end of the scale we have Bill Molno. He hardly ever bothered with reference and just splashed down generic shapes that sort of resembled tanks or warships. Charlton war books printed hundreds if not thousands of pages of his phony war stories. And Charlton war books sold just fine, year after year.
That's the puzzle. Did it really matter that under Molno both a Kawasaki Ki-100 fighter and a Nakajima B5N attack bomber looked like a cardboard paper-towel roll with wings attached? As long as the reader understood "enemy plane," did anything else matter? Perhaps it's the story alone that counts. A kid spending thirty seconds scanning a comic book panel won't care if a plane has a three-blade instead of a four-blade propeller. In this case the research and detail an artist puts into his drawings is mostly for his own benefit. A sort of, forgive the term, artistic masturbation.
I've always admired Alex Toth's notion of "plussing the script." He felt an artist should create backgrounds, props, and poses that give each scene a unique character. The effect might only be subliminal, but it would enrich the reader's experience. I have tried to follow his lead, but maybe we're just fooling ourselves.
I'd be interested to hear what others, artists and non-artists alike, think.
