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[MarkWarner]

This week's book was a dead-cert at some point. It is another one that has sold itself because of the cover, which I think is great. A quick look at the GCD entry seems to indicate it's a Matt Bakerfest. This has got to be a good one!

Canteen Kate #2 can be found at https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=19152, and the story we are concentrating on is the first one "Rugged Rug-Cutters".

[SuperScrounge]

Quips And Queries - A couple nice gags, but most were weak.

Rugged Rug-Cutters - Well, the art's good. The story... okay.

Screw Ball Strategy - Amusing.

Scuttlebutt - Ummmm... yeah... Kate's comment at the end kinda summed up my feelings. It was like the writer couldn't think up a good ending, so he went with a non-ending.

Bring 'em Back Alive - Okay.

Much Ado About Mushrooms - I wonder if the stories would seem funnier if the artwork was more cartoony?

Gag Bag - Only one of the "jokes" got a laugh out of me.

[Mazzucchelli]

I always had a problem with Canteen Kate, since I first read it on this website. I know it

[crashryan]

The art in a comic is what interests me the most, so in my book this one is Grade A. Good drawings with a light touch were Matt Baker's specialty,. He hits the mark in all four Canteen Kate stories. Kate herself is cute and lively. She's sexy without being overtly sexual, which may be surprising in a comic that was obviously aimed at GI's, not kids. But then Baker always showed greater restraint than his "Good Girl Art" contemporaries like Howard Larsen and Jack Kamen. Which brings us to Kate's shirt.

In her earliest appearances in Fightin' Marines, Kate occasionally showed the cleavage one would expect to see when a woman's shirt is unbuttoned halfway down. But soon there was no breast showing; in fact the "V" of the open shirt moved upward in poses in which we might see too much. I wonder if this was self-censorship on Baker's part. Or did the editor, even without a Comics Code, choose to make Kate more respectable than the typical 50s comic cheesecake girl?

Turning to the stories means we leave the good stuff behind. Though I can appreciate Mazzucchelli's points, the Kate stories didn't put me off in that way. Back in my childhood there were tons of "service humor" movies, books and TV shows. It seems to be a genre that appealed to WWII-era men. The stories always dealt with a few stock situations: harmless hijinks amongst the men, privates vs. sergeants, enlisted men vs. officers, guys trying to make time with local babes. They were set somewhere distant from the fighting to avoid the unpleasantness of combat. In this comic Kate's canteen is in Japan--except for one story in which she's magically transported to Korea.

Perhaps ex-GI's related to service comedies, but they never appealed to me. Neither do these Canteen Kate stories. It doesn't help that they're weakly written and barely funny. M. A. S. H. this ain't.

The story that really repels me is "Screw Ball Strategy." Here destruction and death are just jolly excuses for (unfunny) gags. The writer even makes light of the possible deaths of the "good guys"--the enemy don't count, of course, not being human. Overall the writing is a mess. The story is a choppy succession of situations that hardly make sense. "Incomprehensible" about sums up the script.

About those "jokes." The stilted writing style and the odd choice of subjects (two Whistler anecdotes on one page?) make it seem like these were cribbed from a forty-year-old issue of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang.

[jimmm kelly]

Canteen Kate's best feature is her legs. In most shots, the eye is drawn to her legs--that's where all the action is.

In some ways, Kate is a continuation of Matt Baker's Sky Girl. Likewise with Sky Girl, it was often her legs that were going every which way. But that was the '40s Baker where he used a lot of exaggeration in his art. By the '50s, Baker's greater command of anatomy and perspective allows him to ground his art and yet get away with amusing body language.

I expect everything to be offensive in some way, so I don't judge the stories. And the art is so transcendent, I go to another place entirely when I look at it. The brush work is really quite something. Usually when I read any comics, I'm not just following whatever the writer and the artist have put there, but I'm making up my own jokes and plots beyond the thing itself.

Canteen Kate was one of the first features I sought out when I joined Comic Book Plus. The proximity of Kate to the conflict changes in the different stories--sometimes she's in the theatre and sometimes she's further away--maybe even in Japan. Another thing is how the different Koreans are coloured--usually the "bad" Koreans are coloured yellow and the "good" Koreans--like Small Change and Hiya--are coloured orange. But comic book colouring was never realistic--nor should it need to be.

[bowers]

Not bad for what it is. Of course the stories are silly- it goes with the genre. "Cheesecake" comics are all about the art, and Baker was a master.
My intro to Kate was in an early issue of Charlton's "Fightin' Marines", and I've always thought she worked better as a backup feature rather than starring in her own book. The stories can tend to be too much alike.
Anyway, this was an easy read and a treat for the eye. Cheers, Bowers

[paw broon]

Not my best read this week.  Although Kate is nicely drawn, the rest of the comic is pretty corny.  The stories are really poor and not funny. Mushrooms is really worrying as Kate is so thick she thinks it is ok to gather up anything that looks remotely like a mushroom and serve it up.  Nasty.  As for the Quips and Queries and the gags pages, these are awful.  I know this comic is from an era long gone but the almost racist insults re. Irish and Scots -thick and tight fisted- just aren't acceptable in modern day Britain.  All in all a disappointment.

[MarkWarner]

After reading the other reviews I am certainly in a bit of a minority on this one!

The cover is great, one of the best we have on the site. But will the contents match? My money says yes!

The starting one page "Quips and Queries" was good enough. Not quite sure what it is doing in this book