Well, Mention of Captain Savage puts me in mind of his Silver Age relative, which was a navy-based comic on the Howling Commandos Template. Yet again the Silver Age raided the Golden Age for names and inspiration.
http://www.toonopedia.com/capsavge.htm
Korean War? There's Kirby's work for Harvey. For mine, nobody beats Sam Glantzman. Combat ( over in Dell) is all non-fictional WW2 stuff and stunning artwork. He also did an AirWar series for Dell.Forget the name. Glantzman was a seaman stationed in the Pacific during the War, so USS Stevens which was a series he orgiinally did for DC (and available in collections now) is in my top-five of all time comic great series. Great Art, Great Stories, Human dimension, mainly anecdotes about shipboard life,short and sweet pieces and Autobiographical. And there's not much Comics work that's autobiographical. Glantzman also did a lot of work for Charlton. In fact Charlton has a lot of War comics and if you can handle the poor production values, there is some good stuff there. The EC War books are wonderful too,especially George Evan's Aviation stories. But unfortunately not here and not PD. (Evan's has criticized Joe Kubert's Enemy Ace on the grounds that Kubert did not know his planes!) Evans knew his aviation.
I haven't yet looked closely at the Golden Age Blackhawk stuff, so I don't know how accurate that was re aircraft or even if many of the stories were focused on aircraft and then of course there's Airboy and Captain Midnight.
Anyway, have fun.
I'm familar with CAPT. SAVAGE AND HIS LEATHERNECK RAIDERS (actually the U.S. Marines, not the U.S. Navy), and most of Sam Glanzman's (no "t" in there) war comics for the larger publishers -- his work on The Haunted Tank for DC is a particular favorite. DC liked to hedge its bets with war comics by crossbreeding the genre with other elements, so we got the supernatural
Haunted Tank in G.I. COMBAT,
G.I. Robot and
The Creature Commandos in WEIRD WAR STORIES, the ERB-inspired adventure/fantasy
The War That Time Forgot in STAR SPANGLED WAR STORIES, and the superhero/superspy-like
Unknown Soldier. But in reality, I think the 1950s Captain Steve Savage took his name from the same actual historical person on whom DC based its short-lived WWI air-war series,
Lt. Steve Savage, Balloon Buster - a Texan flyer for the U.S. Army Air Corps in WWI France, who wore a sheepskin-lined denim jacket and cowboy hat as he shot down German blimps. Those are some of my favorite war series, because they had unusual and distinctive elements not present in other war titles. Same goes for the 1980s (Hasbro) version of G.I. JOE, which Marvel created simply by bashing its two versions of Nick Fury together -- G.I. Joe is pretty much a straight-up cross between the Howling Commandos and S.H.I.E.L.D., with COBRA replacing HYDRA or the Nazis.
Also of course, the A through E's of air war comics... Airboy, Blackhawk, Captain Midnight, and Enemy Ace. The first three of those are definitely impinging on superhero territory (Captain Midnight the most), as is Charlton's Blackhawks-like team, the Fightin' Five (though not really an 'air war' book per se). EC's war titles I'm familiar with, as well as Jim Warren's BLAZING COMBAT, but I'm looking for series characters, not one-off stories in an anthology book. It's certainly possible to have an anthology with ongoing series characters, and AIR FIGHTERS was exactly that. Sorry if I didn't make it more explicit, but the guys with costumes (or 'uniquely-designed uniforms') and code-names stick out immediately and are therefore sort of obvious. Guys with regular names wearing regular uniforms don't (like Captain Steve Savage... which is a 'regular' name -- for comic books), which is where I need some help -- a character born with a last name like Savage, Rock, or Fury seems destined on a pathway of self-fulfilling prophecy. On top of that, most PD war books don't start with the character's name in the title logo, either, which makes it even harder. The generic war-genre buzzwords used in the titles don't usually give a clue about anything inside, except maybe the branch of service.
You mentioned the Simon & Kirby war titles for Harvey? Took a brief look over the Harvey titles and all that I see is FIGHTING FRONTS, TRUE WAR EXPERIENCES, WAR BATTLES, and WARFRONT. None of those rings a bell, and the only S&K war title that I *do* recall seeing the cover to, FOXHOLE, doesn't seem to be on this site, either. Maybe you were thinking of Crestwood/Prize, not Harvey, but in either case, I don't think the S&K war titles are here. Too bad. STUNTMAN is here -- but strangely, not BOY EXPLORERS or BOYS' RANCH.
You mention Charlton -- certainly by volume one of the greatest producers of what are now PD war stories, but apart from "The Lonely War of Willy Schultz" (yet another series drawn by Sam Glanzman, only 2 episodes of which are available here), what I'm looking for is specific series characters (Charlton didn't seem to want to name a war title after the character) by name, and in what titles they appeared. I'm specifically asking for recommendations out of the PD titles available on THIS site, as I'm pretty familiar with the more famous war series which came from the major publishers. Or minor, if you wanted to list all of the companies Garth Ennis has written war stories for -- as he continues to keep the genre alive single-handedly today.
The other sub-genre of war titles which I've read
only here and can recommend is the "Atomic War" titles. Ace Magazines' WORLD WAR III #1-2 and ATOMIC WAR! #1-4 (which are the best of the bunch), St. John's ATOM-AGE COMBAT (v1) #1-5 (which unfortunately only featured one 'atomic war' story per issue), followed by the second (and better) volume of same from St. John (#1) and Fago Magazines (#s 2 & 3) -- which was ALL atomic war stories, and the American Comics Group title COMMANDER BATTLE AND THE ATOMIC SUB #1-7 (technically more of a sci-fi/adventure series than war per se, although it shares the same appropriate jingoist sensibilities endemic to its time). Youthful Magazines' ATTACK! was converted from a standard war title to
ATOMIC ATTACK! (#s 5 through 8 ), by the inclusion of one new 8-page 'atomic war' story leading off each of the four issues, but it's the weakest of the bunch. Those, and a few related one-shots like Avon's ATOMIC SPY CASES No. 1, comprise the whole sub-genre. Add in a few educational titles like Gilberton's PICTURE PARADE No. 1 ("Andy's Atomic Adventures"), General Electric's INSIDE THE ATOM, and some PSAs like OPERATION SURVIVAL!, or alarmist anti-Communism warnings like IS THIS TOMORROW to round out the bigger picture.
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Topic: Any recommendations for good PD war comics series? (Read 2175 times)
