My favorite item picked up this week at my LCS was Showcase Presents: Our Army at War Volume 1.
It reprints the first 20 issues of that title-all precode issues from 1952-1954. These are the earliest comics that DC has reprinted so far in its Showcase series which so far has mainly concentrated on reprinting comics from the later 1950s into the 1970s.
I have to admit that there are a lot of DC comics from this period that I have never seen so this collection was very welcome. It'll be awhile before I get around to reading it but here are some of my initial comments on my first impressions of the art in these issues.
First off the reproduction overall looks great. They must have had excellent stats on these available as so far I haven't been able to detect any stories where they had to do extensive restoration.
On my first quick run run through the volume I was struck by how similar the art is on the surface to Julius Schwartz's sci-fi mags of this period. I attribute this to the fact that both Kanigher and Schwartz were using many of the same inkers. Joe Giella is the most prolific in the inks department but Bernie Sachs, Frank Giacoia, and Sy Barry are all there too. All these inkers had that slick style (similar to what the Flash Gordon strip then under Dan Barry had) that Schwartz so loved.
Pleasant surprises are the more than half a dozen stories (plus one cover) by Bernie Krigstein. Another surprise was seeing a good twenty stories (plus a cover ) by Gene Colan.
Unfortunately, for me, because all but one of the Colan stories (and the cover) are inked by others and have that slick inking style on them, they don't work for me as well as the stories which he inked himself (such as his concurrent work at Atlas) which all have a rougher look that just works, for me, much better on war stories.
Both Irv Novick and Jerry Grandenetti pop up pretty steadily throughout this volume (Novick is also the most prolific cover artist in it) and are the biggest link between these precode stories and the later post code Silver Age war stories. The popular team of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito also pop up in several stories later in the book with art looking much as it would in their later stories. Another artist who would become known for his war story work (not just at DC), Mort Drucker, has a few stories in this volume but I found him unrecognizable under the inks of Bob Lander (an artist that I am unfamiliar with).
The only pencillers in the book with whom I was unfamiliar were Eugene Hughes and Ray Schott. Their work shows up mainly in the earlier issues.
Most noticeable by their absence are both Joe Kubert and Russ Heath, both of whom were busy elsewhere at this time, but who would come to represent to many Silver Age readers the look of DC's war comics.
The writing credits were also somewhat of a revelation. I really expected to see more stories by Kanigher. He's certainly there (in about 75% of the issues) but never has more than one story per issue. Other writers represented include Hal Kantor, Dave Wood, France Herron, David Kahn, John Reed, William Woolfolk, Art Wallace, Art Barnett, and Robert Bernstein. In fact I would say the most prolific writer in this volume is David Kahn. Later war story work horses like Bob Haney and Hank Chapman (probably still at Atlas) are not yet on board.
All in all a package that I would recommend to anyone interested in war comics, 50s comics or just an interesting package of seldom seen comics from this period in time.
Best
Joe
