veterans daze
Nov. 11th, 2011 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davemerrillI can't think of a better way to remember our veterans than with some panels from a 1970s war comic that was on its way to cancellation!
You can see Marvel Comics thinking, "Why are we paying Dick Ayers money to draw WW2 over and over and over again? Can't we just reprint his old stories?" And so they did. I have a whole lot of Sgt. Fury comics and it's interesting to see it move from fairly standard self-contained stories into the continuing soap-opera kind of plotting that most other comics were adopting in the late 60s and early 70s. That's tough to do with a war comic because America was only in the war for three and a half years, tops. The sequential stories were abandoned sometime in the early 70s as reprints started to sneak in, you'd get one original story and one reprint, and it's hard to keep new storylines going that way.
There is some kind of dire Dick Ayers artwork in this one, everybody's chins sort of stretch to one side, everybody's standing around splay-legged, lots of long wrinkles. The splash page is actually drawn by somebody else, uncredited. There's a gritty earthy look to Ayers' inks that works when he's inking Kirby, and his Westerns are swell, but his 70s work looks rushed. I'm sure Marvel was treating him terribly at this point so I have to cut him some slack, he'd been drawing these darn characters for more than a decade, I'm sure he wasn't very excited about the work either.
Still, even as reprints it must have sold decently, because the book only got cancelled to make way for GI Joe in the early 80s. When I started buying Sgt. Fury it was solidly in the reprint era, working its way back through the mid 60s stories, and I liked 'em just fine. In fact I got to see a lot of great John Severin artwork I otherwise would never have seen thanks to those reprints. Which, by the way, I was buying off the 'kiddie rack' at the Book Trader for twenty five cents each. He sold new comics at cover price and then there was a rack full of Disney comics, old Charlton racing comics, Harveys, and war books that he would sell for a quarter, no matter how old or how new. When I was 12 I would buy whatever was old and cheap, at first out of the typical Overstreet-inspired kid notion that I could immediately sell the old comics for BIG BUCK$$, but I soon realized that old comics were funky and weird, what with their ads for "love lites" and Mothers Of Invention LPs and long-extinct cereals. And then I discovered Carl Barks and bought a lot of Uncle Scrooges out of that rack. They were reprints too, but did I care? Not at all.
Man, that's a lot of old-fogey flashbacking. Anyway salute our veterans by reading STUPID COMICS! Actually salute our veterans and THEN read Stupid Comics, the two things have nothing to do with each other.
You can see Marvel Comics thinking, "Why are we paying Dick Ayers money to draw WW2 over and over and over again? Can't we just reprint his old stories?" And so they did. I have a whole lot of Sgt. Fury comics and it's interesting to see it move from fairly standard self-contained stories into the continuing soap-opera kind of plotting that most other comics were adopting in the late 60s and early 70s. That's tough to do with a war comic because America was only in the war for three and a half years, tops. The sequential stories were abandoned sometime in the early 70s as reprints started to sneak in, you'd get one original story and one reprint, and it's hard to keep new storylines going that way.
There is some kind of dire Dick Ayers artwork in this one, everybody's chins sort of stretch to one side, everybody's standing around splay-legged, lots of long wrinkles. The splash page is actually drawn by somebody else, uncredited. There's a gritty earthy look to Ayers' inks that works when he's inking Kirby, and his Westerns are swell, but his 70s work looks rushed. I'm sure Marvel was treating him terribly at this point so I have to cut him some slack, he'd been drawing these darn characters for more than a decade, I'm sure he wasn't very excited about the work either.
Still, even as reprints it must have sold decently, because the book only got cancelled to make way for GI Joe in the early 80s. When I started buying Sgt. Fury it was solidly in the reprint era, working its way back through the mid 60s stories, and I liked 'em just fine. In fact I got to see a lot of great John Severin artwork I otherwise would never have seen thanks to those reprints. Which, by the way, I was buying off the 'kiddie rack' at the Book Trader for twenty five cents each. He sold new comics at cover price and then there was a rack full of Disney comics, old Charlton racing comics, Harveys, and war books that he would sell for a quarter, no matter how old or how new. When I was 12 I would buy whatever was old and cheap, at first out of the typical Overstreet-inspired kid notion that I could immediately sell the old comics for BIG BUCK$$, but I soon realized that old comics were funky and weird, what with their ads for "love lites" and Mothers Of Invention LPs and long-extinct cereals. And then I discovered Carl Barks and bought a lot of Uncle Scrooges out of that rack. They were reprints too, but did I care? Not at all.
Man, that's a lot of old-fogey flashbacking. Anyway salute our veterans by reading STUPID COMICS! Actually salute our veterans and THEN read Stupid Comics, the two things have nothing to do with each other.
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no subject
Date: 2011-11-11 06:15 pm (UTC)OTOH, don't forget M*A*S*H* managed to make the Korean Police Action last like 10 years... :)
no subject
Date: 2011-11-11 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-11 10:43 pm (UTC)The American GOVERNMENT was late to the party. Dither and dither until Yamamoto pulled his stunt.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-12 04:53 pm (UTC)The US Navy was involved in an undeclared shooting war with the Germans from early '41 on, of course.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-11 07:07 pm (UTC)