DC once thought it was a shootin' offense to not be putting out good war comics:
It is curious...war comics were once all the vogue, even into the mid-1980s. DC was obviously proud that they were still cranking out Sgt. Rock and the Haunted Tank et. al.
All that changed post-Crisis. And I shouldn't single out DC--Marvel hopped off the war comic bandwagon a lot earlier than the Distinguished Competition.
I'm sure part of it was that WWII was more and more remote, and more recent wars were more problematical from a "will they audience accept this war as moral and necessary" angle. War comics are easy when you can make Nazis the villain; not so easy when you've got to portray enemy troops of other races and cultures and not offend anyone.
I don't have any really brilliant thoughts or ideas here...I just found it interesting that 30-odd years ago, DC was proud of their war comics, and sold them fairly hard. Times change...
From DC Sampler #1 (1983), by these guys:
5 comments:
dang it, Nazis really do make handy dandy villains.
They sort of tried to revive war titles with the New 52 (Men of War) and then again with GI Zombie.
Yeah, but those were tied to super-heroes & supernatural...not straight war titles.
I used to enjoy the straight war comics, good tales that often said something interesting about humanity. I didn't need a dinosaur robot.
We all need a dinosaur robot, Martin...we all do.
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