Showcase Presents:
The War That Time Forgot Vol. 1
It’s hard to imagine a weirder World War II story than one in which the ghost of Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart haunts a U.S. tank commander, coaching him to victory against the Germans.
At least, it’s hard to imagine a weirder WWII story unless you happen to be Robert Kanigher, the legendary DC writer/editor responsible for both the long-running Haunted Tank feature and the army guys vs. dinosaurs tales that are compiled into this phone book-sized volume under the title The War That Time Forgot.
Originally running in Star Spangled War Stories in the ’60s, the tales follow a series of U.S. military types sent to run recon on a mysterious island in the Pacific, an island that turns out to be crawling with dinosaurs and other fantastic monsters. Lest the sight of G.I.s futilely machine-gunning dinosaurs get old, Kanigher ensures that things get progressively weirder, with the introduction of G.I. Robot (the robot who’s also an army ranger!), enlisted circus acrobats, Cave Boy and Dino Baby, a King Kong-like good-guy gorilla and a solar-powered Japanese kill-bot.
It’s all played incredibly straight, and Kanigher writes it all in manly-man battlefield dialogue (he also wrote Sgt. Rock, and most of DC’s war heroes), so it’s hard to tell how tongue-in-cheek it actually was back in the day. Nowadays, however, it reads as just plain nuts. You really have to read stories like “Dinosaur D-Day!,” in which dinosaurs pour out of landing ship tanks on the beach of their island, to believe they even exist.
The art, by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito (with covers by Russ Heath), is represented here in black and white, a cheap solution to avoiding the ugly coloring of the day without re-doing it using today’s more sophisticated techniques. It’s a solution that keeps the price insanely low—this is 560 pages for $16.99—and highlights the quality of the line work.
First in Space
Oni Press
Coast Guard mate-turned-cartoonist James Vining’s debut graphic novel focuses on the unsung heroes of the Cold War space race—the chimpanzees who trained with Navy personnel to ride a rocket into space, making sure human astronauts would be able to survive the stress of the endeavor.
Vining’s tale is fairly short but extremely focused, spanning the time between the launch of Sputnik and the U.S.’s first manned space flight (or should that be the first chimpanzeed space flight?). Operating with the understanding that the true events are exciting and dramatic enough on their own, Vining avoids editorializing or fictionalizing things, with little in the way of artistic flourish.
Our protagonist is the chimpanzee who ultimately makes the trip, nicknamed Ham by his human teacher/trainer/friend. We watch as Ham undergoes increasingly dangerous test after test, trains at simulators with a carrot-and-stick motivation system consisting of banana pellets and electric shocks and finally makes the triumphant flight.
Vining’s time in the service no doubt helped when it came to characterizing the military men, who all seem professional to the point of stoicism, with emotion seeping out between their seams only when no one else is looking. There’s a strong cartooniness to Vining’s art, but it’s of the sort that helps rather than hurts the story—his settings and technology are detailed, his animals seem appropriately blank in their personalities, his people are more complex in their design, and he nails a depiction of then-Vice President Johnson.
The book seems designed for kids (there’s even an extensive research bibliography in the back, school paper-style), but it’s a gripping and intense story, one that left me more than a little depressed about the plight of chimpanzees since (we made John Glenn a senator after his historic flight, but we simply stuck Ham in a zoo). Despite the simple art and streamlined story, there’s a difficult meditation regarding animal testing at its core.