Blazing Combat

Classic Comicbook Compilation

It wasn’t an ordinary comicbook. Blazing Combat, produced by Warren Publishing, was released at a delicate time in American military history. Vietnam was beginning to escalate, young soldiers were dying horribly in foreign climes and the comic’s contentious storylines were eventually deemed unsuitable for the viewing public.

Images and stories within its pages eschewed traditional men’s adventure motifs, instead being unequivocal in their depiction of the realities of war. To the American government at least, “stories that show the cost of war, that battle is frequently futile, that good men die for no reason”, were deemed anti-war statements, not an exercise in free speech.

As Michael Catron says in the book's preface, “Blazing Combat died in a crossfire of political and economic attack.” The US military, the American Legion and loads of magazine wholesalers who control what goes on sale, put a stop to it.

By denying it shelf space, they gently and systematically erased it, with some partners even saying: ‘If Warren Publishing is turning out this unpatriotic crap, we don't want any of their other books!’

Fast-forward 33 years and Fantagraphics are releasing all four Blazing Combat issues (1965-66), bound together in one glorious hardbacked tome.

You should buy it. Not only did it go on to be described as “one of the best war comics ever published”, Archie Goodwin’s writing and characterisation are truly superb and the drawings are reproduced from the original printer’s films.

Course, the fact that you weren’t supposed to ever see it should be temptation enough.

Published by Fantagraphics on 9 July, £15.99