Mournful Combat

Blazing Combat (1965-66/ Collected 2010): written by Archie Goodwin and others; illustrated by Reed Crandall, Joe Orlando, Wally Wood, Alex Toth, and others: Having made its mark with B&W horror comics in a magazine-sized format with Creepy and Eerie, Warren Publishing turned to war comics with Blazing Combat. Freed from the constraints of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), Blazing Combat was, like Eerie and Creepy, a return to the more studied and downbeat comics publications which EC Comics towered over aesthetically in the early 1950's prior to the implementation of the CCA.

A young writer-editor named Archie Goodwin wrote or co-wrote all the Blazing Combat stories that exist. Only four issues appeared, as sales were direly affected by a military PX boycott because it was felt by TPTB that Blazing Combat was anti-American. A lot of that weight fell on the single finest story in Blazing Combat's brief but potent run, "Landscape" by Goodwin and artist Joe Orlando. It's a brilliant, sad, reflective piece about the Viet Nam War and it stands as one of the ten great short-form American comic-book war stories.

The rest of the volume ranges from excellent to pretty good. As Goodwin notes in a previously published  interview included with the collection (Goodwin died a decade before Blazing Combat was collected), his one major slip-up was a panel in which a character loads a mortar upside down (!). But otherwise the marvelous artwork and terse, only rarely too-preachy writing make this volume a must-own for readers of comics and war comics especially. Highly recommended.