Cover Cavalcade

 FEBRUARY IS TANKS vs DINOSAURS MONTH!

Even the Haunted Tank eventually got into dinosaur-related combat. This Joe Kubert cover is from 1975.

Cover Cavalcade

 FEBRUARY IS TANKS vs DINOSAURS MONTH!!

Another Ross Andru cover, this one from 1962.

Cover Cavalcade

 FEBRUARY IS TANKS vs DINOSAURS MONTH!

A Ross Andru cover from 1961.

Cover Cavalcade

 FEBRUARY IS TANKS vs DINOSAURS MONTH!!!

A Ross Andru cover from 1960.

Cops, Crooks and Frogmen

 

cover art by Ross Andru

Star Spangled War Stories #121 (June-July 1965) begins with a Navy frogman named Stoner hitching a ride on a PBY. But writer Bob Kanigher and artist Ross Andru soon make his life more interesting.

Partway through the story, we get a flashback giving Stoner's backstory. I'm going to cheat a little and give that information here before we get to the dinosaurs. 

Stoner was a cop before the war. His career took a downturn, though, when he arrested his own brother Manny for murder. Manny then escapes after a train wreck while Stoner is escorting him to prison. Rumors about Stoner allowing Manny to escape are rife, making the cop an outsider on the force.

Then the war happens and Stoner joins the high-risk commando team known as the Suicide Squad. And, when the PBY he's flying in gets a distress call from a submarine, he finds himself on what is definetely a high-risk mission.

The sub is being attacked by a monster. Stoner puts on his frogman suit, then bails out of the plane in an effort to help the sub. THEN the PBY is attacked by Japanese Zeroes. THEN the Zeroes are attacked by a pterodactyl, who goes after Stoner after destroying the planes. Yes, this is definitely high-risk.

Stoner uses a mini-torpedo launcher to kill the pterodactyl, then plummets into the ocean. He's then snatched up by the giant crab that was attacking the sub. Fortunately, a frogman from the sub grabs the mini-torpedo launcher and kills the crab.

You can see it coming, can't you? The two enter the sub and Stoner discovers the man who just saved him is his brother Manny, who joined the Navy under a false name. 

Soon after, the sub approaches an island, where they are attacked by a T-Rex.

After the T-Rex is killed with the sub's deck gun, Stoner and Manny scout the island. Manny decides to do away with his brother (who hasn't yet given Manny away), but can't bring himself to do it. 

The ending is predictable, but still carries some sincere emotional weight to it. They are attacked by another dinosaur. Stoner is trapped under a tree, but Manny gives his own life to save his brother. In the end, serving in the Navy had changed him from a crook to a hero.

The War That Time Forget is enormously entertaining almost purely because we get to see World War II soldiers, sailors and marines fighting dinosaurs. That only is epic and more than justifies the series' existence.

Often, the human characters are just ciphers, with no real personalities of their own. Here, even though the Stoner/Manny situation plays out in a predictable manner, it does succeed in giving them definable personalities. We don't see that often in this series, so it was nice to see it here.

Next week, we'll return to the Planet of the Apes.

Dinosaurs Committing Suicide

 

As I've said in previous War That Time Forgot reviews, these stories existed entirely as an excuse to show World War II soldiers fighting dinosaurs. And that, by itself, more than justifies its existence. I don't want to live in a world in which WWII soldiers didn't fight dinosaurs. No sane person would want that.

The story in Star Spangled War Stories #106 (Dec. 1962-Jan. 1963), written by Bob Kanigher and drawn by Ross Andru (who also did the cover) is typical of the appeal of the series. The human characters are pretty much just ciphers--the human soldiers who are used as a gateway to bring us into their dinosaur-filled world. 

The humans have two gimmicks attached to them. One is that they are the crew of a 155mm cannon. The other is that all three keep having the exact same dream of being chased by dinosaurs.

At first, they laugh this off as coincidence. But then, while being transported by a glider, they fly through a strange cloud and end up on an island inhabited by dinosaurs.

This was early in the series and Kanigher never really made an attempt to link the tales together with a strong continuity. Usually, the dinosaurs are on an island (or islands) in the modern-day Pacific Ocean, which unfortunate soldiers, sailors and Marines continually stumble across. A few stories are set in the Arctic, with frozen dinosaurs getting thawed out. In this case, there is actual time travel involved, with the strange cloud being some sort of warp gate.  

Anyway, the soldiers make liberal use of both their cannon and their hand grenades to fight off dinosaurs. They lose their cannon, though, when a large pachycephlosaurus picks it up and inadvertantly commits suicide with it. Of all the dinosaur deaths we see in this series, this one is the most heart-breaking.

click on the above image to enlarge it.

All the while, the three soldiers are looking back up at the cloud, hoping to figure out a way to get up to it and hopefully get home. 

Well, it's rarely a good thing to be scooped up by a pterodactyl. But when it happens to the soldier and the creature flies them over the cloud, this proves to be serendipitous. A burst of tommy gun fire convinces the ptero to let them go and they fall back through the warp gate, splashing into the Pacific near a navy destroyer.

The story ends with the three men once again dreaming of dinosaurs and wondering if that meant they would be having another prehistoric adventure. But though the War That Time Forgot sometimes repeated human characters, I don't think our artillerymen put in another appearance.

That's it for now. Next week, we'll tag along with the Invaders as they fight among themselves when they should be rescuing Winston Churchill.

How did Dinosaurs end up in World War II?

It's my understanding that writer Bob Kanigher and artist Ross Andru considered the first "War That Time Forgot" story to be a one-shot. That is bizarre. It is simply beyond me that they could look at what they produced and not instantly realize that it would be a concept beloved by comic book geeks for generations to come. Take a look at Andru's cover image above. Is it possible NOT to love that?

"The Island of Armored Giants" appeared in Star Spangled War Stories #90 (April/May 1960). A squad of Marine raiders is going to parachute onto a Pacific island to find out why the previous two patrols (which were landed on the island by sub) vanished.

It's not long before the Marines find out what the problem is--they get attacked by a pterodactyl right after they bail out of their planes. The tank that's dropping with them is lost and only six men in the patrol make it down alive.

They find lots of Japanese equipment on the island, but not a single Japanese. When a dinosaur rises up out of a cleft in the ground, the ranking Marine instantly deduces that prehistoric creatures have been woken from suspended animation by an earthquake. He is, after all, a corporal, so he knows about stuff like that.

The Marines use an abandoned Japanese tank to kill the dinosaur, but three of them are killed when it collapses on the tank. The surviving three of them man an AA gun to take out another pterodactyl, but one of them is killed in that battle.


This is a simple and effective way to generate suspense--the small squad is getting gradually whittled down while trying to escape the island. That, combined with the pure awesomeness of watching World War II soldiers battle dinosaurs, is what makes this story work so well.

The surviving two men swim out towards the sub that was stationed nearby the pick them up. But the sub is attacked by a sea monster. It's up to the two marines to figure out a way to save the sub so they can also save themselves.

The Question Mark patrol would return a few issues later in a story that picks up where this one ends. The War That Time Forgot would soon be a regular feature in Star Spangled War Stories. The series never worried that much about continuity, so every single soldier or sailor who encountered dinosaurs would be surprised by their existence. An early story also had Dinosaur Island wiped out by a barrage from the U.S. fleet. But dinosaurs kept popping up, usually in the Pacific but with a few unfrozen dinosaurs in the arctic interfering with attempts to blow up German rocket or U-boat bases.

So, if we assume the same continuity for all the stories (and why would we not do so?), then there are several islands in the Pacific and a few other isolated locations on which dinosaurs still exist. Of course, we all know this is true from the 1933 documentary King Kong and Edward Malone's memoirs about the Challenger expedition to South America, so this doesn't surprise us. But we must be critical of the Allied High Command. They kept the dinosaurs such a secret, that the poor guys on the front lines kept running into them unexpectedly. I thought better of Nimitz and MacArthur. I really did.

Next week, Superman has a rather confusing day.

Cover Cavalcade

Robots, dinosaurs and World War II. It's the perfect triumvirate of classic nerdiness.

Video: Comic Books and Dinosaurs, part 2

Here's another addition to my YouTube channel:

A wing and a Dinosaur

I didn't consciously mean to give my last few weeks of comic book reviews a theme,  but I guess I have. Two themes actually. The Conan story from two weeks ago involved a large, dinosaur-like creature, while last week and today directly involves dinosaurs. Also, as with those previous stories, this one MIGHT have been my introduction to the "War That Time Forgot" series. But it might not have been. I don't remember for sure.

I think I'm simply too completely geeky. Stuff like this is so completely a part of my DNA that it's as if I've always know about them--there was never a moment when I had to actually learn about Conan, Turok or dinosaurs in World War II. That information was simply always there.

Anyway, "The Guinea Pig Patrol" first appeared in Star Spangled War #95 (March 1961), but I ran across it in the first issue of a reprint book titled G.I. War Tales (April 1973).

Like most War That Time Forgot tales, it's low on characterization (you don't even remember the names of any of the characters when you've finished reading it), but it's high on incredibly entertaining images. Ross Andru does a wonderful job making everything look cool as a small group of paratroopers desperately try to survive an onslaught of prehistoric monsters.










The action starts when a plane full of paratroopers is torn from the sky by a pterodactyl. A few
survivors use the plane's wing as a raft, armed with ineffective small arms and a bazooka with just a few rockets. They use the bazooka to fight off one dinosaur and save a low-flying damaged fighter plane from another. But they are out of rockets when they take refuge on a tiny floating island. That's really bad news when a sea serpent pops up and starts eating the island.

As I've written before, I recognize the faults inherent in the War That Time Forgot stories, but I simply don't care. Writer Bob Kanigher was blessed with great artists for this series and it was thus filled with awesome. It's World War II soldiers fighting dinosaurs. You simply can't go wrong with that.

It's never wrong to include a dinosaur

I've written briefly about The War That Time Forgot in a post from a few years ago. And I still think it's one of the coolest concepts for a comic book series ever.

The series was written by Bob Kanigher, DC's go-to guy for war stories. When looking at Kanigher's work as a writer, I tend to mentally divide his stuff into two catagories.

There were those stories where he constructed plots that would show off the skills of the artist drawing the book, but also introduced an element of real humanity into them--effective character studies that added dramatic backbone to the stories. The Sgt. Rock story arc I covered a few weeks back is a good example of this.

Then there's the stories where it seems ALL he was trying to do was give the artist a chance to show off. He'd still construct a plot that followed a vaguely logical sequence, but his characterizations would be so sketchy as to be almost non-existent. A look at his early Haunted Tank stories provided examples of this--heck, it took several issues for him to consistently remember the names of the crew of the tank, while their back stories changed several time. But the stories allowed Joe Kubert to draw stuff such as a Tiger Tank inexplicable hidden on the second floor of a bombed out building. Or a German fighter strafing the Haunted Tank as it crawled across a makeshift bridge.

.
It looked cool. And that's all that mattered.

Well, dinosaurs always look cool. So dinosaurs tossed together with the already cool-looking stuff from World War II couldn't help but double the visual fun.


Humans in the "War That Time Forgot" series rarely stuck around for more than one issue, but there were a few instances where Kanigher ran with the same characters for two or three issues, perhaps hoping to come up with guys popular enough to make regulars. But he never did--and it really didn't matter. This was another case where his characterizations were of the sketchiest kind. The humans were in the story purely to toss them into combat with dinosaurs.

Star Spangled War #116, 117 & 118 featured Morgan and Mace, two members of the World War II version of the Suicide Squad. (The Squad at that time consisted of tough, highly trained commandos who were sent on the most dangerous missions.) Morgan and Mace hate each other. This is because Morgan blames Mace for the death of his brother in a pre-war tobaggan accident.

In fact, Morgan is perpetually convinced Mace is a coward and will run out on their mission at any moment. He's pretty much obsessed with this idea. No matter how many times Mace pulls off a Medal of Honor-level piece of heroism, Morgan keeps his .45 trained on him to make sure he doesn't run off.

Gee whiz, it's silly. But it really doesn't matter, because the whole set up is merely an opportunity to get the two of them into conflict with dinosaurs. In most of these stories, the action takes place on a remote Pacific island. But the first Morgan/Mace story is one of several set in the Arctic, where a few frozen dinosaurs end up getting thawed out.

The two commandos accept the presence of dinosaurs with remarkable aplomb while managing to complete their task of blowing up a German rocket base. In the next issue, they're in the Pacific, flying an experimental jet bomber that's brought down on a remote island by--yes--a dinosaur.

The two spend several pages blowing up prehistoric creatures before happening upon a pterodactyl nest. When one of the eggs hatch, the "little" creature (incorrectly labeled a dinosaur by the soldiers) apparently imprints on them.

They end up with an ally. The pterodactyl (named "Dino") shows up several times, both in this issue and in the next, helping Morgan and Mace out of sticky situations.

In fact, when the two commandos are attacking a Japanese aircraft carrier in a torpedo bomber they salvaged, Dino is there to help once again by personally weaving through the anti-aircraft fire and dropping the torpedo on the flattop.

I love it. I shouldn't love it. The characterizations are stilted and taken to a ridiculous extreme. Dino showing up to help doesn't make any sense at all, even in the context of a world where dinosaurs still exist. It's really kinda dumb.

But it doesn't matter, because artist Ross Andru makes it all look so fun! That was the point of the whole series--just to look cool. To look fun. To look wonderfully imaginative. I'm generally critical of poor plot construction and characters stripped of even basic personality traits. Even the most basic pulp or comic book fiction should make sense within the context of the world it creates.

But "The War That Time Forgot" proves that sometimes all that must step aside so that we can see what it looks like when a pterodactyl dive-bombs an aircraft carrier.

The War That Time Forgot

top cover by Russ Heath

bottom cover by Ross Andru

In 1960, dinosaurs were (as always) popular with kids. World War II themed comics were also selling well. So why not drop a remote Pacific island full of dinosaurs into a World War II comic book?

That basically was the logic behind "The War That Time Forgot," a series of adventures that ran in Star Spangled War Stories from 1960 to 1968. A few additional stories later appeared in Weird War Tales and a couple of stories from the original run were reprinted in the 1970s in G.I. War Tales.

The stories, written by Bob Kanigher, were rarely more than servicable in terms of plot or characterizations, but the art work was always first rate. And that's why these particular stories existed in the first place--so we could see soldiers wielding tommy guns, bazookas and grenades desperately doing battle with a variety of prehistoric fauna. It is one of those rare cases in which story really is completely secondary to the images.

And, boy-0-boy, did this series deliver in that regard. Top notch artists such as Ross Andru, Russ Heath, Joe Kubert and Neil Adams all did time on the series. The covers alone are worth the price of admission. But inside those covers, we see a tyranosaur ripping the turret off a Sherman tank; or a stegasaurus battling a squad of Marines; or a horde of pteradactyls doing battle with a B-17. It doesn't get any better than that.

That darn island of dinosaurs still pops up in DC comics from time to time. Superman, the younger Green Arrow and Black Canary have all visited the place in recent years. The "War That Time Forgot" is not yet forgotten by its fans--it was a geeky, silly idea for a comic series, but the world is a better place because of it.