Sunday, December 14, 2008

Tomahawk just fell to #2 on my list of comics I want to see collected into Showcase Presents volumes

Have you ever looked at Comics.org's gallery of Weird War Tales covers before? I mean, really looked at it?

Seeing the original Creature Commandos show up in action alongside Superman in last week's Action Comics got me curious about them, so I spent some time poking around Comics.org, and it seems there adventures are just as crazy-looking as you'd expect those of a Frankenstein-like monster, a vampire, a werewolf, a robot, a medusa and some asshole in an orange shirt fighting against the Axis in World War II to look:

Monsters fighting Nazi's while Frankenstein lifts a giant stone swastika over his head,


disguising themselves as a circus that tours concentration camps with (the one with the cover blurb that promises Hitler will freak out that Chris Sims detailed last Halloween),

fighting lions in a coliseum before a crowd of giants,

and, uh, well look, there's Frankenstein, and he's riding a bomb Dr. Strangelove style.

So I look at these covers and I think, Man, wouldn't it be swell to read all these great stories of monsters fighting Nazis, preferably on cheap newsprint-like paper, in black and white, in a trade that doesn't cost very much? Like a Showcase Presents. But it doesn't look like there are actually 500-pages worth of Creature Commandos stories, so DC would need plenty of filler to round out the trade.

Well then, why not just go ahead and publish a Showcase Presents Weird War Tales or three? My favorite of the Showcases have been the war ones (Haunted Tank, War That Time Forgot and Enemy Ace), so there's one sale right there. And perhaps if the Creature Commandos will be sticking around the DCU for a while now, there will be an upsurge in interest in them?

At the very least, it seems like a Weird War Tales would offer the same sort of Holy shit, these are some crazy-ass old comics! thrills that War That Time Forgot offered. In addition to the Creature Commandos and what, based on the cover gallery, seems to be the U.S. ongoing war against skeletons and ghosts, there's apparently some pretty insane stuff in this series. Perhaps even more insane stuff than in Tomahawk, which I've also been hoping gets the Showcase treatment, so I can learn why that giant purple gorilla has a Native American headdress and is shooting a giant bow and arrow.

For example:











And my personal favorite:
It's not just that it's a cover with a centaur with a machine gun fighting a tank. It's that this centaur has those haunted Joe Kubert eyes. That is one war-weary centaur.

So, to summarize: DC should totally publish a Showcase Weird War Tales volume so I can totally buy it.

4 comments:

LurkerWithout said...

I think I actually had that one with the Sphinx at some point. At least I vaguely recall a story in a stack of mostly coverless war and horror comics I once had that had the Sphinx in it...

And I recognize the Primate Patrol from Azzarello's Dr. 13 mini-series...

Tony said...

I'm pretty sure that's John Belushi in the third one from the bottom.

Michael May said...

DC should totally publish a Showcase Weird War Tales volume so I can totally buy it.

Make that two of us.

SallyP said...

Need...more...Enemy Ace!