So last year at the Baltimore Comic-Con, I went to the TwoMorrows Publishing booth and bought their retrospective about war comics called Our Artists At War. It’s a fascinating read ifyou have never had the chance to look at it, and one of the series of comics that jumped out at me was EC’s contribution to the genre in the pre-code days. One of those series was Two-Fisted Tales and by the time I had read Our Artists at War, I had been grabbing reprints of EC’s horror line whenever I could get my hands on them. I love Tales from The Crypt and the company’s other titles, but I’d never read any of the war comics.

Fast forwad to this year’s con and I’m fishing through a huge $3 bin sale at a booth and as I flip through, looking for those last two issues of Now Comics’ Terminator series that seem to be forever eluding me, I came across three issues of Two-Fisted Tales that had been part of a reprint line in the early 1990s. I’d never seen them before, even though I remember seeing the EC horror reprints at Amazing Comics back in the day, but I’m not going to be too hard on myself for missing those at a time when I was buying the X-books and the latest chapters of Knightfall. Anyway, I couldn’t pass them up at $3 each.

Much like EC’s horror books, these are anthologies with one-off stories taking place across a number of wars throughout history, up to the Korean War (which was as close to current as you could get at that point). Some of the talent on the title is well-known–John Severin, Wally Wood, Joe Kubert, and Alex Toth were among the names I recognized–so I went in thinking that I was going to see some really great stuff.

What did I get? Well, not every story or issue was perfect, but when they were great, they were outstanding. As much as I love DC’s classic war books and books from Marvel like Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos and The ‘Nam, EC and Harvey Kurtzman (whom I believe was the editor of the series) really set the standard for war comics. And really, the “not good” parts were more of my personal prference than anything else–I tend to like my war comics in the 20th Century, so stories of pirates on the high seas and the Civil War rarely hold my interest. When I read the World War II and Korean War stories, they were tense and all paid off with some great action.

Gemstone ran tons of these reprints back in the day and whether they are horror, science fiction, or war, they’ve never let me down. I’m looking forward to seeing what else I can find.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Keep.