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Blazing Combat is one of Warren Publishing’s most fondly recalled failures. Actually, it is one of the most fondly recalled failures in all of comics. Only four quarterly issues were published between October 1965 to July 1966. If its run was brief, its influence is still felt. Most of the artists who worked on it were well-known for work done for EC comics during the 1950’s and the handful who were not alumni of EC worked in the same tradition. With the exception of Gene Colan few of them ever had any success or presence in the super-hero dominated comics of the seventies and eighties. In many ways Warren Publishing was an attempt to resurrect the editorial content of EC comics in black and white magazines (an approach that EC had pioneered in replacing the Mad comic book with Mad Magazine) but for most of the artists who worked on Blazing Combat Warren Publishing was just about their last refuge in comics, although many of them commanded high salaries as advertising and animation artists in later years.

As high as the standard of the artwork was, it is not the artwork alone that has given this handful of stories their staying power. Archie Goodwin throughout his career was known as a writer of subtlety and depth. Even in these stories which are rooted in the conventions and formulae of EC comics he doesn’t rely on simple twist endings or shock value. He wrote stories about the Civil War, about World War II, about the Korean Conflict, and most memorably, he wrote about the Vietnam War. The very first story that appeared in Blazing Combat was “Viet-Cong”. It is hard to believe that it appeared before the majority of Americans were even really sure where to find Vietnam on the map. Although American military advisor had been in Vietnam since he Fifties and the Air Force had already begun bombing North Vietnam in support of the South Vietnamese Army, the first American ground troops were only arrived in Vietnam in March of 1965. Apparently it only took Archie Goodwin a few months to realize where the roots of America’s ultimate failure in Vietnam lay. Already in “Viet-Cong” he showed the futility of the 360 degree front, and how chimerical reliance on the South Vietnamese Army was.

The second issue also opened with a story set in Vietnam, “Landscape”. “Landscape was aloes prescient in showing the effect of the war on a peasant famer caught between opposing forces, neither of whom he is loyal or indebted to. “Landscape” was also the beginning of the end for Blazing Combat. Some of Warren Publishing’s biggest points of purchase were the military PXs. When the military decided that they wouldn’t permit the sale of Blazing Combat on military bases a large percentage of the marketplace Warren was counting on was simply not available. From there it was a very short step to vocal opposition from the American Legion and an outright refusal to carry Blazing Combat on the part of the major distributors. It’s not just that very few copies of Blazing Combat were ever read; very few copies were ever even in sight of a customer. The vast majority of the third and fourth issues were evidently pulped.

Blazing Combat is now recognized as a high watermark for comic art and this edition is a wonderful way to experience it. The artwork is reproduced from original printer’s films and probably looks better than it did in the original magazines. One thing I would like to point out about the artwork is that it is artwork. We live in a time when even an average hack can take a couple of photographs and with Photoshop create a reasonable facsimile of artwork. Looking at Russ Heath’s work or Reed Crandall’s it is worth remembering that even where they used photo-reference the final product was the result of pen’s and brushes and a wonderfully subtle use of ink wash, augmented here and there with Ben-days. The point being the work contained in this book really was the result of hours of labor by highly skilled craftsmen.

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