I've not read many war comics and the few I have read I didn't care for, but awhile back someone (maybe Reptisaurus) said Enemy Ace was his favorite series ever and that made me really want to read it.

I developed an appreciation for war comics late in my comics-reading life. In the 1970's, the only war comics I remember buying were Marvel's "War Is Hell" series (only a couple of issues), one Sgt. Fury reprint, one or two Enemy Ace reprints, a couple of issues of Men Of War (with Gravedigger) and...um...I really think that was it!

In the early-mid 80's, I bought a couple of Sgt. Rock annuals mainly for the Dan Spiegle art, and loved them, and then bought several issues of the Sgt. Rock Specials that reprinted highlights of that character's publication history. And I worshiped Evanier and Spiegle's work on Blackhawk. A few special projects in the 90's and 2000's tempted me: the Enemy Ace prestige format book, Warren Ellis's war comics at Marvel, some Sgt. Rock projects, but I still didn't consider myself truly appreciative of the genre.

In the last decade, though, DC's Archives and Showcase Presents have given me the chance to dive more deeply into at least the more popular features. The early Sgt. Rock stories impressed the heck out of me, and were page-for-page the most enjoyable reading of almost any of the Archives series. I was eager to read The War That Time Forgot, but was disappointed to find this was Kanigher at his most annoying. How the same guy could write such great Rock stories and such painful dinosaur stories mystifies me. Oh, the repetition, the lame "humor", the repetition, the miserable dialog, the anachronisms, and the repetition! Aargh!

Haunted Tank proved to be a lot more fun, getting a lot of mileage out of what should be a restrictive premise, and The Losers turned out to be a real classic, with stunning John Severin art, but my favorite of the DC war comics turned out to be Unknown Soldier. I'm not much of a Jack Sparling fan, but this might have been some of his best work, and the later issues made me appreciate the art of Gerry Talaoc, who I'd always resented for taking over Phantom Stranger from Jim Aparo.

Having enjoyed most of these Essentials, I figured it was time to sample Marvel's Sgt. Fury, and got their Essential Volume 1. I love Jack Kirby's art, enjoy Dick Ayers' art, and Dan Bailey and I have agreed on almost everything over the years, so I figured this had to be good stuff.

Sorry to say, I found the 20-something issues from the early days of Fury to be pretty much unreadable. Literally unreadable. My eyes glazed over at the massive amounts of dialogue on the pages. By the time I made it through the thousand words of captions and balloons on one page, I'd start the next having forgotten what had been set up on the page I had just read. I found I could glean very little from just looking at the pictures, where not much ever seemed to be happening. Compared to contemporary war comics at DC, it was a tame book, with enemies getting knocked out off-panel (killed? Marvel wasn't about to admit to it!), mysterious logistics (one page we're in some facility getting a mission briefing, now in some jeep somewhere, going somewhere, now in some castle)...jeez, it was just all so tedious to me. Presumably the good stuff was all later, but this early stuff was Lee and Kirby at their worst doing a cramped, constrained, talky comic short on action and even shorter on any military verisimilitude.