I wonder if this concept originates in a War picture from the earlier days of cinema, something that would have been familiar and memorable to men of Severin's and Kane's age. My War movie acumen is insufficient to the task of finding out.
Mine isn't either, but you're inspiring me to do some research
Fwiw I did find this TCJ interview online regarding the cover. Wally Wood did the interior art for the story "A Baby" that appeared in Frontline #10 and evidently Kurtzman (who wrote ths story) wasn't pleased with Severin's depiction of the child.
GARY GROTH: ...Harvey said something that I thought was sort of odd. I wanted to know what your take on it was. He said, “I have a real strong feeling about kids and how I like them to be depicted. Wally did a good job here, because he’s got a cute kid instinct, so your heart goes out. But on John’s cover, the kid, he was real but not very appealing — “
J. SEVERIN: See?
GROTH: “I mean, he was appealing, but he should have been like that (points to a splash of Wally Wood’s story). It struck me with this cover especially, that John didn’t understand cute. I remember having great conflict about this cover.”
SEVERIN: I know he did have problems with it. What he said was true. In the first place, it looks more like a real kid than a cute kid would look. And I don’t see that I get anymore heartbroken over some cutesy-pie little kid being in a bombed out area than a normal, real kid, maybe an ugly kid. What the hell do I care? A kid’s a kid! Perhaps at that time I couldn’t draw a cute kid in the first place. But even today, I don’t think I draw that many cute kids unless it’s a real cartoony thing.
GROTH: Do you remember feeling strongly that it ought not to be a cute kid?
SEVERIN: No, I had a picture to draw, and I tried to make it look like as real as I could. A real kid in a mess...
...GROTH: Why did you draw the cover? Wouldn’t it have made more sense for the person who drew the story to draw the cover?
SEVERIN: Yeah. I have no idea.
GROTH: Probably just scheduling.
SEVERIN: Yeah. Just a simple matter of not enough time.
GROTH: That one comment by Kurtzman struck me as odd, because it seemed to me that that cover would not have been enhanced with a cute drawing of a kid. In fact, it—
SEVERIN: That’s what I mean. I couldn’t have done a cute little lad and had it mean any more to me than if I drew an ugly kid.
GROTH: You drew a kid who was in agony, but it seems to me that it would have diminished it if the kid were too cute, because the whole point—
SEVERIN: Yeah. You’re right. But I don’t think he meant too cute. I think he was looking for a little more cutesyness in it.
GROTH: Sympathy toward the kid, yeah.
SEVERIN: I don’t know how to draw cutesy stuff, so he gave it to the wrong fellow to draw.
GROTH: Or the right fellow, depending on—
SEVERIN:—which way you want to go.
Entire interview here:
www.tcj.com/the-john-severin-interview-parts-i-ii/7/I found an image of the Wally Wood page referred to.
(yeah, I know it was supposed to regulate his power or something; but IMO it just looked so silly, whether drawn by Adams or Lightle or anyone).
