A naval officer, an Army Air Corps pilot, and a pair of Marines (neither of the last two actually seems to have a real name), get sent on covert missions where most of the time anyone they work with ends up getting killed and any victory they score is a double-edged one. Would I read more war comics? Well, if they're drawn by John Severin, absolutely.Īnyone who knows anything about the way the military operates knows The Losers as a unit should never exist. So I think it's unfair to give Ross Andru top billing as illustrator for this volume, because the real star of this book-contributing almost 300 pages-is John Severin, without whom (in my opinion) The Losers would have been a brief blip on the war comics scene. Kanigher's writing improved DRAMATICALLY because he was rising to some unspoken creative challenge. And The Losers stop beating themselves up every-other sentence. The richly detailed and period-accurate art takes on a heft that is absent in the previous pages. Suddenly, the stories become dramatic-even compelling. Sometimes, even in multiple word balloons in a single panel.īut something mysterious happens around page 151 of this 450+ page tome: John Severin becomes the regular artist of The Losers' adventures. Four soldiers who survived mission after mission-sometimes, they were the ONLY survivors for MILES-seemed bound and determined to undermine their own self-esteem at every opportunity. AWE.-of how many times per page one of The Losers reminded us, the reader, that they were, in fact, losers. There are other reviewers who know more about war comics and writer, Robert Kanigher's, contributions thereto, so I can't offer any expertise in that area.

Combat (#138 ) to their long run in Our Fighting Forces (#123-150 ). This black-and-white reprint volume traces the career of The Losers from their first appearance in G.I. They then take on (or are assigned) what seem to be suicide missions, which they (mostly) survive, even if the objective isn't quite met in the way the brass envisioned. Four soldiers, the respective survivors of three disastrous missions, find themselves thrown together. The premise of the book seems to be 'Challengers of the Unknown' in World War II. What turned me on to 'The Losers' was the fact that John Severin had drawn the comic back in the day, and since he's my first art hero, I wanted to see how he handled the material. Still, war comics are an important genre in the history of American comics, so I'd be remiss if I didn't at least sample them. The glitz of superheroes bewitched my youthful sensibilities, so even if they were on the spinner rack at my local Rite Aid, I didn't notice them.

Somehow, I completely missed the era of war comics.

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