Sunday, July 8, 2012
The Losers!
A clever comic company can take characters who have lost their popularity or perhaps never really developed any, and change them up in a way to make them intriguing. Lots of superheroes have been revised until they found a spark which ignited with an audience. But it's rarer to find it happen with a genre comic. The Losers in the pages of Our Fighting Forces from DC Comics is such an instance. Captain Storm, Johnny Cloud, and Gunner & Sarge had all had features of their own, but those had ended.
Then in the pages of G.I. Combat #138 these has been war heroes were mixed together and the resulting blend was much greater than the sum of the old parts. The Losers were winners for a while.
With the recent Showcase volume and the Jack Kirby volume from a few years ago, almost all of the Losers adventures are available to the modern reader at relatively decent prices. One thing which struck me about the Loser covers is that Joe Kubert played around with the logo in the early issues, and it was hardly ever the same twice. This can be hell on sales as it makes finding the comic a bit difficult, but it makes for a damn creative cover image.
Here are those very creative covers.
The series is continued in the volume below dedicated to the issues done by Jack Kirby who was playing out the string on his contract at DC. But since it was Jack Kirby it still made for some outstanding comics.
Here are the covers.
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How dumb am I? Not only did I not know that they had been in their own "solo" series, but I thought Kirby had created them. :)
ReplyDeleteI've never followed war comics.
It's that Kirby magic, the notion that he can take any project (Jimmy Olsen, Space 1999, Devil Dinosaur) and inject with his own special sauce that makes his work so offbeat.
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