Aside from his justifiable fame for having given birth to the MAD style of satire, Harvey Kurtzman also changed the way war comics worked. Wars were fought for the right reasons by good guys and bad guys. World War II taught us that and comics reflected it. But the Korean War was something different, a war in which the goals were more philosophical than immediate and the enemy was a proxy for our true foe. Kurtzman tapped into the anxiety about a war which people were ambivalent about and he proceeded to give use comic book war stories of a different, more mature style. He did that by focusing not on the war but on the warrior, men who were not heroes but merely survivors. To celebrate Memorial Day here are Kurtzman's seminal war comic book covers for EC's Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales.
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