Striker, Stacey, Adams, and Hiro |
The stories are rugged and full of violence with death being a constant, even the deaths of bystanders. Collateral damage is confronted in the very first battle when a bombing results in the inadvertent death of a gas station employee. It is this notion that innocents will die which gives the series its title of "Total War".
The enemy |
The next quarterly issue has two stories of the Total War. The first titled "Sneak Attack" chronicles how mystery soldiers slip into the area around Niagara Falls and drawn into the battle are both American and Canadian troops. Sgt. Hiro is thought lost for a time during the action, but turns up and just in time to use his frogman skills to stymie the enemy approach. In the second story titled "Breakthrough" the team is required to use guerilla tactics to fend off an enemy who has infiltrated missile sites and later a small town which is ransacked for supplies as the M.A.R.S. team shows up for a bit of leave. They have to lead the surviving townsfolk in a counterattack to finally end the enemy threat for the time being.
The third and final issue of the series by Wally Wood and his assistants Tony Coleman and Dan Adkins finds the members of M.A.R.S. getting showcased quite nicely as each member gets a specific mission which highlights his particular talents. The story titled "Operation Copperhead" begins with Hiro trying to save a high-tech atomic sub from falling into enemy hands; likewise Stacey must protect an advanced prototype laser tank. Striker must locate and rescue a team testing a new type of communications device; and Adams flies his own jet to take on a stolen V-Tol style plane. Each member succeeds but again the enemy though defeated is either killed or escapes, their origins and motives remaining an enigma to the team and to the reader.
The series written by Leo Dorfman is remarkable for the multi-ethnic make up of the M.A.R.S. team, mostly since no particular mention is made of it. The only regrettable aspect along those lines is that Ken Hiro talks in a Charlie Chan fashion in later issues despite the fact he is specifically rebuked by his commander Lt. Adams in the first issue for engaging in such a display. Otherwise, the series is to be commended for the way it handles this aspect of the storytelling.
The series lasted seven more issues up to 1969 and it is revealed that the invaders are indeed from outer space. The artwork after Wally Wood leaves is handled by the likes of Jack Sparling and Dan Spiegle. Wood for his part started his most famous work for Tower Comics, the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents simultaneously as his work for Gold Key. Many of the themes of paranoia and of a united force required to repel a mysterious enemy are developed in the early issues of that series, but with a superhero spin. I find I rather like it here with mere men battling against the threat. That the story ends with no answer gives is a juice it might not have otherwise, the ends are not neatly tied up, but rather like life left open and the mysteries are just that.
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I've always thought the series was inspired by the Operator Five pulp, particularly the 13 issue Purple Invasion serial, in which a mysterious foreign force lays waste to pretty much the entire US, symbolically depicting the destruction or subversion of various national landmarks along the way until Operator #5 and the remnants of the shattered American government manage to push back and finally prevail.
ReplyDeleteI first read about this series in Steranko's History of Comics and finally read it when High Adventure magazine reprinted it in sequence. It's a monumental work and part of a genre that was all over popular fiction prior to the second World War, going back to the apocalyptic turn of the century books of M. P. Shiel.
I'd forgotten about Operator 5, and it does seem a logical connection. I think I've read one of the pulp yarns in the sprawling "Purple" epic. Good catch. Thanks.
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