Frank Frazetta —The War Years
Frank Frazetta—The War Years
by Steven Ringgenberg
Frank Frazetta was not noted for drawing many war comics, unlike, say, John Severin or
Joe Kubert whose war comics constituted a considerable percentage of their total output. However, the scant number of war stories and covers he illustrated are pure gold.
His most famous war work includes the four covers he painted for Warren Publishing’s Blazing Combat title, the first of which is a bonafide classic of war art, showing a scene that distills war comics down to their very essence--a soldier fighting fiercely while protecting a wounded comrade. His third cover is unusual in that it depicts a scene from the Vietnam War, a relative rarity during the 1960s, when most war comics focused on World War 2. His other two covers both show scenes from World War Two. His second cover for Blazing Combat illustrates a moment of brutal combat, with an American sergeant bayonetting a Nazi soldier. A dead GI dominates the foreground, while in the sky above Frazetta painted his favorite WW2 fighter, the P-47 Thunderbolt. Since he was born in 1928, Frazetta grew up during World War 2, he sometimes sketched planes in his sketchbooks and built model planes. His final Blazing Combat cover is a strikingly colored scene of a GI shooting a German tank commander while black smoke billows out of his stricken tank. This painting was used as the cover of Warren’s own Blazing Combat trade paperback published in the seventies that collected most of the stories from the four issues. All of the Blazing Combat stories, and their covers have been reprinted in multiple different editions.
Frazetta was eighteen by the time World War 2 ended, but never served in the military,
either during that monumental conflict or during the Korean War when he was in his early
twenties. Many of his friends who comprised the Fleagles, the group of cartoonists that hung out together, went camping, played softball, went to the movies, and chased girls. Aside from Frazetta, the members of the Fleagles were Al Williamson, Angelo Torres, Roy Krenkel, Nick Meglin and George Woodbridge. Except for Williamson, all of them were drafted and served in either World War Two, the Korean War, or served in the peacetime military during the ‘fifties. Frazetta, on the other hand, was never called up. Why? Well, if the truth be told, it was because some indiscretions in his youth rendered him ineligible for the draft. As Frazetta recalled in a brief memoir published in 1973, “The reputation I gained in those days is something I’d much rather forget…” So, Frazetta never served, but he did illustrate stories of the Korean War for a run of issues of Heroic Comics, beginning with issue #67 and running through #87, though he did not have a story in every issue. However, his artwork on these one to three-page stories comprises some of the most dynamically rendered war comics ever published. It’s really a shame that Frazetta never drew any stories for Harvey Kurtzman’s two brilliant ‘fifties war comics, Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, though Kurtzman noted back in the 80s: “We tried (to get Frank to draw something), but Frank was always very busy.” Alas, the idea of Frazetta
illustrating one of Kurtzman’s great scripts is something Frazetta fanboys can only dream about.
Frazetta and Kurtzman remained friends after the EC Comics era and would, however,
collaborate in the mid-sixties on three installments of “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy. When asked what Frazetta contributed to those three “Annie Fanny” strips, Kurtzman laconically replied, “Tits and ass. What else?” The stories that Frazetta drew for Heroic Comics are all based on real-life events, though not all of them feature military heroism. His earliest work for Heroic Comics in issues 65-69, including a two-page collaboration with Al Williamson, “Sunny’s Sunday”, all featured civilian acts of heroism, but with issue #69, Frazetta began depicting war stories almost exclusively in stories like “Beyond the Call of Duty” and “Stranded in a Mine Field”, his last war story for Heroic (issue #87). This story features him at or near his artistic peak as a comic book artist. Let’s consider each of the military-themed stories in the order that they were published.
His first war story from Heroic #69 was, “Beyond the call of Duty”, an exciting three-page
Korean War tale about a soldier who throws himself onto a grenade to save his comrades that boasts a riveting splash panel. His other story in that issue, “A Memorable Memorial Day” is also three pages, but since it’s about an act of heroism in the civilian world, it will be discussed in my next article on Frazetta’s “civilian” stories for the title. Frazetta did not have any work in issue #70, but the following issue (71) features two war stories that are among his best. “Gave Life to Save Lives” is a compact two-page gem about how Master Sergeant Travis Watkins, severely wounded, sacrificed himself to cover his troops’ withdrawal. It’s only four panels, but Frazetta draws the hell out of each frame. The other story he contributes to that issue, “He Stayed Behind,” is a real oddity. It’s listed in checklists as a single-page story, but it’s actually only two big panels, fitted in around an inset box showing the title’s circulation figures. Despite the brevity of the story, or perhaps because of it, those two panels are exceedingly well-drawn and feature some of Frazetta’s best comics inking anywhere.
Because of the oddball layout, it qualifies as one of the strangest one-pagers he ever drew. Still, Frazetta’s bold inking and robust design sense make it really striking. The other one-pagers he did, mostly PSA ads, feature far more conventional page layouts.
Issue #72 highlights an untitled three-page story about how MSGT. Ernest R. Kouma won the Medal of Honor. Interestingly, it opens with Kouma receiving his medal from then- president Harry S. Truman. As usual, when depicting real people Frazetta provides an excellent likeness of his subject (as he did with depictions of other presidents like LBJ, Nixon and Eisenhower in various assignments). From this relatively simple panel, Frazetta takes the reader to a battlefield near Asok, Korea to show how MSGT. Kouma earned his medal. The next two pages feature eleven panels of rousing battle action culminating with a wounded Kouma being taken away on a stretcher while protesting that “…the boys need me.” Panel two on page three of the story has a particularly striking panel of enemy soldiers being mowed down by Kouma’s machine gun fire, while panel three is particularly interesting in the way the art depicts a mass of mangled bodies silhouetted against the horizon. This single image foreshadows similar scenes in several of the Conan paintings Frazetta did in the sixties. This issue is a particular treat for Frazetta fans since it contains not one, but three Korean war tales, plus Frazetta’s one page ad showing serial actor and Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe demonstrating a then-new life-saving technique “Red Cross New Method of Artificial Respiration.” The other two stories are the cover-featured “With Only a Shovel,” and naturally enough, depicts heroic PFC Melvin Brown killing North Korean soldiers with a shovel in the splash panel. The rest of the story excitingly tells how Brown held up an enemy advance, first exhausting all off his ammo and grenades and then fighting on, throwing boulders, and using his shovel to dispatch enemy soldiers. The final Korean War tale, “He Chose to Fight,” chronicles the heroism of General William F. Dean, showing him battling enemy tanks with grenades, in a fanciful story that bears only a cursory relationship to actual events. During his battle with the North Koreans, Dean was captured, and as one of the highest-ranking POWs the Communists had, he was paraded through the streets of Seoul and subjected to endless rounds of interrogation. Fortunately, General Dean survived his arduous ordeal and made it back to the U.S. after hostilities concluded.
The following issue, 73, featured a pair of two-page stories about the Korean conflict.
“Bivouac” focuses on a non-combat act of military heroism on an Army base in Germany that highlights the dangers inherent even in peaceful deployments. If you’ve never served, know that just being in the military is frequently hazardous, something that’s very rarely depicted in war comics, even though soldiers die in training accidents, command errors, and just plain bad luck (wrong place/wrong time) more frequently than the military wants to admit. For example, 75,280 US service personnel perished during WW2 from accidents, disease, vehicle wrecks, etc. So, it comes out that around 29% of all US deaths during the war were accidents in some sense of the word. In the case of “Bivouac,” a quick-witted corporal saved the life of a fellow soldier who was on fire. The splash panel shows this horrific scene pretty tastefully, considering what happened. The other story, “Heroism on the Korean Front”, opens with Corporal Richard H. Shand being blown up by an enemy grenade, and then shows what led up to his wounding, and the aftermath of the battle, with Shand bravely refusing to be evacuated until after the other wounded soldiers in his platoon.
After issue #73, there are only a few scant pages of Frazetta artwork in issues 75-83, and
they are mostly his public service ads, “Prayer Works Wonders”, “Boy Scout Jamboree”, and a single civilian story. However, issue #86 contains “Only Doing His Job”, a three-page masterpiece that ranks among his best comic stories from this period. It relates the heroism of Sgt. Lonnie R. Asche, a gutsy medic who put his life on the line to rescue wounded Gis and lead them to safety through a hail of gunfire and explosions. It is told in an electrifying way, with Frazetta’s inking and figure work demonstrating a growing maturity and confidence in his style. The second page of the story is propelled by a series of three panels (3-5) that show ferocious combat action. The first panel of the third page continues the action with a truly kinetic scene of Sgt. Asche and two other soldiers dodging explosions. “Stranded in a Mine Field,” featured in Heroic #87 is Frazetta’s penultimate published story for Heroic, and also his last war story for the title. It’s a minor masterpiece of comic art, with elegant draftsmanship, vivid storytelling, and a surprising amount of atmosphere for its 3- page length. It’s absolutely one of his best stories from 1953, when he was nearing his absolute peak as a comic book artist, though he would leave the field within the next two years to focus on being a ghost artist for Al Capp’s Li’l Abner newspaper strip, usually penciling the Sunday page for around seven years. Frazetta’s final strip for Heroic is not a war story, though it’s just as beautifully drawn and will be discussed in the next Heroic article. By the end of his short run on Heroic, Frazetta was producing war art that was as good as any ever published, including EC’s famed titles, Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, Kirby and Simon’s Mainline war comic, Foxhole, and the best of DC’s many, many war stories that featured some of Frazetta’s EC Comics colleagues, like Joe Kubert, Russ Heath, Wallace Wood, Bernard Krigstein, Alex Toth, and John Severin.
Although he is most famous for his brilliant paintings showing barbarians and primitive
warriors clashing on so many paperback covers, with the exceptions of his Blazing Combat covers, Frazetta rarely painted organized warfare. Among the exceptions are his cover for the Ace edition of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, The Mad King, and then decades later, he painted the military-themed cover for the L. Ron Hubbard novel The Final Blackout. His cover for the second version of Beyond the Farthest Star depicts a futuristic air battle, while the frontispiece for the first Ace edition of the title shows a pair of futuristic fighter planes dogfighting.
Ironically, one of Frazetta’s most famous fantasy creations, The Death Dealer, has
become the mascot for the U.S. Army’s III Corps, with a larger than life-size statue of the
mounted warrior guarding the atrium of III Corps headquarters at Fort Hood, Texas. The Death Dealer was also used as the nose art for a B-52 bomber called “The Death Dealer”. And so, Frazetta’s most famous barbarian warrior has become an iconic symbol of the ferocity of modern warfare, yet more evidence of this artist’s pervasive influence throughout popular culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.
