The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics
This collection containing over 500 pages of war comics runs the gamut from staid, anonymously created British comics dealing with tried and true tales of WW II heroism produced for paperback racks to the super-freaky — and decidedly anti-war — “Legion of Charlies” by Tom Veitch and Greg Irons produced at the height of the Vietnam War, this Mammoth anthology includes some real classics, not the least of which is the work that starts it off, “I Saw It,” by Keiji Nakazawa. “I Saw It” was the original manga that chronicles Nakazawa’s own experience of living through the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that spawned his epic saga, Gen of Hiroshima that is currently being collected in a new English translation of eight volumes by Last Gasp. Also included in this collection are: the picture book The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman by the one and only Raymond Briggs (Ethel and Ernest); exerpts from Last Day in Vietnam by Will Eisner; classics from Blazing Combat by Alex Toth, John Severin and Don Lomax; and, in full color, two classic full-length WW II tales drawn by Sam Glanzman in the early 1960s, “You Only Lose Once,” and “Pearl Harbor.” There’s plenty more — 26 works in all, and while a few of the works are obviously serving to fill out the volume, there’s still enough on offer here to more than justify the relatively modest asking price.