Put up or Shut up! What is your best WWII comic or magazine cover?

[Flex Mentallo]

[Flex Mentallo]

[Sqeggs]

Striking images!

[BB-Gun]

Was the mosquito detectable with radar? It was made out of plywood but the engines were still metal. Fast too.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Was the mosquito detectable with radar? It was made out of plywood but the engines were still metal. Fast too.

 

I'm glad you posted a Wings, and a nice one too!

 

Due to their low radar signature, sorties of Mosquito fighters were frequently mistaken as flocks of birds!

 

For its time, this was the fastest aircraft flying, with a top airspeed of 380 mph.

[walclark]

 

Very nice! I've got several WW II propaganda posters...but none photographed. May try to remedy that and post a couple here.

[Point Five]

Hard to pick just one, but here's a strong contender:

 

 

 

[buttock]

Hard to pick just one, but here's a strong contender:

 

 

 

I wrestled with MLJs and a few Raboys before settling on my Boy Commandos. Love that book Jon!

[Flex Mentallo]

Hard to pick just one, but here's a strong contender:

 

 

 

Fab cover

[Flex Mentallo]

The War Papers was a series of 90 facsimiles of daily newspapers from World War 2. (One gets a far different feel for the chaos of war from contemporaary journalistic reportage than from retrospective histories.)

 

[Twistty1]

Impossible to choose just one. Here are 3 of my top 20... or 25.

 

 

 

[jimbo_707]

 

 

I hadn't realized this was a war cover. Believe it or not, I had never noticed the Japanese soldiers down in the water before. I guess I was distracted.

[vaillant]

Wow, so much awesome stuff!

 

To reply Michael: yes, I think it is an important distinction the one between period pieces (or stuff published in 1945-46) and subsequent material.

All important and/or cool in its own right, but the assumptions (and the creators' background) is necessarily different.

 

So (being from the early 1950s) the Fleetway books are basically comparable to Mainline‘s Foxhole, as Kirby and Simon wanted to create war stories from veteran’s memories – I just got my first one:

 

 

Two panels from the two-page Kirby story "Hot Box" (these are found images, not scanned from my copy, BTW):

 

 

[vaillant]

"L’Intrepido" was the only other italian title to publish a war-related story close to the end of the war. "Cuore garibaldino nuovo episodio" is a three part story published between 1945 and 1947 which shows the very first depiction of concentration camps (imagined, because actual pictures weren’t circulating yet).

 

I don’t have that specific issue, but I have some from 1946:

 

[vaillant]

As Michael righteously said (and that was what Bo_Hogg mostly expected, I guess), the more striking images came from different publications than comics.

 

Italian illustrator Boccasile produced paintings of strking power. If one gets past the racial undertones (US soldiers had to be pictured as black, so they looked more "savage" and ruthless), they have an incredible power, and they also document the conflictual feelings of the italian population torn between civil war and fear of the allies' bombs.

 

Some Republic of Salò posters are particularly striking, like this one (I have an early 1950s publication documenting the damages brought by bombing to the italian landscape which uses it as a cover):

 

 

Another striking RSI poster image:

(I assume "V" stands for "Victory"?)

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Wow, so much awesome stuff!

 

To reply Michael: yes, I think it is an important distinction the one between period pieces (or stuff published in 1945-46) and subsequent material.

All important and/or cool in its own right, but the assumptions (and the creators' background) is necessarily different.

 

 

Our perspective is different again, because we do not have the lived experience of the world at war to look back on. I also find the prewar era especially poignant.

[Flex Mentallo]

 

 

Another striking RSI poster image:

(I assume "V" stands for "Victory"?)

 

 

Wow.

 

To state the obvious, what is produced during the war is invariably propaganda. What is produced after, reminiscence.

[vaillant]

Some other very striking ones.

(These are larger and can be double clicked to see a bigger version – I don’t have most of these, so I choose the best ones found on the web):

 

National Association of Families of the Fallen, Chivasso (1942)

Postcard

 

"Fratricide!" (1944)

 

This one commemorates the death of over 180 children, killed in the bombing of a primary school in the Gorla district of the city of Milano (October 20, 1944)

[vaillant]

Wow.

 

To state the obvious, what is produced during the war is invariably propaganda. What is produced after, reminiscence.

 

That goes for sure. You can be told (as I have been several times by both my parents, grandparents and friends which lived the events) but you can’t figure them out properly, just attempt to draw the general lines (and the individual drama) as best as you can.

 

To tell you a thing, by many children american soldiers were truly experienced as the liberators, but at the same time the memories left from the bombings are indelible.

My mother (born in 1934) was a bit scared the first time he saw a black soldier, but she loved the chocolate brought by the allies.

[vaillant]

This is probably the first depiction in comics of the bombing of the Montecassino abbey (american science fiction writer Walter Miller Jr. was part of the squad), as an opening to a St. Benedict biography. From a "Treasure Chest" issue from late 1944 (I don’t have it at hand):

 

 

This is a 1944 book I recently bought which documents the damage to italian artistic patrimony produced by the allies' bombing. The book is unbiased, and has no propaganda overtones, and the title translates as "war against art":