Showcase Presents: Men of War, Vol. 1

Showcase Presents

by David Michelinie, Ed Davis (Illustrator), Larry Hama (Illustrator)

These tales of war originally published in the late 1970s star Enemy Ace, DC's German fighter pilot from World War I, and a new war hero: Codename Gravedigger, an African American soldier who goes undercover behind enemy lines.

Collects MEN OF WAR #1-26, the entire series.

Genres: Comics

493 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2014

Reviews

[Little Timmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

DC always had a nice selection of WW2 characters. Recommended

[Brent · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was some good stuff in here but on the whole it was fairly average. The harder edge of 70's comics was present here but did not serve the series very well.

[Skjam! · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1977, African-American male leads in mainstream comic books were still countable on one hand (and don’t even ask about African-American women!) But this also had the effect of making a comic with a black person on the front attention-getting. And I suspect that at least some of the creation of “Gravedigger” came from that fact.

Gravedigger was the lead feature in DC Comics’ last-launched war comics series of the Bronze Age, Men of War. He is introduced as Sergeant Ulysses Hazard, a polio survivor who threw himself into intense physical training (including martial arts) to overcome his handicaps. Despite his superior physical condition and combat skills, Hazard was consigned to a segregated battalion and assigned to funeral detail (thus his codename.) After his heroics saved lives (except his best military friend) and defeated Nazi troops, the white officers ignored his contributions and denied his request for reassignment to a combat unit.

In the second issue, Hazard somehow gets back to the U.S. and single-handedly infiltrates the Pentagon War Room to demonstrate his skills. A character identified in that issue as the Secretary of War but in later issues demoted to an undersecretary (as his sliminess would have been a slur on the character of Henry L. Stimson, the actual Secretary at the time) decides to use Hazard as a political pawn. If “Gravedigger” fails on one of the suicidal missions, he can be written off, but if he succeeds, the Undersecretary can take credit.

Now Captain Ulysses Hazard so that he can pull rank when necessary, Gravedigger returns to Europe and takes on a number of commando missions ranging from rescuing art from the Nazis to destroying an experimental mini-sub. There are guest appearances by a couple of DC’s other war comics characters, and the final issue features Gravedigger actually leading Easy Company (normally the job of Sergeant Rock) for a few hours.

Gravedigger was basically “military Batman”, performing superheroic feats on a regular basis. To be fair, this is common in comic books about commando-style solo characters, but if you are a stickler for realism, look elsewhere. Later in the series, he gets a cross-shaped facial scar to make him more distinctive looks, important in comic books. He even gets an archnemesis, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, who enlists mad science in a massive scheme to rid the Reich of this one commando.

In the next to last story, Gravedigger personally saves the lives of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though an opportunity is missed to have Captain Hazard bond with FDR over their mutual experience with polio.

In addition to the expected violence, there’s also period racism, ableism and anti-Semitism (the last confined to Nazi characters.)

The back-up features varied from issue to issue. “Enemy Ace” featured Baron Hans von Hammer, “the Hammer of Hell”, a World War I German fighter pilot. He was depicted as noble and honorable, one of a dying breed of warrior outdated by brutal modern warfare. Some of the stories have art by Howard Chaykin, who is not as well served by the black and white reprint as the other artists.

“Dateline: Frontline” was about American reporter Wayne Clifford, covering World War Two while the U.S. was still neutral, and having his naivete chipped away bit by bit. He struggles with censorship, the temptation of writing the story to suit the person who can give you access, and the moral gray areas of war.

“Rosa” features a spy working in the late 19th Century who is loyal to no country, and has the habit of switching accents in every sentence either to disguise his nationality or (as he claims in a somewhat dubious origin story) because he is literally a man without a country. His name might or might not actually be Rosa. Most notable for having a character switch sides between chapters for plot convenience.

This volume contains all 26 issues, and is not brilliant but is decent work by journeymen creators. Worth picking up if you are a war comics fan, or interested in the history of African-American characters in comic books.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a kid I never was one to follow the super hero comics. However I was always all over the comics with a military theme running through them, or the horror comics. So when I saw this one at the library some of those memories started rattling around somewhere deep in the old brain pan and I knew I had to check this one out. Perhaps I may have read one or two of these as a youngster but after reading the whole book it just does not seem familiar. Now I have read several of these Showcase Presents from DC comics and am seeing a common thread. If it is all one story it kind of numbs the brain about half way through, such as this one did. If it is various stories, like the Witching Hour one I read, it tends to break it up a bit. Than again as a kid we usually had to wait at least a month to see the next installment and here you have three years of this comic crammed into one book. And the issue with the black and white again. These comics seemed so much more fun in color. I know it saves on cost to put it in black and white but it sure would be neat to see DC go for it and put some color back in. It still is very neat to see DC gather these comics as kind of an all in one bundle. To me it seems a great way to preserve all of those old back issues.
P.S. Happy Fourth of July to all! God Bless America!

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection contains the DC Men Of War issues from #1 through #26. There are three main storylines of continuing tales. The first features the American super soldier named Gravedigger, sent on the deadliest and most critical of missions in World War II. The second is Enemy Ace, World War I German fighter pilot Baron Von Hammer, a man that fights with great chivalry against any and all enemies. The third features war correspondent Wayne Clifford as he faces danger in order to get the true story as to how the war is going. Sergeant Rock and Easy Company make a cameo appearance in one Gravedigger episode.
The action is the standard of DC war stories, where the heroes face great peril and all seems lost, yet they manage to emerge relatively unscathed. Gravedigger is African-American, so his stories are a bit of a departure from the white hero format.
My favorite stories are those featuring Enemy Ace. He is not depicted as a bloodthirsty killer, but as a humane man forced to do inhumane things. The Baron is a man that has a duty to perform and he will do so to the best of his abilities. Some of the stories also mention his aristocratic heritage and what it means to a German.

[Quentin Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume includes the entire MEN OF WAR series, and I thought it was some of the best war comics I've ever read. The main story feature Gravedigger, who not only had to battle Nazis but also racism which put a new twist on a war comic. The back ups were just as good, if not better, especially in the series Dateline: Frontline, which followed the adventure of a newspaper reporter during WWII. The Enemy Ace stories were good too, and even there's also a series called "Rosa" about a spy in the late 1800s that wasn't bad. The art was good throughout the series as well. I was just really impressed with this series overall.

[J.L. Lamastus · Rating 4 out of 5]

If it had only been the Codename : Gravedigger stories I'd have given it five stars. But the back-up stories were a bit hit or miss. And for me they were more miss than hit. Still it was overall a good read.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK, I'll start with the good: for a DC collection of war comics, the stories printed herein are a lot closer to reality than the usual mix where Americans are always good, Germans are always bad, and everyone else divides neatly into allies and enemies. Those stories are fine, but given how many Sgt. Rock stories seem to show Rock having an exciting adventure that can and often does include Rock and Easy shooting down aircraft with their hand-held rifles and fistfights that seem to somehow win battles (I guess they punch hard enough to kill Nazis), and then end with a hypocritical-seeming slogan of "Make War No More," there may not be much room else to go. But here, we see casual racism from American soldiers and government officials towards the character that appeared in every issue, black special commando Ulysses "Gravedigger" Hazard, though there was plenty there that was also not likely, such as how Hazard started out as a literal gravedigger since the story supposed blacks were not permitted in combat, and only a casual perusal of Wikipedia will remind you that certainly wasn't true, or how Hazard somehow became a top fighting man after beating back polio-endused handicaps (my guess that would be the real reason he wasn't sent to the front lines), or how even at the rank of captain he was still digging graves in most stories. His "now you hear it, now you don't" accent also bugged me. But showing war as ugly fit "Men of War" rather well, which is why the last of Robert Kanigher's Enemy Ace stories worked here, as the character's fatalism worked very well, as did the "Dateline: Frontline" feature that showed the ugly side of war everywhere, from starving Russians to Arabs who just wanted their own country to British war censors who wouldn't let the truth out on occasion. Story-wise, the only regular feature that didn't work was one introduced very late in this reprint, "Rosa, Master Spy." Rosa was, despite a fairly feminine-sounding name, a man, and he was supposed to be a man without a country, so he sprinkled his language with Spanish, French, German, Russian, and even Hebrew at one point. His stuff was short and rather dull.

So, the writing was often good, but then there was the artwork. Gravedigger's was rather generic with nothing special to it, when it wasn't outright awful. Foreign characters, such as Gravedigger's British commando comrades, were often drawn to look like stereotypes the stories themselves were trying to decry with their main character (seriously, one of those guys is dressed like a butler with a bowler hat when we first see him and another wears a kilt while they are supposedly sneaking around Germany). Gravedigger's arch enemy was Joseph Goebbels, who had some experiment that was forgotten about at one point in favor of another one, but his British commander was confined to a wheelchair and in one panel laid a reassuring hand on the shoulder of another man while still being seated in his chair but without raising his arm all that much. Enemy Ace's stories were drawn mostly by Howard Chaykin, but the black-and-white rendering here made some panels difficult to make out. Dateline: Frontline's art I didn't care for much at all. Joe Kubert's work was there, sadly limited to just the covers.

All in all, good stories were sucked down by lesser artwork. Not DC's best war comics by a long shot.