Re: Two-Fisted Tales

[Donald McElfresh <a0019874@airmail.net>]

Comment:

During Korea we didn't have television coverage, maybe that's why it was the
"forgotten war." Vietnam was like a daily sitcom with journalists standing in
the middle of runways with a destroyed aircraft behind them telling America we
were losing the war...for ten years.  This particular television clip was shown
over and over.  Or well known Hanoi Jane with her helmet on a triple A.  A well
known Canadian professor commented (as I remember) about marketing in saying,
"the media is the message."  The journalists of the Vietnam era were marketing a
message, and we all know what it was.  That is why they were shut down during
the Gulf campaign.

Bottom line:  It's how you market the product that the public perceives it.

Don

Martin Dunne wrote:

> I have purchased a 1994 Gemstone Publishing re-print of the first five
> issues of "Two-Fisted Tales". This was an Entertaining Comic publication
> devoted to conflict- war stories and revenge tales. The cover dates are
> October 1950- July/August 1951.
>
> The first issue (cover gives it as # 18, October 1950) features piracy,
> conquistadors, and tales of spies/insurgency in Hong Kong and Central
> America, but no mention of the then current conflict. Issue # 2 (cover gives
> it as # 19, January 1951) features *one* story set in Korea ("War Story")-
> which turns out to be the frame for a WWII tale. The Korean material even
> makes it onto the cover.
>
> Issue # 3 ("# 20", April 1952, likely a misprint of 1951) gives us the first
> unashamedly identifiable Korean tale. "Massacred!" credited to John Severin
> and Bill Elder is an eight page well executed revenge tale. A party of
> American soldiers find a group of "United Nations" troop shot to death,
> hands tied behind their backs with their own shoe laces. One is found to be
> alive, he tells the story in flashback. His squad had been taken prisoner
> when they came face to gun with "Russian T-34's" [SIC], this legend floating
> over the tank in rough shock script. They are taken before Colonel Jun, the
> villain of the piece. He orders all but two of them tied up and shot. Their
> uniforms are stolen, the intent is to use these and the two surviving
> captives to infiltrate UN lines. Encountering more North Koreans, one of the
> captives attacks, only to be gunned down. This self sacrifice seals the fate
> of the wannabe spies, they are tied and massacred just as they had killed
> their own captives. Only our narrator survives.
> The cover shows one US soldier warily watching a line of evacuees asking his
> friend how thy could recognise infiltrators. Behind him, in the foreground,
> an apparently black soldier is lying crumpled while an obscured figure with
> a dagger advances on soldier one.
>
> Issue # 4 ("# 21" May, 1952, likely a misprint of 1951) continues the
> pattern of one Korean War to three non-KW stories. "Ambush!" by Jack Davis
> is set near the Yalu River, being an infantry to infantry conflict it
> suggests the intended date to be October 1950. Two jeeps of GIs are mined
> and ambushed by "North Koreans" (who never the less appear to be wearing
> Chinese uniforms). Both sides rack up casualties in fierce fighting, leaving
> only the characters with names- "Pretty Boy" and "Lucky". Lucky is sure of
> his invulnerability due to the Kewpie doll inside his helmet, however the
> relieving solders reveal the unfortunate Pretty Boy had swapped helmets with
> him to no effect.
> The cover shows the first jeep flying momentarily as it is blown up, with
> the second jeep in the foreground, dialogue in balloons - "*The road's
> mined! It's a guerrilla ambush!*"; "We're in a crossfire! *Get this jeep out
> of here!*".
>
> Issue # 5 ("# 22" July/August 1951) breaks this pattern with two Korean War
> stories, half the publications comic strip content. The first of these
> "Enemy Contact" by Jack Davis is a fairly ubiquitous war tale. An orderly
> succeeds in performing an appendectomy on the front (Inchon), only to lose
> his patient to enemy mortar fire.
> This strip makes the cover with the first real identification of the war-
> "*Take cover!* There's a *North Korean* machine gun out there!".
> "Dying City" (Alex Toth) presents us with two survivors of bombing raid, a
> blinded North Korean and his Grandfather, who castigates him for involving
> his family in the war. It transpires through flashback that the ruins are
> their family home, the family were just massacred by a grenade thrown to
> kill an American soldier who had sought refuge there. This last tale, along
> with "Massacred!" are the most identifiable as Korean War fiction, the
> others could easily have been Pacific WWII stories.
>
> For a publication devoted to war, published during a war there is
> surprisingly little about the Korean war here. "War, Presidents and Public
> Opinion" by John Mueller uses
> poll data to compare Korea to Vietnam, finding overall that Korea was little
> more popular to the US public than Vietnam. The main difference was the
> Vietnam opposition was quite vocal, where the respondents who didn't support
> the Korean were motivated more through apathy.
>
> Another explanation could be that there would have been a run in in
> commissioning Korean stories, a time lag between the start of the war and
> the artists/writers responding to it.
>
> Alternately, a hybrid explanation. Two-Fisted Tales was evidently rebadged
> from another publication. Perhaps William M. Gains was simply being cautious
> with this second launch of his war comic, testing the waters with more
> Korean material as the war progressed. Certainly "War Story", the first
> tentative KW tale published here ends with a request for feedback from the
> reader.