This is the cover of the first war comic I ever bought. I would have been about nine or ten. Mum ridiculed the title but that's what made me pick it out at the newsagent. The cover and the title formed a kind of concentrate. My first war comic had to be full flavoured and lasting. This one promised magnificent violence and in machine-like hatred. Win!
I think it's particularly apt, then to begin this subseries of posts about direct influences over the look, feel and content of The Monsoons with what was a huge formative influence o'er my life for about three years, either side of eleven.
The story of Kill the Enemy, in fact, was about a soldier twisted with a personal hatred. Fuelled by vendetta and propaganda, he was ready to go out in a blaze as long as he took a few beastly boche with him. Eventually, he was brought around by his fellow soldiers because it's all bad and puts everyone's life in danger when they could fight more coldly and kill a whole host more of the deadly hun. Well, not quite, there was in fact a quite effective anti-war message to this which I grew to quite enjoy. No contradiction here, I liked the war story and liked being invited to join in and condemn war: I take one in and get to feel superior (yea, verily unto myself). Then everything rebooted for the next one.
This was a War Picture Library comic. It was British. The other British war comic to get was Commando. These were black and white, mostly without tones and varied little but noticeably in style. They had to move quickly and be very authentic with their military hardware and landscape. Something I always noticed about the stories set in the desert campaigns was that they captured the effect of glare through very sparse use of line. You could put tones galore on the North Sea,the roof of New Guinea or the beaches of Normandy but the desert was all line, thin line against white that looked blisteringly hot.
The American war comics were coloured and heroic but it was easier to get the antiwar messages from them. If you didn't notice that the circle drawn around the words THE END in the last panel of each story itself contained a phrase like MAKE WAR NO MORE then you were choosing not to look. Sgt. Rock was chief among these (it was the one with the end messages) had some intriguing stories, sometimes verging on the kind of sci fi nazi of eighties cult cinema. They'd also tack on shorter stories from different eras of warfare. One was set during a Roman campaign. Blood flowed from the title panel and poured into a centurion's cup as red wine. That really zapped me.
The UK ones never went anywhere near there. They were the solid universe replaying over and over as I reread and reread them until the pulpy beige pages disintegrated in my hands. However, as a reader the two strands, fantastical and adventuresome, I conflated them into a World War II of clean lines and phantasmagoria. War movies, by contrast were always drab by comparison, either too jolly and heroic or as everyday as the war machines I could see just by looking up at the sound of a jet engine in my town of soldiers, sailors and flyboys.
The stark line of the desert comics is the same as the one I'm using for the piercing glare of the tropics in The Monsoons. The esoterica (well, near enough) of Sgt. Rock weaves in between the hard edged line and the wandering white of the Commando blaze. I cannot stress too strongly the effect that these comics had on me. It was to the cost of any super hero fare and even horror pieces that my elder siblings left in their wardrobes under their old paisley jackets and cadet's slouch hats.
Perhaps they also fired, I doubt it not, the young imagination of Magnetic Island's most infamous or famous son, Julian Assange (will I put him in?) who, at the age of eight during the The Monsoon's timeline, would, just like me and all of us, have looked up at the sound of a jet engine to see the hardware of the state, a Mirage or a Phantom fighter, tearing at the clouds, or gaze into the waves in case he saw not stingers, nor sharks, but an Oberon Class submarine rise huge and awesome from the jade green waves of Cleveland Bay. That's what I was looking for.
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