Fantagraphics plans Blazing Combat collection

Choice stories from Warren Publishing's mid-60s war comics anthology series "Blazing Combat" will be collected in a 200-page hardcover from Fantagraphics this December, IVC2 reports.

There were some top notch creators involved in the original series, which was edited by the legendary Archie Goodwin.

The artists on the series were a rogues gallery of top sixties talent, including Gene Colan, Frank Frazetta (who did all four covers), John Severin, Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Russ Heath, Reed Crandall, and Wally Wood.

The stories covered the full range of organized conflict, concentrating on World War II, but going back to the Revolutionary War and forward into the Vietnam War, which was raging at the time. They were “unified by a humanistic theme of the personal costs of war, rather than by traditional men’s adventure motifs,” as Fantagraphics’ description put it.

The anti-war stories were the reason for the magazine’s brief lifespan. “Landscape,” a story from the second issue reprinted in the Fantagraphics collection, led to protests and distributors refusing to carry the title.