You are quite right about the impact of the Vietnam war. DC (or Joe Kubert, I should say) was even explicit with its ‘Make War No More’ bit at the end of each Sgt. Rock story – I’m not sure precisely when they started that. I didn’t touch on GI Joe for two reasons 1) My mandate is to discuss older books and that’s pretty modern from my perspective and 2) I’ve never seen it as a true war book, but I’m really not familiar enough with the title to make an educated comment.

I also think it’s rather telling that the only other war comic that seems to have had any popular impact after the 1970′s was G.I. Joe, which hit during the peak of the Reagan military build-up and at a point when the draft had been gone long enough that kids were growing up where daddy having been “in the service” was no longer common. G.I. Joe is a radically different kind of war comic than the other examples listed here, and while a lot of that can be traced back to Hasbro wanting an extended toy commercial, I do think there is some reflection of society and its perception of war and the military to be found in there as well. I’m just not sure what it is yet.

There are comments on the state of the war comic in the wake of the War on Terror, but I’m explicitly avoiding that for now. I don’t think I can get too far into that discussion without my Political Tourette’s Syndrome kicking in (defined as the inability to talk about matters of public policy for long before involuntarily degenerating into a stream of obscenities).