Two more Weird War Tales issues.
Weird War Tales 13.
The Die Hards. WW2. The Germans occupy a small town and soldiers are dying each night. Their throats torn out and drained of blood. The villagers say it’s vampires, but the German commander refuses to believe. As the days pass, the commander executes more and more villagers because the mayor refuses to give up the real killers. The mayor insists it really is vampires. The commander has all the villagers gunned down. That night all the villagers rise again. They’re all vampires.
Old Samurai Never Die. Japan, 15th Century. A ruthless lord shows no mercy to anyone. He kills women and children without mercy and fails to pay his soldiers. They are near rebellion so the lord hires an actor to trick the troops with a religious portent. They fight harder without pay. The lord kills the actor as payment. The lord then has to disguise himself to meet with a rival. The lord’s own soldiers catch him and execute him thinking he’s a lowly peasant. Really underwhelming, no supernatural element to speak of, and the racism is cringeworthy. It’s a comic from the early 1970s take one guess how the Japanese are depicted.
Loser’s Luck. Far future. Nuclear war ravaged the planet and poisoned the atmosphere. So some people began living underground. One group takes the orphans under 10 underground and raises them. A set of twins is rounded up and taken underground. They’re raised and trained. One is brawny and itching to continue the war. The other is brainy and doesn’t care about the war. On their 18th birthday one is set to return to the surface. The brawny one thinks it’s to go fight, but the brainy one was picked. Brawny knocks out brainy and takes his place. He fools the guards with the switch and is sent to the surface to die. The colony has no need of brains, only brawn. Kid accidentally saved his brother and condemned himself. Kinda disappointing again as there’s not really any weird to the story.
Weird War Tales 16.
More Dead than Alive. WW2. A replacement soldier has the worst luck in the field…he keeps having bits blown off him. Arms, legs, etc. But he has the best luck in the medical tents. The “lady doc” keeps patching him up good as new. Turns out she’s using bits and pieces of the dead to keep him alive. The twist at the end is there’s no more parts so he’s dying, freaks out, and paralyzes the lady doc. Her male colleague puts her parts in his body to keep it alive, but transplants her head on to the body. Weird.
The Conquerers. Alien invasion. The aliens wipe out all life on Earth with their ray guns and fire. Inexplicably there are survivors. The aliens round them up and take them back to their home planet. After a few weeks the survivors rebel and take over the ship. The twist is the survivors are vampires. The fires burned away the stakes through their hearts.
Evil Eye. WW2. The Americans take a town and rebuild the local bridge before starting to rebuild the local church. The idea being winning hearts and minds. A war orphan shows up and is adopted by the commander. We see the kid chanting spells and causing accidents. Eventually he wipes out the Americans by collapsing the repaired bridge. The Germans take the town, repair the bridge, and the same kid shows up asking for food.
Comic nerd aside. I’ve read a lot of comics but I don’t remember ever seeing a five-panel page with the panels running vertically up-and-down the page. Lots of five-panel pages that run horizontally, sure. But vertically? First time.
