Comics: The Haunted Tank

I literally grew up reading war comics.  During the 1970's WWII was still fresh enough in people's minds that it took over a large part of our culture, books, TV, movies, toys, comics, and maintained that hold until the 80's, at which point it started falling out of vogue until the rash of WWII games over the last couple of years.  During the 70's though the comic rack wasn't filled until you had issues of SGT Rock, The Unknown Soldier, The Losers, and, my personal favorite, GI Combat.  Oh and yes, I understand the politics of the Vietnam War, but this is how you see things as a kid.

GI Combat was a collection of stories, 3 or 4 in each issue, usually ending with the Mercenaries, a couple of guys on the run from the French Foriegn Legion for desertion, but always starting out a Haunted Tank story.  For those of you not in the know let me explain:  the Haunted Tank told stories about a particular Sherman tank and it's crew.  What gave the tank it's name you ask?  The fact that the tank was shepherded by the ghost of American civil war General JEB Stuart, a cavalry general known for his bold and daring tactics; I won't go into detail but you can read more about General Stuart here.  

The General wouldn't do much except give sage advice to the tank commander, a Lt Stuart, never anything straight forward like "Watch out, the Germans have a tank trap set up", something cryptic like "Valor is in itself reserved for the valorous"; somehow Lt Stuart got the problem solved and saved the crew (although it always seemed to me the he would have had better luck just fighting and not worrying about decrypting hidden messages from beyond the grave).  Oh and by the way, the crew couldn't see or hear the General, they just heard their commander talking to himself, sometimes screaming; apparently anti-psychotics weren't invented until after the war. 

A word about the Generals advice, you see even in those days it wasn't generally acceptable to use comics to recruit for the army or glorify war so they made really cool stories about people in war doing awesome heroic things and then put in a message about why it wasn't cool to be in war and have to do heroic things; what can I say, it was the 70's! 

What makes this relevant today you ask?  I recently read the first issue of a new mini series launched by Vertigo that contemporizes the Haunted Tank.  The tank is now an Abrams in Iraq and the General has shown up to avail himself to the crew once again.  This time, however, he takes an active role and is not only able to use the .50 mounted on the tank, but he also manages to slice the barrel of an Iraqi tank with nothing more than his sabre.  They made another departure by making the whole crew aware of the General, but then again we do have anti-psychotics today, and they made the tank commander, again named Stuart, into a black man; stick that in your Confederate pipe and smoke it.  

I am here to recomend the series on what I've seen, excellent art work, great writing, and an interesting plot to the story; yes its a bit contrived, but then this is a comic book and it's only running for a few issues.  There have been a few of these contemporized WWII stories lately, and I have thoroughly enjoyed most of them, although the SGT Rock story didn't come of as well as I would have liked.  If you get a chance check it out, it's not exactly a slice of the 1970's but trust me, as someone who lived through them, the 70's are better left in the past.