Blood, Devastation, Death, War and Horror

Steve Rogers didn't like Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It's true! It's canon! We tend to forget that in our canonization of the Star-Spangled Avengers following his tragic death mysterious disappearance into time, but Captain America didn't care for one of the great blockbusters of 1981. Not one bit. You'd think a guy raised on the continued-next-week antics of Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy and Spy Swatter, the Lone Star, the Caped Madman and all the rest, woulda eaten stuff like this up as if it was breakfast serial...I mean cereal:



...but if he did, he certainly didn't care much for the adventures of Henry "Indiana Wants Me" Jones. (And this was years before Indy rode out a nuclear blast in a Norge Chill-King!)



Panels from Captain America #286 (April 1982), script by J. M. DeMatteis, pencils by Mike Zeck, inks by John Beatty, colors by Bob Sharen, letters by Jim Novak

Well, what do you know anyway, Cap? I bet you liked...(flipping through my book listing 1981 movies)...I bet you liked Chariots of Fire, ya big mook!

Make ya wonder, huh, what Cap would think about the comic books of today (if he had only lived to see 'em, sniff!) with their heroes quick and ready to put a bullet through your eyes if you sneeze in the wrong direction. Like, f'r instance, the Ultimate version of Captain America, who may be quite violent, but to his credit, is always ready to help you out with spelling lessons. (For example: 'France' does not begin with 'A'.)

Cap's 1960s and 1970s adventures in comics, by comparison, are pretty tame on the "kill or be killed" front. You can pretty much set Cap's FDR Timex on a supervillain cackling "You'll never take me alive, Captain Dumb-merica! and then accidentally toppling backwards into his own power ray and disintegrating himself. No body to clean up afterwards (but imagine the paperwork!) In fact, during that era in Marvel Comics, it was very nearly the unspoken rule: heroes do not kill. Well, there were exceptions, depending on how you define that Frank Castle guy, but the biggest "get out of jail free" card Stan and his Marvelous Maniacs gave to their heroes was it's okay to kill Nazis during wartime. World War II wartime, that is, as we saw in Marvel's family of battle-hardened all-out action war magazines. Sure, there was Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, the flagship of the fightin' line, but don't forget other Marvel war comics of the '60s and '70s like Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders, Major Mayhem and His Maniac Marauders, Doc Strange of the M*A*S*H Unit 4076, Battlin' Jack Murdock and His Crazy Company Clerks, Reed Richards, Science Agent of O.S.S.S.S.S.S.* (*Office of Strategic Services, Secret Science Syndicate for Smart-Guys), and that favorite of warplane buffs, Captain Ben Grimm and His Fantastic Flyers.

But probably the most unremittingly violent Marvel war mag of that period was the short-lived (9 issues) Combat Kelly and the Deadly Dozen. The 1972-73 series revamped an war character who starred in a 1951-1957 Atlas comic book, but the inspiration is baldly the 1967 movie The Dirty Dozen. War-hardened tough-guy Mike Kelly is paroled from a military prison for a crime he didn't commit. Promptly escaping to the Los Angeles Underground to gather a crack team of misfits and cons to perform surgically violent attacks on the Nazis, in the "it takes a maniac to stop a maniac" philosophy that has always served our nation so well and had never backfired on us, oh no no no.


Panels from Combat Kelly and the Deadly Dozen #1 (June 1972), script by Gary Friedrich, pencils by Dick Ayers, inks by Jim Mooney, letters by Shelly Leferman

Combat Kelly is what you'd call a "spin-off" of Nick Fury, and several of Nick's Howling Commandos appear in the first issue as members of Kelly's own personal suicide squad, including Dino Manelli and Percy Pinkerton. These cross-over guest appearances of two long-time Fury cast members are about as appropriate as the time Robin Williams played "Mork" on Happy Days. There's also no expense paid to fly in several stereotypes like a hillbilly who speaks like Rogue, likes country music, and whose first name is, apparently, "Hillbilly." There's also a Japanese soldier who has decided fighting for America's better than being in one if its internment camps, a handful of uncontrollably sadistic brutes, and even a dame:



...whose presence is apparently to button her uniform up to show off her midriff. Well, you can't blame her...Witchblade would not premiere for over another thirty years, so there was precious few job openings for professional women who like to display their belly buttons.

Well, once Kelly gets his box o' egg's-worth squad of hardened criminals, stereotypes, and guest stars under way, you can bet we're in for some subtle and elegant storytelling, right? Well, actually, Combat Kelly #1 is mostly all about killing Nazis every which way, for the next seventeen pages. They kill Nazis with rifles:



They kill Nazis with bows and arrows:



They kill Nazis with country music:



And they kill Nazis with...umbrellas?!?!



Just to show you some of 'em are rotten to the core, they kill surrendering non-combatants:



And for some pyrotechnics, they blow up Luftwaffe planes:



Yes, it's just like Castle Wolfenstein, except without the giant robot Hitler at the end:



And, just in case you thought Laurie Livingston was there, like Counselor Troi, to look hot and state the obvious, think again:



Well, nobody said war was neat and gentle, and rough and violent as this job is, it must be done for the safety of the world and future generations. It's a tough task, but nobody really takes any joy in it...





Um. Okay. From this we can conclude two things: one—Combat Kelly and the Deadly Dozen would fit right in with today's modern-day Norman Osborn-run Marvel Universe. And two: I'm pretty sure Steve Rogers wouldn't care for Inglourious Basterds, either.