Fucking Comics: War Is... What the Hell? Part 1 - A Look at the War That Time Forgot
 It's a little known fact that while the Allied Forces in Europe were busy battle the Nazi scourge and saving millions of Jews from being gassed, the American forces were busy farting around the South Pacific fighting dinosaurs.
Or at least, that's what the folks at DC Comics would have you believe in their old series of war stories called "The War That Time Forgot." These stories saw printing in DC's old "Star Spangled War Stories" comic book series. It was a monthly comic that featured many stories about about World War 2, but with "exciting twists".
The War that Time Forgot featured stories that featured US soldiers going up against Dinosaurs in each issues instead of fighting the enemy. It's not surprising that these stories were probably inspired by the popular monster films of the 1950's, especially the ones by Ray Harryhousen and his special effects ilk of the time. You know the kinds of movies I'm talking about right? The kind where they would have claymation dinosaurs running around fighting each other? Those ones.
These stories always followed a pretty basic plot in each issue, and got old really fast, allow me to provide you with a run down of each and every plot:
Step One - The Troops Are Deployed:
The first thing that happens in these stories the soldiers/tank battalion/navy divers/acrobats are briefed on their mission. The mission is usually that one of their previous missions in a certain area (usually signified with a designation like "Location X-5" and the like) that has gone missing. Fearing that it's the enemy using some new secret weapon (thankfully we're out of the Golden Age of comics here and we're spared having to read the "Jap bashing" that was popular during the war) and that these brave soldiers must go on a suicide mission to find out what's going on, but they may never come back. They're more often than not given really expensive military equipment (or some new experimental device), an unlimited supply of ammo that would make Rambo proud, and of course explosives of all sorts.
Step Two - The Initial Attack:
The next thing that usually happens in these stories is that the team that's being deployed is attacked by dinosaurs. They either fly through a cloud that makes them travel billions of years into the past, or there is some sort of earthquake that releases dinosaurs who were trapped in suspended animation (Because as we all know, underground is known for it's abundance of frozen dinosaurs in a state of suspended animation) And of course the dinosaurs usually smash just about everything except for the main characters of the story. I'm going to take a moment at this time to mention that the writers of the War That Time Forgot believed that all dinosaurs were meat eaters that would recklessly attack anything human looking or looking like it was made by humans, and they would all team up and attack. Obviously research wasn't a big priority at the DC Comics bullpen.
Step Three - Our Bullets Have No Effect On Them!
Of course when in the face of adversity (or meat hungry dinosaurs) the US Army will try to shoot whatever obstacle in their way. Now apparently when it comes to dinosaurs, they are totally bullet proof. It doesn't matter what kind of bullets your using. You could be using armor piercing tracer fire from an aircraft and you won't even dent their hide. In every case apparently the best way to fell a dinosaur opponent is to use an explosive of some kind. It didn't matter if it was TNT, grenades, torpedo's, as long as it exploded it'd kill the dinosaur in one shot. In fact dinosaurs apparently have a magical property that makes anything around them unaffected by exploding ordinance around their bodies. It would take a scientist to explain it, but your little army man could be in ground zero of the explosion, and he'd walk away from it unharmed as long as the explosion hit the dinosaur first.
Step Four - Denial
Like most habits, this one is like a giant dinosaur in the middle of the room, and for whatever reason nobody can address the fucking problem. In the world of the War That Time Forgot after any mission that involved a the survivors of a scouting team showing up on the wing of a plane found in the middle of the Pacific, all in tatters claiming they fought dinosaurs is met with disbelief both from officials and the people involved. Fuck, there could be a full size pterodactyl corpse floating on next to them and that commanding officer of the sub that finds you is just going to scoff at you and call you crazy.
So as you can tell, this makes for some pretty awful comic book story telling, with awful plots, and stupid characters. In fact a lot of the stories read like they were written by a kid in the 6th grade. Here's a quote of a narrative from one issue just to give you an idea:
"What happened would fill ten books --- if you could write underwater -- with TNT!"
No joke that's what it says. Don't believe me? Pick up Star Spangle War Stories #94, it's right there on page 1. For some reason the writer loved to use the word "TNT" as often as possible. I don't know why, but I'm guessing kids from the 1960's had a morbid infatuation with TNT. Maybe that's why they're called baby boomers now? Why we don't have an entire generation of unibombers is anybodies guess... Oh wait... I can thank Gerry Garcia and LSD for that.
Now, there are so many fucking wacky characters and plot lines in the War That Time Forgot to even know where to start, the fuck of it is that the stories are so bland and boring that even mentioning a single issue won't make for much of a review (well at least not one of my lengthy reviews that I am legend for anyway.) so I'm going to take a look at some of the regular occurring characters and plot lines in this series. |
