I'm looking forward to this re-read, to see what else we glean from it: from 1980,
Weird War Tales #85, "The War on the Edge of Reality!" Written by J.M. DeMatteis, art by Terry Henson.
The cover pitches this as "a bonus-length 22-page thriller!" In other words, a full-length story, instead of two or three shorts:
WWT didn't seem to do that often, although we've seen an earlier one,
#37.
WWT also sometimes exceled at making a bad situation worse: oh, don't like war, huh? I'll give you something to cry about...This issue, a lost PT boat gets attacked by a pterodactyl--an alarmingly common occurrence in the title, I'm sure, but this one had a German uniform and helmet, and cusses them out in Deutsch when shot down. Next, the boat is swarmed by Japanese apes (not
those apes...well, maybe) and mythological creatures gone Nazi. What could possibly save those brave American soldiers now?
Oh, come on. The PT boat crew is saved by the sudden arrival of the gold-plated battleship
U.S.S. Capitalism. Which appears to be manned by an unsavory and unfriendly looking lot, but it, and the attackers, all disappear. Since in WWII every American grouping of soldiers had at least one guy that read the pulps, whose job it was to process weird crap like this for their C.O. (and the reader!) but he doesn't have long to articulate his multiverse theories, as another ship arrives to board them: another golden 'American' ship, the
Master Race. Captured and beaten, the crew also gets their names made fun of as "unAmerican" by their captors, led by Captain Du Pont, who wants to figure out why an American boat, a type he'd never seen before, would have foreigners on it. Reading their documents, Du Pont scoffs at the idea of Pearl Harbor: everyone knows, America started the war! To keep all the inferiors of the world from killing themselves, and maybe getting a little something-something for their trouble--that was, after all the American way! (In Du
The PT captain had been going through a crisis before this, and after bottoming out in despair that the rabid Du Pont was seemingly a better commander than he was, has to dig his way out of it. But, Du Pont puts the PT crew in gladiatorial matches against captured Japanese and German troops, who were doubtless a bit keen on revenge, and fight hard. The PT captain rallies them all, against their captors, and kills Du Pont with a spear. Then attacked from within and without, the laser blasters on the
Master Race seem to have won the day, but the Japanese had developed the A-bomb before the Americans, and nuke the ship. The PT captain and crew awaken back on their boat, even the guys that had already fallen: the pulp reader theorizes, if they weren't from there, maybe they couldn't die there? The radio man also relays a message that seems like good news, at first: the war was over, after the A-bomb was dropped on Japan, but Roosevelt was making the announcement, and in their reality he had died months prior? Seeing the crew of a nearby ship, they realize, they were no closer to home at all...
Golden warships with horrible, and racist, names? An America that strikes first and seems more concerned with racism and profit? Yeesh, that kinda hit hard the other day, but more so after the weekend. On a more cheerful note, the letters page includes an ad for
Warlord #31, an issue I love!
Read more!
