BOMB RUN & OTHER STORIES

The team of Harvey Kurtzman and John Severin was one of the most fruitful collaborations in the history of comics. The work they did together brings the gritty realism and psychological truth of Stephen Crane and a verisimilitude to the page that it seems as if they are reporting from the scene. Together with inker and friend Will Elder, whose own obsession for detail perfectly complemented the impact they were all striving to achieve, they produced 34 emotionally draining — and dramatically eloquent — war stories in just under three years. This book collects them all. Settings include: the Roman empire; the Revolutionary War; the American-Indian Wars; the Alamo; the Civil War; World War I (in the trenches and in the air); World War II (in the Pacific and in Europe, including the D-Day invasion); and the Korean War.

John Powers Severin (1921–2012), who had a "realistic" comics style, specialized in war, western, and humor comics. One of MAD’s founding artists, he worked for Cracked magazine for forty-five years.

Before creating and writing the all-time greatest satirical comic, Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) had already been the only humor cartoonist given full editorial freedom by Stan Lee and created and wrote the first serious war comics in an age of heroic jingoism. After revamping MAD from a comic into the all-time greatest satirical magazine, he went on to create and write the most widely read adult comic strip (with “Little Annie Fanny” in Playboy) and write and draw one of the earliest graphic novels (with the 1959 The Jungle Book). He continued to work in magazine and book publishing his whole life, with an eye for talent that gave leading cartoonists of the 1960s undergrounds and the 1980s alternative comics movement their earliest opportunities. Since 1988, one of the two major awards programs in American comics has been given annually in his name.

Will Elder was an American illustrator and comic book artist who worked in numerous areas of commercial art but is best known for a frantically funny cartoon style that helped launch Harvey Kurtzman's MAD comic book in 1952. He was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2003.