Before going on break, I did a couple of posts spotlighting Joe Kubert’s impressive covers starring Sgt Rock. Yet Kubert was hardly the only genius working at Our Army at War… Since their debut in the early 1950s, those comics boasted exciting cover images by the likes of Irv Novick and Jerry Grandenetti, who threw readers into the middle of combat action, promising them further thrills inside. Seventy years later, they’re still amazing to behold!
At the end of a summer when the US armed forces wrapped up their own contribution to Afghanistan’s problematic reputation as the ‘graveyard of empires,’ it’s hard to look at these covers and not think about pop culture’s perverse role in glorifying violent interventions abroad, often with disgraceful results. From a design standpoint, though, they remain as breathtaking as ever. With that in mind, here are 15 great examples of riveting war art taken from the Grand Comics Database:
