Frontline Combat

Frontline Combat
Frontline Combat #8 (September–October 1952) Cover by Harvey Kurtzman
Publication information
Publisher	EC Comics
Schedule	Bi-monthly
Format	Anthology
Publication date	July/August 1951 – January 1954
No. of issues	15
Creative team
Created by	Harvey Kurtzman
Written by	Harvey Kurtzman
Artist(s)	Various
Editor(s)	Harvey Kurtzman

Frontline Combat is an anthology war comic book written and edited by Harvey Kurtzman and published bi-monthly by EC Comics. The first issue was cover dated July/August, 1951.^[1] It ran for 15 issues over three years, and ended with the January, 1954 issue. Publication was discontinued following a decline in sales attributed to the end of the Korean War. The title was a companion to Kurtzman's comic book Two-Fisted Tales. Both titles depicted the horrors of war realistically and in great detail, exposing what Kurtzman saw as the truth about war without glamorizing or idealizing it.

Artists who contributed included Kurtzman and EC regulars such as John Severin, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, George Evans and Will Elder. Non-EC regulars who contributed included Alex Toth, Ric Estrada, Joe Kubert and Russ Heath.

Kurtzman wrote the majority of the comic's stories with Jerry DeFuccio contributing one-page text stories and an occasional regular story. The issues included writing contributions from artists Davis, Wood and Evans.^[2]

In addition to contemporary stories about the Korean War and World War II, Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat contained a number of stories taking place in historical settings, including the Civil War, the Revolutionary War and ancient Rome.

A series of special issues dedicated to the Civil War included issues 31 and 35 of Two-Fisted Tales and issue 9 of Frontline Combat. Although originally planned to be seven issues in total, the series was never completed. Other special issues of Frontline Combat included an issue dedicated to Iwo Jima (issue 7) and an issue dedicated to the Air Force (issue 12).

Kurtzman's editing approach to Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat was a stark contrast to EC editor Al Feldstein's style. Whereas Feldstein allowed his artists to draw the story in any manner they desired, Kurtzman developed detailed layouts for each story and required his artists to follow them exactly.^[3] Kurtzman's writing tended to have a lot less text in them than Feldstein's, which enabled the two war titles to be hand-lettered rather than machine-lettered like the remainder of EC's titles.^[4] Kurtzman was also dedicated to making the stories as historically accurate as possible and, along with assistant DeFuccio, put a lot of research into each story. As a result, where Feldstein took generally about a week to complete each issue he edited, Kurtzman took approximately a month.

Frontline Combat has been reprinted several times in the years since its demise. It was fully reprinted in a series of three black-and-white hardbacks by publisher Russ Cochran as part of The Complete EC Library in 1982. Between August 1995 and February 1999, Cochran (in association with Gemstone Publishing) reprinted the full 15 individual issues. This complete run was later rebound, with covers included, in a series of three softcover EC Annuals. In 2008, Cochran and Gemstone began to publish hardcover, re-colored volumes of Frontline Combat as part of the EC Archives series. One volume (of a projected three) was published before Gemstone's financial troubles left the project in limbo. Dark Horse resumed publication of the series in 2019, releasing the third and final volume in 2021.^[5][6]

• (audio) Golden Age of Comic Books podcast: Frontline Combat
• Commentary on Frontline Combat #10