The fifty-first comic: #150 Frontline Combat
A sister publication to Shock SuspenStories, Frontline Combat follows the same format of four stories in an issue that cover a topic - in this case, stories about war. These are brutal, showing the real horror of war, and involve plenty of people dying, running away like cowards and being horribly maimed. There's a jingoistic bend to it, where the American troups win, being a coward gets punished and collaborators end up in trouble. Considering this was published during the Korean war, that's not a big surprise, but it feels very moralizing now. Still, when ignoring that the series is quite informative and you really get a feeling for how terrible it is on the frontline. I'm sure war has changed somewhat, but it feels more like what you expect than the perfection other places sometimes have. It's dirty and dark.
The series probably ended at the right time - not just because the war was over, but the stories became stale and the increased focus on the air force led to some repetitive stories that have planes flying around, which didn't hold my interest. It feels like they were out of really new ideas, as the creativity from the earlier issues was lost.