POP GOES THE WAR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01365R000300310124-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 25, 2004
• Sequence Number: 124
• Publication Date: September 12, 1966
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

0
NEWSWEEIC
Approved For R eJl psej2 1/13 CIA-RDP$8-0136 RQ,0R300 01~ 4 6~ 3
Pop Gees the War
ZAP! OOPI-I' CRASH! It's the Viet-
nam story no one will ever find on the
front pages---it's being fought relentlessly
on the funny pages. With a patriotic
POW!, America's comic-strip heroes
have thrown themselves into the battle
against the foe in Southeast Asia.
Many aging veterans of earlier bat-
tles have been called up for the new
campaign and some are already waging
preventive warfare against the Chinese
Communists. Along the front last week:
Navy flier Buz Sawyer, fresh from a
napalm strike against the VC, was try-
ing to rescue a radio operator whose jet
plane had been shot down off the coast
of North Vietnam; Terry of "Terry and
the Pirates" was tryin; ; to smuggle a de-
fecting Communist big si:ot out of Red
China; and Air force Col. Steve Canyon
was trying to foil an insidious Chicom
plot to test atom bombs in the good old
U.S, of A
Blood and cuts: The old heroes are
doing well enough, but a new war needs
new blood and guts and "Tales of the
Green Beret," a comic strip based on
Robin Moore's fact-fiction novel about
the Special Forces, is supplying them.
Last week, "Tales" hero Chris Tower,
having been captured, blindfolded and
bound to a wooden chair by a band of
Saigon juvenile delinquents threatening
to sell him to the Viet Cong, escaped
by flattening his lone guard with a fly-
ing block-chair on his back and all.
"Tales," which started in April and
now appears in about 75 newspapers,
escalated its attack still further last week
by mustering in a 12-cent Dell c >mic
book. On the newsstands, Dell's Tower
is fighting alongside another Special
Forces hero, "Capt. Hunter" of National
Periodical Publications, Inc. Modeled.
after Donald Dawson, a 25-year-old
civilian from Costa Mesa, Calif., who
went on a hunt for his lost brother
last year in Viet Cong territory, Hunter,
searches indefatigably for his lost twin,
Nick, a downed pilot. From time to time,
Capt. Hunter pauses to destroy the VC,
most recently by training Vietnamese
children (K for Kindergarten Company)
to wipe out uerrllas by rushing their
trenches in suicidal waves.
Handling the comic-book war is not
all ghoulish child's play. The truth is
that some Viet comics are having much
the same kind of trouble holding reader
support for their war that the Admin-
istration is having rallying support for
the real war.
Several weeks ago The Charlotte Ob-
server dropped "Tales" after a handful
of complaints about its paramilitary
bloodthirstiness ("Why not sell hot dogs
at car 'wrecks?" grumbled one critic)
and 'suspected reader indifference. "Peo-
ple were reading about the war on the
front page and throughout the newspa-
per," said Observer managing editor
Toni Fesperman. "By the time they got
to the comic page they wanted relief."
William C. Baggs, editor of The Miami
News, says his newspaper is also think-
ing about dropping it. "That comic
strip," says Baggs, "plays propaganda
on the comic page like `Little Orphan
Annie' has for years."
Apolitical: "Tales" artist Joe Kubert
insists, however, that the strip is apoliti-
cal, simply ' a straight, romantic adven-
ture. "I don't think we're taking any
side, either hawk or dove," says Kubert.
"The fact is the United States is there
and we're doing the strip as though we
are there." But he admits that portray-,
ing the war in Vietnam creates problems
of reader empathy that other, simpler
wars don't: "We're the big guy fighting .
the little guy and the American has al-
ways been for the underdog."
Partly for that reason, perhaps, most
of the 'war comic books, which aim at an
.audience between 7 and 17, are still go-
ing back a generation for story lines.
"World War Il seems to be the main
event," Robert Kanigher, editor of war
comic books for National Periodical Pub-
lications, Inc., told NEWSWEEK's Lee
Smith. "I think it was more glamorous.
There were tanks, airplanes, infantry.
Vietnam is just guerrilla warfare on a
large scale."
Of National's five war comic books
only "Capt. Hunter" is fighting in the
present tense: the others are all con-
c!uc'ting rear-guard actions with the past.
"Capt. Storm" is a wooden-legged PT-
boat commander battling the (ap:urese;
"GI Combat" features a tank crow, i
,!guided by the ghost of Confederate cav- I
alryman J.E.B; Stuart, defying German
iPanzers;'in "War Stories" a World War
II Yank flier duels Japanese and pre-
historic monsters in the Pacific., Don't
Lbet? on. the Japs-or the dinosaurs.
Approved For Release 2005/01/13 CIA-RDP88-01365R000300310124-6