Battlefront #12

Atlas Comics' Battlefront #12 from July 1953 delivers exactly what its tagline promises — "Rugged Combat Tales on Actual Battlefields!" The cover, penciled and inked by Sol Brodsky with inks also by Carl Burgos, throws you straight into a brutal close-quarters struggle, as a U.S. soldier kneeling in the dirt grapples rifle-to-rifle with an enemy combatant swinging a weapon overhead, helmets flying and expressions locked in raw desperation. A fallen figure in the foreground adds to the sense of a desperate, ground-level fight that captures the gritty intensity of Korea-era war comics at their most visceral.