It was this crusade that inspired Kurtzman's legendary passion for research. Only the truth can eradicate a lie, and to tell the truth, one needed to study history and news reports in order to unearth fact and to be able to portray facts accurately. Kurtzman had been impressed with Charles Biro's storytelling in the Lev Gleason crime comic books. "He offered stories based on fact, presented in a hard-edged documentary style, a highly original approach to comics back then," Kurtzman said. He recalled the excitement he felt reading those stories, "the shock" of being brought "nose-to-nose with reality." He set out to do the same thing with his war stories. The realities of the battlefield would destroy the phony, glamorous vision of war.
But Kurtzman's war stories were not anti-war: in deglamourising warfare, he did not oppose the effort in Korea. His stories acknowledged the necessity of the fight - not only in Korea but in wars generally. Against that necessity, Kurtzman balanced recognition of the over-all futility of warfare. His unique achievement was to strike the balance. But in those days - in the wake of the superpatriotism of World War II just concluded, during another war in which veterans of the previous conflict were also fighting and dying - to publish such a balanced view was extraordinarily unprecedented. While Kurtzman's stories recognised the causes of wars and the necessity of fighting them, he dramatised the loss, the profligate waste of human life that characterised war everywhere in every time.
To show these consequences, Kurtzman's stories often focused on the fate of a single individual. One story chronicled in elaborate detail the steps a Korean farmer took in building his house - picking a site, laying the foundations, erecting a framework, making bricks, putting it all together. Then on the day he finishes his work, a bomb falls on the house and in a second destroys the painstaking labour of months. In another story, a dying soldier wonders about the arbitrariness of timing: if he hadn't stopped for a moment to tie his shoe, he would have been 20 feet further down the road and when the bomb hit - he would have been far enough away to survive.
In telling the stories, Kurtzman paced his narrative more dramatically than others did at the time. To focus on a key sequence, for instance, he sometimes deployed a series of almost static visuals, the progression of the panels building to a conclusion with "voice-over" captions while the camera tracked in for a final close-up, giving the last moment of the sequence emotional intensity. This restrained kind of manoeuvre gave his stories the even-handed patina of a documentary, enhancing their realistic aura. A stickler for execution, Kurtzman painstakingly laid out every page of his stories, penciling in the action and the verbiage; and he demanded that the illustrators follow his layouts exactly.
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