Broken Frontier

As part of our continuing Halloween celebration Broken Frontier's Dan Rafter looks back at one of DC's most fondly remembered wartime series The Haunted Tank - a feature with a decidedly spooky twist. 

When we think of comics today, we tend to focus first on superheroes. That’s fine. I’ve never seen any medium tell superhero stories as well as do comics.

But comics have long been about more than men in tights and women in ridiculously inappropriate wardrobes jumping over buildings and punching each other. Comics writers and artists have used sequential art to tell stories of romance, mystery, horror and comedy. And that’s just a small slice of the wide range of comic storytelling.

Halloween arrives at the end of this month. To me, this is as good an excuse as any to gather up some old horror comics. Ever since the days of EC Comics’ horror anthologies in the 1940s and 1950s, the wonderfully grisly Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear, comic artists and writers have done a wonderful job telling creepy, sometimes gory, horror tales. In fact, the comics often showed scenes that filmmakers didn’t dare foist on its audiences. Beheadings, spikes through eyes, slit throats … readers never know what to expect when they flipped open their horror comics.

This, of course, led EC Comics into some serious trouble with the morality police. It also eventually brought an end most horror comics.

But not all comic horror dealt with gore and twist endings. Some focused on atmosphere and exotic settings, like Swamp Thing. Others concentrated on resurrecting classic horror monsters, such as Tomb of Dracula. It’s pretty safe to say, though, that only one old horror comic focused on a haunted tank.

That’d be the appropriately named The Haunted Tank.

Most comics readers probably remember little about this series from DC Comics. Remarkably, though, the tank and the ghost that haunts it is actually the second-longest running war series ever published by DC. The longest-running, of course, is the far more famous Sgt. Rock.

Of all the things to haunt

If you were a ghost, would you haunt a tank? Well, maybe you would if you were the ghost of a 19th century Confederate general. At least that appears to be the reasoning of writer and editor Robert Kanigher and artist Russ Heath who created The Haunted Tank.

The series started as a feature in the DC anthology G.I. Combat. Despite its rather strange premise, or maybe because of it, the series had a long run, appearing in the anthology from 1961 through 1987. It often hit the cover, too, so this was no mere backup feature.

The series follows the military exploits of the ghost of Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart, who fought, obviously, in the U.S. Civil War, on the losing side. But there isn’t just one ghost in The Haunted Tank. The spirit of Alexander the Great – yes, that Alexander the Great – makes an appearance, sending Stuart’s ghost to watch over the series’ two stars: Jeb Stuart, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, and the Stuart tank that he commands for the Allies in the North African Campaign of World War II.

The ghostly elements of the story are always present, but are rarely the focus. The main action, as with all of DC Comics’ war stories, focuses on the heroism of the U.S. Armed Forces and the men serving in them. The haunted tank’s crew battles behind enemy lines, loses members and smash through enemy blockades. It’s the standard stuff of war comics.

Reading these comics today, it’s hard to not cringe at the sometimes sappy dialogue and banter. But there’s also some comfort to these stories. They’re far simpler than any war stories that comics could tell today. You knew exactly who the bad guys were. And you knew that the good guys weren’t going to falter, no matter what.

As far as the "horror," the Confederate ghost isn’t very scary. He doesn’t do all that much, either, mainly existing to give Stuart fairly cryptic clues regarding future events.

Still, the series is a fun one to hunt down. DC Comics has published the Haunted Tank adventures in its Showcase Presents series, and these can still be found at Amazon. The stories may be outdated today, but they still feature some terrific art and rousing adventures. The tank also serves as a reminder that DC came out with some pretty oddball stuff during the 1960s. Who would have thought that a supernatural war story would ever sell?

Mostly, the old-fashioned feel of The Haunted Tank is fun. But there is one particular instance that isn’t quite so fun: In honor of his ghostly assistant, Stuart flies a Confederate flag on his tank. Today, that flag isn’t quite as beloved, as it brings back unpleasant memories of slavery.

Overall, though, The Haunted Tank is well worth a read or two this Halloween season. Sure, it’s not really scary, but it is fun. And isn’t that why we all started reading comics in the first place?

The classic tales of The Haunted Tank are currently available in two Showcase Presents volumes one and two.