Never a Commando kid

Even though I'm a big old dirty pacifist who would be overjoyed if all the guns in the world just went in the fucking sea, I have a deep fondness for the intensity of war comics, because I'm a human being and human beings are contradictory motherfuckers.

I love a good Sgt Rock and the masked misadventures of the Unknown Soldier are part of my comic DNA. The EC war comics remain absolutely devastating, and I read every single war story that Garth Ennis ever writes (and keep them some of them forever, largely depending on the art). Charley's War is one of the greatest comics ever created. 

Most of the best war comics are heavily anti-war, and recognise the absurdity of killing men in the name of uncaring ideology and aloof power. They focus on the poor bastard at the sharp end of conflict and the terrible things they do just to survive. Which is probably why I never had much time for Commando. 

As a kid, I would read any comic, just for the fix. I read and reread my sister's girls comic annuals as much as my own, would eat up some Archie or Buster or whatever. But Commando comics - which are fucking everywhere - were always the absolute last result .When there was literally nothing else, there was always some flimsy Commando thing to read.

And they were insanely popular. I know people who have sizable collections, but have never read any other comic, and there have now been 5000 issues of the damned thing. I still read enough that most of the German language phrases I know are the expletives that Nazi scum scream as they are machine gunned to death, but I barely touched the edges of the comic's long history.

Maybe I missed out on some good stuff - Ian Kennedy did a heap of them and he's a bloody genius - but it always felt like Commando just didn't have that extra edge of those other comics. The stories were always flat, the art was largely functionary and there wasn't enough meat on the narrative bones.

Worst of all, they never really seemed to question the horror of war, or how fucking ridiculous it was. Most Commando stories feature hard-jawed men doing what men gotta do, and any death or carnage is just fuel for more revenge. There was more outright celebration of war, and I just can't get behind that.

They might have changed in recent years - I still see issues in the local newsagents - but I checked out on this never-ending conflict a long time ago.