John Severin, "Our Fighting Forces" #138, p 10. August 1972

John Severin's style is unmistakeable, no one else looks like him, but his style is also understated, unforced. An un-stylized style, grittily realistic, but also clean and precise. It's a very "masculine" style, and he was suited best for war and western genres -- too manly for the romance genre, generally not fanciful enough for horror or superhero (the one great horror story of his that I can think of was, appropriately, a vampire WESTERN in one of the Warren magazines around 1975 or 6). He could get by in crime and cop genres, but the city wasn't really his setting. His pencils and inks are inseparable... I feel like there were a few instances where he inked someone else or vice versa (Wood? Infantino?), but in general he was an artistic 'auteur."

In a nutshell, the Howard Hawks of comics artists!

The Losers are out of their element in this story, entitled "The Targets," stationed on a British sub. I like this page because it shows Severin's easy naturalism and the elegance of his design. The close-up dramatic lighting in panel one gives us the darkest black of the page. The crowded, submarine-set top two panels, set off by the large swathe of white space (sky blue no doubt in the printed comic) on the bottom. The panel of all hands is unusual too.