Our Army at War #8 (1953), story page 3 by Krigstein

"Toy Soldier" by Dave Wood, March 1953. Letterer unknown.

"World War I saw the first military use of many new weapons--the plane, the tank, the submarine--and, most startling of all, the doughboy known as the...Toy Soldier!"

Plot: Tinker Thompson's contraptions get him in hot water with his captain but save the unit from a German attack.

Krigstein (pronounced Krig-styne, not -steen) drew seven stories and a cover for Our Army at War and four stories in All-American Men of War for DC in 1952-53, among other titles. His art, however, clashed with the house style. "DC war comics writer and editor, Robert Kanigher, went so far as to have Krigstein’s artwork shaved with razors to ‘correct’ his expressionistic anatomy so that it conformed to his editorial standards of realism, before eventually firing him." ("Bernie Krigstein: The Right To Silence" by Paul Gravett, Comics International (UK), 2007)

He found more freedom and less supervision at Atlas (Marvel), drawing some 77 stories off and on between 1950-57, many of them for Atlas war books. "The final straw came when editor and writer Stan Lee insisted that Krigstein amalgamate some of his extra panels to insert balloons into his deliberately silent sequences. When Krigstein refused and threatened to sue, the story was published unchanged. His next four-pager for Atlas was his last." ("Bernie Krigstein: The Right To Silence")

Gravett on his EC work and Master Race story:
"Bernie Krigstein’s 44 stories for the maverick EC Comics from 1953 to 1955 are his pinnacle, but here too he struggled against their rigid working systems. EC is generally hailed as the period’s most enlightened publisher and encouraged Krigstein to bring in a variety of artistic inspirations to suit each tale, from Chinese prints to German expressionist film. But still the writer and editor dominated. Their chief writer Al Feldstein, an artist himself, would provide Krigstein with artboards on which the empty panels were already lettered with often wordy descriptive captions and balloons. With all the breaking down of the story already done, and virtually all the story told in the words, Krigstein struggled to use the panel spaces to make pictures that could resonate with and interpret the texts, rather than simply accompany and duplicate them.

In these circumstances, it was a stroke of luck that Krigstein was assigned to draw Master Race which ran in the premiere of Impact in 1955. Feldstein, a Jew like himself, wrote this intense study of the legacy of the Holocaust in the second person, from inside the mind of a paranoid Nazi death-camp commandant who, on being recognised and pursued by one of his surviving victims on the subway, panics, runs and falls under a train. Assigned only six pages, Krigstein saw such scope in this unprecedented tale addressing the Holocaust, that he asked for an exceptional 12 pages; he had to make do with eight, thanks to the absurd dictum that this was the longest any EC story could run.

So he cut up the lettering and reconfigured the layouts to introduce extra panels, most famously an exceptional 2-tier, 11-panel, soundless finale. Art Spiegelman wrote about this in his New Yorker essay: 'The two tiers of wordless staccato panels that climax the story… have often been described as "cinematic", a phrase thoroughly inadequate to the achievement: Krigstein condenses and distends time itself… The cumulative effect carries an impact - simultaneously visceral and intellectual - that is unique to comics.'

The whole work became Krigstein’s master class on the power of soundless, purely visual narration, on how sometimes pictures are more eloquent than any amount of words."