Jack Davis - MUD - Two-Fisted Tales #25 - Pg 6

I've been looking for a nice example of Jack Davis' EC war work for many years. Davis work on Two-Fisted Tales, when edited by Harvey Kurtzman, is the pinnacle of comic book work for me. The drawing, compositions and story-telling are all top-notch. But the work has gotten more and more expensive over the years, and I knew that I could never afford to buy a whole story. So when Mike Burkey offered up individual pages from the story "MUD" (1952), I was quite thrilled to be able to purchase two of them. At first I was only going for page 7, but after checking back on the website over and over again, I decided to go for page 6 as well, keeping the two-page sequence together.

Many of the EC artists were influenced by Bill Mauldin during WWII, but none more than Jack Davis. You can see the influence in this story, with that slap-dash, ink-slinging approach of Davis'. But the title of the story, "MUD", is also a homage to Mauldin. In Mauldin's Pulitzer prize winning book, Up Front, he specifically wrote about the character of mud in the battlefield, and the hardship that it added to the soldiers:

"Mud, for one, is a curse which seems to save itself for war. I'm sure Europe never got this muddy during peacetime. I'm equally sure that no mud in the world is so deep or sticky or wet as European mud. It doesn't even have an honest color like ordinary mud." Mauldin continued, "The worst thing about mud, outside of the fact that it keeps armies from advancing, is that it causes trench foot. There was a lot of it that first winter in Italy. The doggies found it difficult to keep their feet dry, and they had to stay in wet foxholes for days and weeks at a time. If they couldn't stand the pain, they crawled out of their holes and stumbled and crawled (they couldn't walk) down the mountains until they reached the aid station. Their shoes were cut off, and their feet swelled like balloons. Sometimes the feet had to be amputated. But most often the men had to make their agonized way back up the mountain and crawl into their holes again because there were no replacements and the line had to be held."

Mauldin wrote about trying to capture the quality of the mud, by having to draw it from life. He said that it couldn't be experienced in the studio. Davis, like many of his EC brethren, experienced the stuff firsthand during the war.

I love this two-page sequence. With Kurtzman's layouts, it's like a mini-movie, as you follow the action across the tiers. And the figure work is just terrific, in typical Jack Davis fashion.

I don't really have collecting grails, but these two pages may come about as close as it gets for me. A Tip o' the Hatlo Hat to Mike Burkey for being so accommodating in arranging for the sale of these pages. Thanks Mike!