EC - Fire Mission (Berg)

Fire Mission
art by Dave Berg, story by Harvey Kurtzman
Two-Fisted Tales #29[#12] (1952)

Dave Berg of course eventually became one of the artist most associated with MAD MAGAZINE for this humour work on the "Lighter Side of..." feature, being a regular there for over 40 years. Before that he was quite an accomplished writer/artist on dramatic stories, doing a lot of work for Timely/Atlas. He also drew two war stories for Kurtzman's TWO-FISTED.

"Fire Mission" looks at a mortar crew in Korea and has a lot of interesting storytelling aspects about how they're waiting to attack, in and out of communication and likely to be targets from afar at any moment. The actual story isn't anything special, but the small touches are, and I really liked Berg's art in here. It seemed to work well with Kurtzman's layout in a sort of style between Davis and Wood. Makes you wonder what could have been if he was around for Kurtzman's MAD instead of coming around later.