art by Jack Davis, story by Harvey Kurtzman
Frontline Combat #9 (1952)
This story opens up the first of what Kurtzman had planned as seven issues chronicling the US Civil War, only three of which were actually published before Kurtzman left the war books to concentrate on MAD. To launch, he has an old man telling some anecdotes about Lincoln, starting with how his father Tom Lincoln was almost killed in an Indian attack, then some tales of Lincoln's childhood. Most visually entertaining is the story of Lincoln doing some wrassling...
The story ends with Lincoln's inauguration and then the attack on Fort Sumter, with the old man pleading to the lord for peace and for the life of Lincoln.
Great Davis artwork in this story, which captures the larger-than-life image of Lincoln that the script is trying to project. Some of the actual anecdotes chosen are kind of goofy (ruining his clean suit by pulling a pig out of the mud), but overall it's a good start to the unfinished series that tried to tell some entertaining and human stories about the war rather than just a dry history of battles and dates.
I think it is important to know that in the very last panels, where the old narrator of Lincoln tales starts praying God to keep the President safe, we find out that the old-timer, who until then we'd only seen from the back and in the dark, is actually a black slave…
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