The Lonely War of Captain Willy Schultz

Over here, over there
It’s the same everywhere
A boy cries out for his momma
Before he dies for his home
– Greg Trooper, “Everywhere”

Some iconic war comic characters: Sgt. Frank Rock. Sgt. Nick Fury. ... Cpt. Willy Schultz?

Schultz sticks out not just due to his officer’s rank, but his obviously German (i.e. ethnic) name, as opposed to the macho, heroic names of Rock and Fury. He also didn’t have the benefit of a DC or Marvel publishing his stories and keeping them in the popular consciousness. Schultz was the product of perennial third stringer Charlton Comics. His lonely war was chronicled in sixteen issues of that publisher’s Fightin’ Army. Happily, Dark Horse and It’s Alive have republished Schultz’s adventures in a handsome hardcover collecting the full story of The Lonely War of Captain Willy Schultz.

It took some time for this collection to come about. Charlton reprinted the original stories in a haphazard manner. In the late 1990s Avalon Comics reran them as a four issue miniseries. A Kickstarter was launched in 2018 to finally collect all the Willy Schultz stories in one book, with a new conclusion drawn by The ‘Nam artist Wayne Vansant, original Willy Schultz artist Sam Glanzman having passed away in 2017 at 92. Unfortunately, It’s Alive publisher Drew Ford did not live to see this collection in print, as he passed away in 2022 at the too young age of 48.

The Lonely War of Captain Willy Schultz, as expected from the title, tells the story of German-American U.S. Army Captain Willy. He is falsely accused of murdering his superior officer while fighting in North Africa. The court martial is overseen by the dead man’s father, also a military officer (how fair) and Schultz is sentenced to be executed. He escapes and crosses back and forth across the frontlines, at times pretending to be a German soldier, all the while searching for a way to clear his name and escape the firing squad. Schultz’s lonely war goes from the deserts of North Africa to a POW camp in Italy, before ending with Italian partisans. Franz and Wayne Vansant’s conclusion takes the protagonist to Vietnam for a semi-happy ending.

Before readers see any comics, there is a lot of text introduction and history to get through. Willy Schultz writer Will Franz gives his backstory and reasons for writing the series. He speculates that the story’s forced conclusion may have come from official pressure. A young man claimed conscientious objector status before his draft board, citing Willy Schultz and Franz by name as reasons for his inability to participate in war. Franz says these reports filtered back to Charlton and led to the series’s cancellation. He wonders if he may have an FBI file someplace. Sounds far fetched? Consider a few facts: 1. Several comic publishers have had FBI files, including Harry Donnenfeld, Lev Gleason, and Bill Gaines; 2. U.S. Army intelligence opened an investigation into EC Comics over possible seditious content in Frontline Combat and Two Fisted Tales; 3. Jim Warren claims that Blazing Combat was canceled due to objections from stores on military bases and American Legion-affiliated distributors.

In tone, Willy Schultz is miles away from the previous Charlton war comics I’d read. The pro-war, almost bloodthirsty, tone of those comics is exemplified a quote from a from Fightin’ Army 74 (June 1967). The story ends with a chilling monologue from a GI: “The fools back home who burn draft cards or march in peace demonstrations are helping the Viet Cong. They are his enemies and he knows it now.” Yikes. Charlton is also not the company you think of to make any grand social statements. Their page rates were bottom of the barrel. The company only printed comics because it was less expensive to keep their presses running than to idle them in between printings of their more lucrative magazines. This lack of attention shows on some of the covers of Fightin’ Army, which don’t even get Schultz’s last name spelled right.

Does Willy Schultz work as an anti-war title? Francois Truffaut commented in an interview with Gene Siskel on the impossibility of making an anti-war film, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anti-war film.” In a harsh review of Marvel’s The ‘Nam, comics scribe Pat Mills gave his criteria for an effective anti-war story: “Does it make you feel sick? Does it make you want to be there? If the answer to the first question is ‘yes’ and the second ‘no’, it’s an anti-war story alright.” As readers see the various ways men are killed, it does make you feel sick; it does make you glad you aren’t there. The contrast with a Sgt. Fury or Sgt. Rock is starkest there. When those two blew up tanks with bazookas or shot down planes with their Thompson submachine guns, there was hardly concern about the flesh and blood men who may have been in them.

In Willy Schultz, however, bodies are crushed by tanks, set aflame, stabbed by combat knives, and shot down by firing squad. In one gruesome sequence, an attempted escapee from a POW camp is machine gunned as he tries to scale barbed wire. His corpse hangs upside down, like a side of beef on a hook. The tale’s power comes in part from its willingness to show the horrific violence of war. I had always thought the reluctance to show violence in Marvel and DC war comics was a requirement of the censors over at the Comics Code Authority. After seeing Franz and Glanzman’s work, that decision appears to be less due to Code requirements, and more due to a desire to make war seem fun and adventurous, even if later DC war stories ended with the phrase “Make War No More.”

Dark Horse and It’s Alive’s reprint of the title is likely the best the series will ever look. Glanzman (himself a Navy veteran) provides authentic renderings of the weapons, uniforms, and equipment of American and German soldiers. There is still one defect from the Charlton days that goes unimproved. Many Charlton aficionados and comics fans know that for most of its line, the company used a typeset rather than employ a letterer. Sometimes the lettering would be humorously credited to “A. Machine.” There’s no exception to that rule here, although eventually Charlotte Jetter takes over. The typeset text has a coldness and sterility that drags down the early stories. I understand this book is meant to faithfully reproduce the original stories yet part of me wants those earlier stories to be relettered.

Willy Franz was only 16 when he began writing the title. He leaned more on melodrama in the earlier stories, where the dialogue and narration are so overwrought they lose emotional impact. As an example, read this from the conclusion to Fightin’ Army 77: “Then your confused mind snapped back to reality, you cannot remain here ... you must return to our own ranks ... to your countrymen, and whatever awaits you.” Obviously there was no ration on ellipses at Charlton.

He improved greatly as the series went on. One story shows Schultz versus a group of child soldiers who have volunteered to fight for the Nazis. Schultz tries to convince them to surrender but they are all too far gone, brainwashed by Hitler’s propaganda. One of them is obsessed with winning an Iron Cross. After he is killed, Schultz places pins to his chest that he has taken from another corpse. “Wear it with pride, dignity, and honor …,” Schultz orders, “For all the good it will do you ... in Hell!” This incident is a powerful statement of what the creators view as the outcome of glorifying war. It’s a shame that Franz basically ended his comics career after this title.

In his introductory essay, Stephen Bissette situates Willy Schultz as a natural successor to DC’s “Enemy Ace,” from Our Army at War and Star Spangled War Stories (How odd that an “enemy” character would appear in books with those titles) another series that looked at war from the opponent's viewpoint. But what Willy Schultz really resembles is not so much American war comics, but British ones. In having Schultz serve, however briefly, with the Germans, the title presages Action’s “Hellman of Hammer Force” and Battle’s “Death Squad,” two titles that also served to deglamorize combat.

The organ of the Socialist Workers Party, the Militant, ran a brief overview of war comics during the Vietnam War. Malachi Constant proclaimed it “is readily evident” that “war comic books are a form of reactionary propaganda. They propagate a romanticized, super-patriotic, and racist form of American militarism.” It’s apparent that the writer never read Willy Schultz or the suppressed Blazing Combat. That’s a shame. Within the constraints of mainstream comics, those titles attempted to put out an anti-war message to a mass audience. Willy Schultz was reaching over 100,000 monthly readers.

World War II is the most difficult war to make an anti-war story about, particularly from the Allied side. Of course the Allies committed crimes and atrocities — what else can the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki be called? — but World War II is still considered the “good war.” Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s Charley’s War, the perfect companion to Wilfred Owens’s anti-war poetry, is safely set in the far less "good" World War I. By Franz and Vansant’s conclusion, Willy Schultz accepts the righteousness of the Allied cause, even if he laments the costs involved.

That ending, however, rings somewhat false. Not because of the changes in art and coloration. Coming nearly fifty years later, that’s understandable. But giving Willy Schultz a definite ending at all seems at odds with the series. Schultz is strung along with the promise that he could somehow, someway, clear his name. Without resolution, his futile quest resembles the seemingly unending scourge of war.

Despite these handicaps, The Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz is a powerful anti-war statement; one that Glanzman can be proud of illustrating and Ford can be proud of reprinting, wherever they are. The price might mark this book out as one for war comics fans only, but it can also be recommended for those interested in comics history given the generous text introduction from Bissette and the presence of original script and correspondence between the creators.

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