Achtung! Achtung! Gott im Himmel, and with large dollops of both Donner und Blitzen, is nowhere safe from the march of wokery?
For it has emerged that the Commando comic, now more than 60 years old, has decided to abandon jingoism.
What?
Perish the thought! Surely they might as well get rid of machine guns and Spitfires.
No more, it seems, will schoolboys be able to read war mags in which lantern-jawed Tommies exhort vile 'Huns' to 'eat lead' or for 'Fritz' to 'take that'.
Neither will boys — let's face it, girls don't read this stuff — be able to pore gleefully over frames of fiendish 'Japs' while they shout 'Banzai!' or die with 'Aiiiieeee!' on their lips.
Instead, according to Calum Laird, a former editor of Commando, and the holder of a doctorate in 'representations of conflict and character in British war comics', the magazine is going less gung-ho and presenting 'more nuanced and compassionate depictions of wartime life'.





Although it is clearly the most iconic of the war mags, Commando was certainly not the first






Commando is now 61 years old and it's clear the comics today cannot remain the same as when they were born. But those who love these magazines should act as custodians to make sure the spirit is not lost





Russia has lost 30% of its forces with 50,000 soldiers dead... [img][/img] Briton, 28, facing death by firing squad in Ukraine is...








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Occasionally, a soldier's worst enemy is some demon within, such as a sibling rivalry born from a brother with a higher tally of kills during the Battle of Britain; or a lack of self-esteem caused by a pushy father who was a hero of World War I; or perhaps plain fear.
Nevertheless, by the end of their personal odysseys, these men find personal salvation through the horrors of war.

The final frame of every comic inevitably features our hero making up with his former rival and finding inner peace.
Along the way, of course, a lot of Germans and Japanese are killed. A lot.
Yet despite all the violence, it feels almost innocent compared with the graphic nature of many modern computer games such as Call Of Duty.
It is worth appreciating that Commando and its ilk really are works of art.

Many of the covers and the stories were drawn by legendary illustrators such as Gordon Livingstone, Ian Kennedy and Ken Barr, all of whom paid a painstaking attention to detail that ensured no war buffs could write snooty letters of correction to DC Thomson.
With the stories featuring some 120 frames, each comic takes an artist anything from four weeks to six months to produce.

As well as immersing himself in military detail, the artist also has to follow the writer's script to the letter.
Although the formula is not set in stone, there are some strict guidelines. Stories based on the hunt for a secret Nazi weapon are ruled out for being too much of a cliche.

Women almost never feature, partly because the women who did fight in World War II did not see the intense level of combat required to make a gripping comic.
The quality and sophistication of the plots, characters and illustrations mean there are a lot of Commando aficionados out there who try to collect every one of the magazine's 5,558 issues.
That's an expensive business, and early copies can change hands for well into four figures.

The most pricey copy currently on eBay is Issue 5 — Hellfire Landing — published in 1961, for which the vendor is asking for ?1,484.
One of the most recent issues boasts a classic Commando title — Hard To Kill! — but the setting, in the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s, is not the staple Commando background of World War II.

Indeed, over the past few years, the comic has set stories during the Vietnam War, the Roman invasion of Britain and the Spanish Civil War.
Commando is now 61 years old and it's clear the comics today cannot remain the same as when they were born. But those who love these magazines should act as custodians to make sure the spirit is not lost.
It's unlikely that Commando will ever deal with today's issues of say, sexuality and gender, but one never knows.

Mind you, a Commando comic set during the culture wars could prove to be the bloodiest of all.