From Our Army at War #241 (February 1972), here’s a four-page classic with story by Bob Haney and art by Alex Toth:
[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
Ragged Claws Network
"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munroe, "What is Remembered"
Wow.
What marvellous design on page one: the large upright sword at the left, and the smaller, downturned sword in the logo with the blood transitioning into the wine in the bottom panel—ingenious!
Great ‘acting’ of the characters in that aforementioned bottom panel: in a single image Toth has already shown us their varied mental states (brooding Antonius, arrogant Marcus, and bitter, hateful Rufio).
The lack of white panel borders only seems to heighen the fractured, angular abstraction of Toth’s carefully placed black inks.
The silhouettes on page 3, panel 1 could have come right out of film director John Ford’s “The Searchers,” they’re so striking, and page 4 could have been a German Expressionist woodcut/block print, it is so powerful (Emil Nolde comes to mind).
A classic!
I love how Toth uses the silhouetted panel that extends across the top of page three to provide variety within the six-panel grid while at the same time he cheekily reestablishes/reinforces the grid by breaking the panel into two halves, each framed by the structure of the building, with a support beam where the panel border/gutter would have been. And those word balloons — the tails all go the way from the visual foreground, where the text balloons reside, between and behind the silhouettes of Roman soldiers caught in the act of brutalizing the native population, and into a doorway in the background! It’s an audacious choice, but Toth makes it work!