The news today of the replacement of certain series was not surprising in one sense, but was in another. In the not surprising way, I had expected a few of those series to fail for a while now and four of the ones on the cutting block were expected by me to go down and wasn't reading the other two (Statis Shock and Blackhawks.) The surprising part was that DC already had six new series to fill the slots emptied by the others. While I do think that the decision to cancel Men of War was the right one, as the main story in the book just wasn't accomplishing anything, I am sad to see it go in a way, and that is because of the more realistic backup story they were telling (granted this was only one story arc) focusing on a group of Navy SEALs. I am not the most militant person alive, in fact far from, but war is a part of human society, so I did like this more realistic look on war, focusing on what in modern parlance is called the three block war. With the apparent move to Dinosaur Island an aspect of the reality of the "war" series at DC is lost. I understand that DC made a lot of its early popularity out of war series focusing on the Second World War, as the medium became popular in the period immediately after the war, and as real life heroes provided the inspiration for those ion comics. As it moved into the silver age it began to get more fantastical in nature though, with a demand still for war stories, but with no new stories to tell. This was when we got some of the weirder aspects of the war comics, things like the Creature Commandos or the now once again relevant Dinosaur Island. These stories had little to do with the true impact of war though, and so it is hard to see this making a resurgence now. Instead the modern war as we know will lay buried in the back pages of a canceled series.
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