THE LOSERS ON THE RUN

I've described the first four pages of the story as "the prologue" [no Frankie Howerd jokes, please :-)]: this is the case not just in terms of narrative construction but literally, due to Kirby's penchant for dividing his comics into chapters. Apart from the first three panels of page 1, which amount to an "escape clause" which reassures the readers that the Losers may eventually be rescue from an impossible situation, the real time narrative of those first four pages was unbroken. Between page four and page five, time has elapsed: the skirmish which took place on page four has, inevitably, alerted the Nazi forces to the presence of hostiles in the town and the Losers, having broken cover, are seen in the first panel running own a street pursued by a tank. The sequence of events leading to that panel is as noted assumed by Kirby to be understood: the narrative break is both disguised and explained by the chapter heading - "Mission for The Losers... Get out of town! This is... A SMALL PLACE IN HELL!" (The chapter heading is, of course, also the title of the story. Incidentally, Kirby does not follow his common practice of numbering the chapters here, but there is no mistaking the fact that a chapter heading is what this is.)

With the chapter heading pasted into white, borderless space, that first panel once again conveys all that is needed and nothing more - the Losers in flight down a street, only one side of which is depicted, to the right, while on the left, behind and spewing out beyond the running figure of Storm, is one of Kirby's characteristic glyphs representing the impact of a shell (a central flare from which closely grouped speed lines radiate through dark clouds, while at the base of the effect a few bits of rubble indicate the road surface being torn up). In the background - tiny, partially obscured - is a tank with a smoking muzzle. The dialogue remains terse and humourous - "... that's no street car", comments Gunner. With all that white space and less than half of the panel, which itself fills the top half of the page, surrounded by border, there's a contradictory effect: the "small place" looks wide open. Any such idea is negated by the rest of the page, divided into three narrow panels, not quite equally sized, which pull back into tight focus on the group. "We've been boxed off!", barks Cloud in the central of the three panels, and indeed they have! That central panel, in which the reader sees, over Cloud's shoulder, another tiny tank entering the street ahead of the group, is framed by panels which break the group into tight boxes containing head shots - Cloud with Storm behind him in the first, Gunner ahead of Sarge in the other. In a splendid piece of composition, the placement of Storm behind and "below" Cloud, the perspective shot of the street with the tank entering it , then the placement of Sarge's head "above" Gunner's, Kirby has set up both a mirror reflection around the axis of the central panel and a visual wedge formation which emphasises the narrowing of the Losers' position and options. Naturally, the dialogue backs this up: in the last of the three panels Sarge, face taut and eyes wide with tension, asks which of the tanks they should attack: off panel, Cloud rejects that option ("Neither! We live as long as we can!"). Don't fight if there's another way to survive... (and you'll have to turn the page to find out what that is).

Two more significant points can be made before turning that page. The first is that the Losers have not fired a single shot, nor will they for another two pages. The second is that the tanks boxing them in are drawn very small indeed. The hardware, the mechanisms which threaten and kill, is not important in this story: the focus is so clearly on the humans and the importance of survival...

"Don't fight if there's another way to survive... (and you'll have to turn the page to find out what that is)..." That last speech balloon on page 5 leads the reader into page6, both by setting up a poser - how can the Losers get out of the tank trap? - and by allowing Kirby to make one of those astounding jump cuts which defy the conventional methods of maintaining sequentiality but still work. Cloud's imperative - "We live as long as we can!" - works together with the scene set in the first panel of page 5, with buildings clearly visible, to let us decode the sudden leap of perspective from the street scene at the end of page 5 to the shot inside a house which opens page 6. It also allows Kirby to open up the action a bit, increasing the momentum by playing with the positioning of his characters (and even more with the artistic POV).

Since the last panel of page 1 the Losers have appeared in a file, headed by Cloud, with Storm, then Gunner, then Sarge behind him. The jump cut into page 6 has been initiate by Cloud, who, we can see, has led the way to the side of the street and held a door open for the rest of the group to run into a house. As we'll see, they are in fact running into an even smaller "place in hell"... but for now, what is striking is the way in which Kirby has audaciously switched the POV from an exterior close up on Sarge and Gunner, via a directionally indicative dialogue balloon off panel from Cloud, to an interior shot pointing down from the ceiling of a room - and made it work! Nothing new for Kirby, of course, but surely well worth remarking on, even so. What underpins this technique is an absolute certainty, on Kirby's part, of the physical positioning of his characters AT ALL TIMES: with that as an underlying constant, he is able to maintain a solid, comprehensible sequential flow even while switching his POV all over the place, which is what he does throughout page 6.

The impetus of the first two panels is strictly visual - the dialogue, instead of interlocking with the images, briefly sets up a complementary flow which, as so often in this issue, emphasises the normality and the close-knit nature of the group without wasting any words on exposition. As Cloud holds open the door in panel 1, the others dash across a wrecked living room and up a flight of stairs, Sarge commenting that the place reminds him of a New Jersey social club (again, characteristic Kirby - the sort of line Boy Commando Brooklyn might have spoken!)and Gunner drily responding that someone "real *sociable*" might be upstairs, taking in Sarge's gag while simultaneously bringing the peril of the situation back into focus. Visually, the movement of Storm, Gunner and Sarge across the room and up the stairs sweeps us across the page - in another of Kirby's tricks, the effect of motion is further enhance by the placement of Storm already half vanished up the stairs, his form identifiable only because the other three are fully visible. And so it is established that the file order has changed, Cloud now taking up the rear and Storm in the lead: so when Kirby jump cuts savagely to a POV outside the window of an upstairs room in panel 2, we have already been prepared for the appearance of Storm at the window, Gunner surveying the room from its centre and Sarge entering the doorway. Again, the word play: Storm answers Gunner's comment that the place is empty with a terse "but the street's filling up".

For panel 3 the POV shifts again, jumping into and across the room to the doorway to focus on Cloud, who bursts in barking orders to move away from the window and get on the floor. The dialogue is back in synch with the visuals - Cloud's order justifies the 90 degree rotation of the POV in panel 4,turning in the doorway to show the window opposite, the houses across the street and the group lying prone on the floorboards. Here, the dialogue briefly turns expositional, with an exchange, commenting on how the Nazis don't know exactly where the group is hidden but will try to find out, which leads us to another savage jump cutout of the house and back onto the one side of the street in panel 5,where the tank last glimpsed in page 5 panel 3 is now rolling up the road strafing the buildings on either side.

For the first panel on page 7 the POV has shifted again, to an indeterminate position in the middle of the street for a head-on perspective shot. Quite where the POVs of this, page 6panel 5 and page 7 panel 2 exist in relation to the position of the Losers is uncertain - as it should be, given that these panels depict the Nazis attempting to locate the group. Within the context of this two page spread, these three panels form a (slightly off) centre piece - headed by descriptive captions, containing no dialogue and filled with sound effects - contrasting with the rest of the two pages, in which sound effects are absent and only the (presumably) hushed voices of the Losers break the silence. Swiftly and economically they present the notion of the hunt for the group focussing in, from the indiscriminate strafing of the tank in page 6 panel 5 to the sudden appearance of eleven Nazi soldiers kicking own doors and firing through them in page 7 panel 1(with a drily humourous caption commenting that the soldiers have appeared "out of nowhere") to a new POV for page 7 panel 2 focussing on an upper storey window and wall which is being raked by shots. Whether or not this is actually the window of the room where the Losers are hiding is irrelevant - this otherwise slightly weak panel serves to lead us sequentially back to the group's refuge as silence falls.

Then, for two panels, there is a brief, tense respite. In panel 3 the POV is back inside the room looking across the window as Storm peeps over the ledge, rubble falling past outside, commenting that the Nazis will be back. Panel 4 jump cuts yet again to the view from the ceiling of the room depicting the Losers "taking five", the first (and almost the last) time the action pauses: once again, it's time for the dialogue to establish the group's camaraderie, as Sarge, by now well established as the group's humourist (SEE FOOTNOTE 5), stretches out luxuriously on a bed and Storm warns him not too expect much of a nap. This panel also allows Kirby to shift the group's physical positioning again - barely, since Storm relaxes on a chest by the window, Gunner sits on the floor below the window, Sarge stretches on the bed and Cloud remains standing in the foreground, but enough that the next alert can be sounded by Gunner, who, as the POV shifts up to the window again for panel 5,glances up through the window to see Nazis patrolling the rooftops opposite. The respite, and the Losers' flight is nearly up - on the next page they will finally be forced to fight...

Taken as a whole, this two page spread presents an exercise in tension underpinned by stability, a more dynamic riff on the contradictory impulses evident in the issue's cover. Tension is set up by the absolutely chaotic series of jump cuts, an abrupt shift of POV taking place in literally every panel. But there's a strength and calm to the layout which, working together with the dialogue cues and the absolute certainty of figure positioning, keeps the jump cuts from tearing the sequentiality apart: the two pages mirror each other, the first panel of each stretching the width of the page and the rest of each page divided into four square panels, a good, solid structure which reassures yet, I think, heightens the tension of the jump cuts even as it obscures them. This kind of layout was, of course, all in a day's work for Kirby!

THE LOSERS AT BAY

From the beginning of page 8 three things occur more or less simultaneously. In terms of plotting, the action accelerates enormously; the dialogue correspondingly becomes more terse and more sparse; visually, the seemingly casual repositioning of the Losers in page 7 panel 4 becomes crucial as Kirby splits the group into two units for the next three and a half pages. In the final panel of page 7 Gunner glanced through the window of the upper storey room to see Nazis on the rooftop across the street: panel 1 of page 8 pulls the POV back to the door of the room, as Cloud hears more troopers on the roof above and Sarge, clambering down from the bed on which he reclined, comments that they appear to becoming down into the building. This is not a spectacular panel, just a very competent one which mirrors the last panel of the previous page, emphasises the threat from above by showing Cloud in the foreground glancing up, sets up a logical transition to the next panel by showing Sarge in motion and still leaves

plenty of space for two word balloons. Panel 2,however, is a delight, one of those Kirby panels which really should not work but do, depicting not an event but a moment of transition between events. It's just a drawing, devoid of words or sound effects: on the left are a fraction of Cloud's arm, leg and gun muzzle in the doorway of the room, to the lower right can be seen part of Sarge's back and head as he moves across the landing to the head of the stairs, to set up a crossfire along the landing: to the upper right is the flight of stairs leading down from the roof with a couple of Nazis cautiously moving into view. I'm darned if I can find any focal point in this panel - it's all about movement and positioning, a last moment of silent manoeuvring before battle is joined. The silence seems to represent the last tightening of the tension before the release of the next panel; it also bears mute testimony to the way the Losers function as a close-knit team, needing no instructions at crucial moments.

After this, the release of gunfire in panel3 is almost anti-climactic. Almost. Taken alone, it appears to try too hard to make a major impact, with large gunfire sound effects ("BAM! BAM!BAM!") stripped in so as to completely hide Cloud and Sarge in a volley of explosions, the POV shifted to the far end of the landing, the rest of the frame filled with Nazi bodies tumbling down and across the stairs and banisters. The sense of motion is beautifully conveyed - with not a speed line in sight, the bodies are frozen in just the right positions of half collapse - and the sequentiality to the next panel is maintained by a pair of feet seen still standing further up the staircase: but alone it is not striking enough to convey the breaking of the tension. No problem - panel 4 works in tandem with it, cutting back from the Nazis to Cloud and Sarge angled back and firing upward as they advance to the stairs to drive the troopers back. It's the dialogue here which fully indicates both the extent of the tension which has been built and the sharp effects of its release: Sarge, still the joker, comments that the Nazis seem to have found them, to which a tense, straining Cloud yells "SHUT UP! KEEPFIRING!" Now that battle has finally been joined, jokes are out of place - action is all that counts, at least for Cloud. In the final panel of page 8 the POV is angled down from the ceiling above the stairs, showing Cloud, still lost in the moment, firing up the stairs, snarling "TAKE IT, you -!!@??* " as a caption affirms what the panel does not in fact show: that the Nazis have been forced back to the roof. The force of the pictures is strengthened immensely by Cloud's violent, unrestrained yells - this is Kirby meshing dialogue and images for maximum effect.

Skipping past two ad pages, the action cuts briefly back in time and returns to the room, where the fusillade on the landing has alerted the troops on the opposite rooftop and bullets are pouring in through the window as Storm and Gunner crouch on the floor. Given that the combatants are separated by the width of a street, the action on this page is cooler, less intense than on page 8: in fact, this may be the weakest page of the issue. In panel 2Kirby briefly abandons any attempt at visual sequencing: the dialogue holds things together, as Storm's query about Gunner's pitching ability in panel 1 is answered by panel 2'sdepiction of the two with arms thrown back, ready to toss grenades, but for once there is no background detail to this panel, no sense of setting. Panel 3 shows the grenades flying through space towards a cowering group of soldiers on the roof across the street, panel 4 is exactly the same view but completely obscured by a big sound effect, one of those great Kirby explosions and a mass of falling rubble. As always, Kirby tells the story clearly and adequately, and in almost anyone else's hands this would be a strong, laconic sequence. In the context of this issue, though, it just lacks intensity... it's absolutely competent, nothing more.

Finally there's a page-wide panel, shifting the POV down to street level, which serves to set up the next phase of the action: Nazi reinforcements race along the street, with one soldier in the foreground looking and pointing his gun upwards to remind us that the action is taking place above street level. Again it's a fine panel, figures bursting in from the left hand edge and rushing to the right to convey that all important sense of hurried motion - but on the whole page 9 has done its job and moved the plot along without being particularly distinguished.

Page 10 begins another chapter - but this time there's no narrative break, the flow of action moving straight on from the previous page. "When the hunting dogs corner their prey, the world narrows down to a SAVAGE little wing-ding called.... GANG-UP!"... it's easy to ignore Kirby's chapter headings, to simply register them as such and move on to the story: but Kirby wasn't wasting words for the sake of it, especially not in this comic. That heading says two things to me. One is that, for just about the only time in the whole 18 pages, Kirby is giving us the Nazi perspective on events: the Losers are an anomaly in this town, prey to be hunted down and flushed out. This is a very bleak view of the Nazis, likening them to animals acting on instinct: comfortable or not, it explains the treatment of them as a faceless, swarming mass of hostiles. The other... well, that word GANG-UP makes me think of "Street Code". Struggle for survival on hostile streets was, after all, a constant theme in Kirby's work: that this particular example is probably understood by most of us as being just part of the much larger picture of WW2 perhaps obscures the fact that, after all, this is really another gang fight, transposed to an international level but still a conflict over territory, a fight with no clear beginning or end, apart of the battle which is life. Is this why Kirby liked war stories: perhaps he understood them as his own stories of ghetto survival writ very large?

But chapter headings are usually skipped over by readers - they are signposts, indicating and sometimes expounding on the way ahead! And the page this one leads into is an orgy of destruction, more than compensating for any weakness in the previous page. It's also devoid of dialogue: a medley of images and sound effects, this is the sheer Kirby high impact art. That "small place in hell", the room in which the Losers had taken refuge on page 6,begins to be torn apart: in a large panel filling two thirds of page 10, its smallness is emphasised by a POV from street level, to one side of the building and looking upwards. The troops which filled the street in the last panel of page 9 are directing their fire into the window behind which Storm and Gunner are hidden: Nazi helmets loom in the right hand foreground, large and menacing compared with the tiny window at which their fire is directed. The blasts of their weapons are arranged in a fan shape, leading the reader's eye inexorably to the window in another example of Kirby's daring with graphic design: instead of obeying the general rule about directing movement within a panel from left to right, this panel draws the eye vertically downwards on the right from the chapter heading to the looming figures of the attacking soldiers, and thence to the left via the disposition of the gun blasts. The eye then drops naturally enough from there to panel 2, directly below...

For panel 2 the POV cuts back into the room, looking down from ceiling level as both Storm and Gunner huddle in upon themselves for protection from the rain of splinters as the window frame is torn apart in a hail of gunfire. To further emphasise the destructive force being hurled at the room, Kirby sets up a crescendo between panels 2 and 3, stringing a sound effect suggesting the cracking of wood in ever larger letters across both panels and, in panel 3, zooming in for a close up on Storm's head, drawn down within his greatcoat, surrounded by chunks off lying wood. The effect is terribly violent and intensely realistic: the sequence clearly lasts for seconds only and portrays not an impossible escape from a hail of bullets but an attempt to survive the impact of the bullets on the building. It is not a directly life-threatening event, but that does nothing to diminish its force.

And the threat to life is not long incoming. In the first panel of page 11 Storm and Gunner react to the inevitable destruction by scrambling desperately for the door, an action stretched in time by a long, distorted perspective shot from the doorway. Their rush comes almost too late - the barrage of gunfire has "softened up" the room and, behind them, a stick grenade is lobbed in through the window. Here, for once, Kirby's precisely logical positioning of objects goes haywire - the grenade is flying towards Gunner's fleeing figure, to the right of panel 1 but, in panel 2, detonates directly behind Storm on the left of the panel. Storm is in front of Gunner - but, if panel 3 is to make sense, we must believe that a/the grenade has turned sharply in mid flight and b/ it has thrown Gunner ahead of Storm towards the doorway. It's a tiny blip, one which I doubt I'd notice in a comic less precisely laid out than this one: but it doesn't bother me. As already noted, this sequence is all about impact.

Panel 3, by very sharp contrast, is all about teamwork, bringing back the human dimension. The splitting of the narrative into two simultaneous sets of actions which began on page 8 ends here, as Sarge and Cloud pile in through the doorway. The destruction of the room has been achieved, depriving the Losers of refuge: the grenade blast has taken out the floor, which has very nearly taken Storm with it. As smoke, outlined with "Kirby dots", billows across the totally smashed superstructure, Gunner strains to haul Storm up out of the hole where once there was a floor: Sarge has arrive in time to grab Gunner's free arm and aid him. The terrible strain of the effort is exemplified in the twisted positions of Gunner's and Sarge's bodies and backed up by Gunner's speech balloon - "Can't... lose......Storm...". Once again, though, Kirby brings what is close to a depiction of superhuman heroism back down to earth, with Sarge's wonderfully laconic response - "Yeah, yeah.". Note the absence of an exclamation mark there - Kirby wasn't usually reticent about using exclamation marks, but in this story he uses them only for extra emphasis, a "realistic" technique which enhances both the terseness of the dialogue and the general air of reality. In this instance, it also reaffirms the sardonic humour which is part of what holds Kirby's Losers together.

The four of them reunited, the POV holds their heads in focus in panel 4, with no background to draw our attention away. It's a cramped, closely grouped panel: Sarge is in the centre, holding up Storm by the armpits and declaring that he is okay (though he doesn't look it!). Behind him a splendid moment is taking place - although all we can see of Gunner is his shoulder and the side of his helmet, it is clear that he has his hand across his face and his words combine with this tiny image to let us know the depths of emotion he is feeling at having almost dropped his comrade. A universe away from the declamatory style of emotionalism favoured by series creator Bob Kanigher (or, for that matter, by Stan Lee), the sheer economy of the moment makes it all the more telling.

The rest leads us to the next page. Sarge asks Cloud for instructions: panel 5 zooms squarely in on Cloud's tense, deeply lined face, slightly raised as he announces "The roof's our ONLY chance.". There are, as we know from page 8, Nazi soldiers on the roof: the small place in hell has just become more desperate than ever.