This made total sense to me when Marvel started it in 1988--The 'Nam was aimed at a different audience than your standard Marvel Zombie, so putting it out as a black and white magazine would put it directly in front of a more adult readership; and the lack of ads for other Marvel product made it seem even more an immersive experience.This first issue reprints The 'Nam color series #s 1 and 2, ("First Patrol" and "Dustoff" respectively) both written by Doug Murray, pencilled by the incomparable Michael Golden, and inked by Armando Gil.
Even though I was just a teenager reared entirely on superheroes, I bought The 'Nam when it came out and I thought it was superb. Even though Golden's cartoony work seemed like an odd fit for a book about the grim realities of the Vientmam war, his brilliant storytelling and Gil's beautiful inks told Murray's story very well.
Golden uses a lot of panels per page in these first issues, and you feel very cramped and slightly claustrophobic; so when action breaks out you don't always have a good sense of where you are or what's happening:
...yet when it came time to slow down and have a moment, Murray and Golden knew how to pause, like when our ostensible main character(PFC Marks) finally starts to realize he is in a completely different world than the one he knew:
While some black and white magazine reprint material of color comics suffer without the color, I felt The 'Nam worked just as well, if not better, in black and white.The 'Nam Magazine was just a blip on Marvel's publishing schedule; it only lasted ten issues and I couldn't even find it listed on the GCBD. Luckily, there was a fan site about the comic that provided complete cover scans.
That's too bad, since of course the color comic had a healthy run(96 issues!) and more of it could've been given the b/w magazine treatment.
