Published in September, 1986, Combat Comic No. 6 provided readers with a mixture of military-themed comics, articles, and model kit features stretched across over 200 newsprint pages. Visually, Combat Comic wasn’t much different from the classic ideal of a manga weekly (or monthly, or bimonthly, in this case); hundreds of pages on rough paper, squarebound and sold at a cheap price. Notable comics in this issue include what may be a rip-off of Katsuhiro Otomo’s A Farewell to Arms by Motofumi Kobayashi (Cat Shit One, The Black Knight) and a Spiral Zone comic by Kazuhisa Kondo.
Inside you’d find a comic about airsoft, a model kit photo spread of fictional self-propelled guns of the Third Reich, and an article about German artillery featuring Wehrmacht women in camo underwear. A hybrid comic/article about Operation El Dorado Canyon features what may be one of the few (if only) examples of both Ronald Reagan and Muammar Gaddafi appearing in manga-form.
Rounding things out you had a short feature on creating the CG for the cover, some fanart and a center section on early VTOL aircraft (like the XFY Pogo), which is why the Harrier shows up on the back cover. Simulation games, both digital and tabletop, also make an appearance. There’s a few pages of video game reviews and a turn-by-turn playthrough of a tabletop strategy game based on the Battle of Dunkirk.
To be entirely honest, I’d never even heard of Combat Comic until I stumbled across this issue while browsing Yahoo Auctions for Kazuhisa Kondo books. Despite its niche focus, Combat Comic survived for a long time, eventually going on to rack up 137 issues over 16 years. First published in September 1985 (it was biweekly until 1989), Combat Comic finally closed its doors in March of 2001. More information about the publication can be found here.
