Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored | Tagged: abner sundell, Charles Biro, Ed Smalle, MLJ
Dunkirk & a Hundred Years of War in Blue Ribbon Comics #7, at Auction
Abner Sundell and Charles Biro were inspired by events still making headlines as they created their Corporal Collins Dunkirk story for Blue Ribbon Comics #7.
Article Summary
- Blue Ribbon Comics #7 reached stands weeks after Dunkirk, turning breaking war news into a timely Golden Age comic.
- Abner Sundell and Charles Biro recast Dunkirk as Corporal Collins drama, with betrayal, surrender, and siege.
- Churchill’s June 4 Dunkirk report helps frame how the story compressed encirclement, rescue, and blame into fiction.
- Beyond Dunkirk, MLJ’s Blue Ribbon Comics #7 imagines a 1939-2039 Hundred Years War in an early future-war tale.
Ed Smalle‘s cover for Blue Ribbon Comics #7 announces “Extra! War!!!” beside a plug for the Corporal Collins feature of that issue. The newspaper-headline-style phrasing was justified here, as this story was inspired by very recent events in the war. The issue reached newsstands on August 15, 1940, about ten weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation ended and less than two months after France signed its armistice with Germany. The historic events of Dunkirk were likely still making headlines when Abner Sundell and Charles Biro began developing the Corporal Collins story of this issue. And overall, this issue reflects the hopes, fears, and events of its time in several different ways: as an in-progress battlefield saga, contemporary air combat, and a greater war catastrophe projected across the next hundred years.
Dunkirk Becomes A Comic-Book Betrayal
Abner Sundell and Charles Biro’s Corporal Collins story opens with part of the French Army and the entire British Expeditionary Force surrounded near Dunkirk. British General Hogg orders surrender, and Collins calls him a double-crosser who “swapped 50,000 of us for a German command.” The wording appears to mean that Hogg sacrificed or abandoned those soldiers, turning an enormous military collapse into a betrayal. The real Dunkirk evacuation ran from May 26 through June 4, 1940. In his June 4 report to Parliament, Winston Churchill said more than 335,000 British and French soldiers had been rescued. He credited the defense of Calais with drawing German armored divisions away from the BEF and said French troops helped keep the route to Dunkirk open. He also warned that “wars are not won by evacuations.” The public story of Dunkirk contained the basic elements Sundell and Biro drew from: encircled armies, heroic rearguards, armored pressure, air attack, surrender, and accusations that one ally had exposed another’s flank. The comic story condenses all of that into someone to blame in the form of the fictional General Hogg.
The War That Lasted Until 2039
Joe Blair and Sam Cooper‘s Doc Strong story then projects current events a century into the future. Its opening caption says a “Hundred Years War” began in Europe in 1939 and had laid civilization waste by 2039. A mechanized horde has driven the surviving population to an uncharted Pacific island, where Doc Strong and his companions defend what the story calls the last outpost of civilization. H. G. Wells’s 1936 film Things to Come. film had done something very similar. The British Film Institute summarizes its future history as beginning with a world war in 1940 that nearly destroys humanity and continues to 2036. Of course, this structure also borrows also the wider future-war tradition of Buck Rogers, as did several other comic book features of this period.
Blue Ribbon Comics #7 captures an early MLJ line reacting to events of the war in almost real time. A historically fascinating early MLJ with early work by Charles Biro, Irwin Hasen, Mort Meskin, Ed Smalle, and Sam Cooper, there’s a Blue Ribbon Comics #7 (MLJ, 1940) CGC VG 4.0 Cream to off-white pages up for auction at the 2026 August 13 Golden Age Century Comics Showcase Auction V #40377.
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