This commercial title, available at newsstands alongside the crime and horror comics that would cause such a national uproar during the late 1940s and early 1950s, was intermittently published by a private corporation but reviewed and cleared by the U.S. Marine Corp. Unlike government titles charged with turning sewage treatment processes or Social Security benefits into the stuff of page-turning drama, this title featured government work in all its two-fisted, action-packed glory, with page after page of machine-gun strafing, saber disembowelings, and other vividly rendered war-time carnage. Issues like this one also featured dozens of actual black-and-white photographs of Marines in combat—hanging out in foxholes, poking enemy dead with bayonets, carrying their wounded brethren on stretchers.

In Government Issue, Richard Graham notes that while many commercial newspaper comic strips featured content depicting the war, including depictions of “Nazis as Teutonic buffoons and the Japanese as blood-drooling torturers,” the Office of War Information worried that such depictions were “too simplistic and could lead to over overconfidence” because they portrayed “the enemy as lazy and posing little threat.”

Perhaps that’s why on the cover of this Marine-approved comic, Prime Minister Tojo is depicted as a lively eight-legged sea-monster.