My third Haunted Tank page, and what a page. From the night battle scene in the upper panel to the high contrast interior shots on the bottom, this is Heath at his best. My friend Henry Baba brought this page to a Comicart-l get together at Maybelle's in San Francisco. It took no thought at all to buy it when Henry asked if I was interested. Thanks, Henry.

Russ Heath drew one of the first comics I recall owning--my mom bought G.I. Combat 96 for me when I had my tonsils removed between first and second grade. I was hooked. Finding a nice Heath piece with Jeb Stewart and the crew of the M3 Stewart was one of my goals in attending SD in 2001. As luck had it, I didn't find any G.I. Combat/Heath pages in the dealer's booths I poured over. But Tom Horvitz had five of them--and his was the one booth I didn't spend much time in. No matter, within in a week or two after the show, Tom hooked me up with this piece featuring a common occurance in Haunted Tank stories--a German plane crashing into the M3 Stewart.

While finding a Heath Haunted Tank page was high on my list for Comic-Con 2001, I'd picked up three Heath's at Wondercon in April of 2002, so I didn't have any Heath work on my want list for San Diego 2002. Still, that didn't stop me from looking for it. I dropped by Steve Wyatt's booth to see if he had any of Russ's stuff to offer--he did, but I was looking for Haunted Tank pages, and those he didn't have. Almost by chance, I discovered Steve Morger had this beauty as well as the Our Army at War pages seen here. Thanks, Steve.

I had this stunning 2-page spread in my portfolio when I stopped by the DC booth at S.D. 2002 in hopes of getting Eduardo Risso and Brian Azzarello to sign a bunch of 100 Bullets pages I'd bought. As Risso was busy putting his iconograph on my 100b pages, Brian spotted this Heath and said, "Wow, is that Joe Kubert?" I explained it was Russ Heath's work. Azzarello asked to look at all the Heath pages I had with me, and commented on how nice they were. I'm looking forward to Azzarello's take on Sgt. Rock.

The fourth of the Heath pages I picked up from Steve Morger. After Brian Azzarello asked if this and the 2-page spread were by Kubert, I went back and looked more closely--you can see signs of Kubert's hand in the upper left panel of the spread, and in the old guy on these pages. Heath himself said Kubert often redid things for no apparent reason, though there's no sign of whiteout or pasted on panels on any of these pages. Thanks to Alan Barnard for ID'ng this page for me.