When Commando Gets Creepy: Judgement

So we've been looking at some of the times when British boys' war comic Commando decided to add a little supernatural into the mix. Well, for this final post we have two comics which apparently take their inspiration from Vault Of Horror. 

Each issue uses a framing device before going into individual stories, all of deal with bad people doing bad things.  Interestingly, the miscreants are all on the Allied side. 

Suffice it to say, at the end the hammer of judgement comes down hard.

Commando 5693: Nightmare Express (2023)

Four men are detailed to guard a train compartment. Strangely, for such an important the door isn't locked.  Temptation quickly proves too much and all four men step inside to find something terrifying.

Two airmen murder a comrade and all seems well until he comes back to fly with them one last time. 

A soldier robs the wrong shop. 

A shipwrecked sailor is rescued by a lifeboat from a civilian liner. A liner that sank decades ago. 

(My personal favourite out of the three0

I am confident that there is no way this would have been published in the 1970s because bloody hell, this is straight out of one of the darker Twilight Zone episodes. 

Like a lot of Commando stories, it ends with the bad guys getting their karmic reward; but in most stories, the villain dies and that's it. Here it looks like that's only the start.  

  

Commando 5795:  Strange Frequencies (2024)

 Three members of a medical team are sent out into the desert to check on an observation post. They arrive to find a collection of graves and a single dead body.  What happened; disease or something worse?

 Struggling to get the radio to work, a signal finally comes through from somewhere and for each of the three, the voice on the radio reveals secrets that nobody should even know, sparking visions of a grim end.

Bullying RSM Curtis meets a soldier he tormented one final time. 

 Nurse Mary Barclay hatches a plan to "acquire" a valuable necklace. Shame she also acquires the curse that goes with it.  

Captain Marlowe had a little help to get promoted to an officer. Now he has to face the consequences.  

I loved "Strange frequencies" and the way the threads tie together right at the end. The atmosphere is spooky and, I think, easily one of the best Creepy stories Commando ever did. 

   Like "Nightmare Express" this is a tale of ghastly people running into something unearthly before revealing that everybody is trapped in something darker still. 

  

 Interestingly, considering that Commando is a war comic, the war itself is only vaguely in the background. 

Anyway, that's enough Commando posts for the time being.  

That's All Folks