the American Civil War. "Holding Action" (issue #2), set on the last day of the Korean War, ended with a gung-ho young soldier, unwilling to quit, being escorted over his protests into a medical vehicle. The final panel leaves ambiguous whether the trauma will be temporary or lasting. The most controversial stories were set during the contemporary Vietnam War, particularly "Landscape" (issue #2), which follows the thoughts of a Vietnamese peasant rice-farmer devoid of ideology, who nonetheless becomes a civilian casualty. Warren said the story caused key distributors to stop selling the title. Early cancellation The premiere issue of Blazing Combat reached newsstands in mid-1965, during a troop-escalation period years before American public sentiment would turn against the Vietnam War. Publisher James Warren said that, from the beginning, wholesale magazine distributors cautioned him that the magazine's anti-war stance presented a sales obstacle. As Warren recalled in a 1999 interview, "[H]ere is my distributor, saying, 'Uh oh! Wait until our wholesalers — many of them belonging to the American Legion — see this!' They found out very fast that it was anti-war". Warren said the second issue's Vietnam-set story "Landscape", by writer Goodwin and artist Orlando, solidified wholesalers' stance against the magazine. According to Warren, the American Legion began a campaign to let the magazine sit on distributor shelves rather than be sent to the buying public. The armed forces, which were at the time a major purchaser of B&W comic magazines, began to refuse to sell Blazing Combat on their bases or PXs, due to its perceived anti-war stance. Warren said in 1999 that In a 1993 interview, Warren said that distributors generally did not communicate with him as to why the series was not selling: And the story that I got back was that the American Legion, which was very much gung ho for Vietnam or any conflict involving American boys at that time, looked on us and saw us as traitors to our own country And I think that happened with the second issue. The sales were terrible. They were terrible with the third and, of course, they were terrible with the fourth. And no one would tell me the truth. Our national distributor didn't care enough to delve into it. The people who were responsible didn't have the courage to write me a letter, or telephone me, or tell me to my face at the conventions I