This article describes “Ben Oda and the 442nd”, my build for BrickCon 2024’s History theme. It was a tribute to comic book letterer Ben Oda and his service in World War Two.
Descriptive sign
“Ben Oda – WW2 medic and comic book letterer – left a huge mark, including 1000’s of DC Comics. This scene is semi-biographical and from Frontline Combat #5 in October 1951.” That’s what my sign said. It sat next to my model at September’s BrickCon 2024 in Bellevue, Washington in the History section.
The text was in Odaballoon font, based on his style and released as freeware by Ben Oda’s family after his death in 1984.
I thought a lot about Ben Oda, and ideas for this build, after learning about him in November 2023. He was one of a handful of early Japanese American comic book artists that I looked into, including Bob Fujitani, Bill Yoshida, and Fred Kida. I was totally drawn in when I found out that Oda lettered a comic about the 442nd, the Japanese American group of US Army soldiers in which he was a medic in World War II.
442nd Combat Team
Ben Oda was incredibly prolific, lettering comics from the 1940s until his death in 1984. He lettered a comic starting in 1950 called Two Fisted Tales for EC Comics that started as a general adventure anthology before turning to all war stories. Then simultaneously he lettered EC’s Frontline Combat, a dedicated war anthology that started in 1951. The writer and editor for Frontline Combat was Harvey Kurtzman, including “442nd Combat Team”, the lead story of issue 5. Artists on the story were John Severin, himself a WW2 army veteran, and Bill Elder. The brilliance of Kurtzman’s story telling in Frontline Combat was that it was an anti-war comic.
Before he was drafted in 1940, Ben Oda worked briefly for Walt Disney. I haven’t found clear documentation of where he served in 1941 and 1942. But after the Japanese American unit 442nd formed in early 1943, he joined it as a medic.
The brief story in Frontline Comics is based on conversations between Ben Oda and writer Harvey Kurtzman. Did it really happen? Or rather was it a combination of many events? Either way, I’m sure the unnamed medic in this story is Ben Oda himself. And that those KRAKs and BLAMs he drew are sounds he really heard, and the gunshots are wounds he really dressed.
Ben Oda and the 442nd
My model (or MOC – My Own Creation) is based on the first panel of the 7th of 8 pages of the story. It shows 9 members of a 44nd squad firing down on a group of Nazi SS soldiers. First I decided on the minifigs (from Toy Story), then I slowly experimented with the hill. Finally I added some Star Wars First Order officers as the Nazi SS solders.
In 1951 there were few colors per page. So to make the story more dramatic, the hill is alternately blue, yellow, brown, and green. In the scene I reproduced, it’s blue, with a pink background. Consequently, that’s what I decided to do as well.
Ben Oda is in the back right, the medic with glasses looking at us. There’s a soldier throwing a grenade (an apple), another using a stolen German machine gun, a radio man, and the sergeant is smoking a cigarette. They’ve just snuck up on a German machine gunner at the top of the hill, and his fallen helmet sits next to them.
Meanwhile at the bottom of the hill, the Germans think they have the 442nd squad pinned in a shack, and they’re chuckling even as shots begin to fall on them from the top of the hill.
Microscale Ben Oda
At BrickCon, there is a tradition of making mini versions of your piece. It’s displayed in “Micro BrickCon”, a convention within a convention with microscale people looking at the models. Thus, here is my 17-piece version of Ben Oda and the 442nd.
Sample comics
Here are a couple examples of Ben Oda’s work. They’re “silver age” comics I picked up, Ripley’s Believe it or Not 6 from 1967 and Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery 14 from 1963. It’s easy to pick up examples of Oda’s work for cheap, though, because there was so much of it. His issue page in the Grand Comics Database brings up 4,744 results.
Three degrees of separation
Our human world is a web of close connections, and I was surprised to find at least one chain of between Ben Oda and me that is only three steps long. Ben’s wife was Michiko Morita prior to marriage. I learned that she was from Seattle, and the Moritas lived at 7th and Marion in the early 1930s, where they ran a grocery store. Michiko was in her tweens at the time, a middle schooler at the Central School across the street. The school had something like one-third Japanese American students.
The principal of that school was named Joseph Widmer. In 1931, parents of Japanese American students celebrated his 30 years at the Central School by sending him on a tour of Japan. Presumably the Moritas contributed as well. I wrote about Widmer briefly in my book Lost Seattle. The connection is stronger than just that though — I am sitting in the house he built, which is now our home.
Related things I’ve written
- Derezzed: Tron Legacy LEGO reimagined
- Life of Iconic Internment Family
- George Nakashima and Scouting
- Elmer Katayama at Camp Parsons’ opening
- Pike/Pine’s non-white residents in 1910 and 1920
- Arai Market in A shop on 11th (on CHS Blog)
- The Pink Dress on Boylston (on CHS Blog)
- Julia’s building past to present (on CHS Blog)
- Koba family and Halmar Apartments (on CHS Blog)