Johnny Reb and Billy Yank was a Sunday comic strip

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 drawn by Frank Giacoia

Frank Giacoia

Frank Giacoia was an American comic book artist known primarily as an inker. He sometimes worked under the name Frank Ray, and to a lesser extent Phil Zupa, and the single moniker Espoia .-Early life and career:Frank Giacoia studied at Manhattan's School of...

 from November 18, 1956 to May 24, 1959. It was one of the last full page Sunday strip

Sunday strip

A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and virtually always in color. Some readers called these sections the Sunday funnies...

s. The last full page appeared in late 1957. On May 18, 1958 the title changed to Johnny Reb. Some Sundays were ghosted by other artists, including Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby

Jack Kirby , born Jacob Kurtzberg, was an American comic book artist, writer and editor regarded by historians and fans as one of the major innovators and most influential creators in the comic book medium....

 and Joe Kubert

Joe Kubert

Joe Kubert is an American comic book artist who went on to found The Kubert School. He is best known for his work on the DC Comics characters Sgt. Rock and Hawkman...

.

Characters and story

The strip told the story of the American Civil War

American Civil War

The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...

, roughly chronicling events that had taken place 95 years earlier. The first 11 stories (of 20) alternated between the adventures of Johnny Reb, who fought for the South, and Billy Yank

Billy Yank

Billy Yank is the personification of the Northern states of the United States, or less generally, the Union during the American Civil War. The latter part of his name is derived from yankee, a slang term for New Englanders...

, who fought for the North. They met briefly in the first story, and "Secret Staff Order Number 191" featured both characters. After that, Billy Yank appeared in only one additional story, "The Copperhead Strikes".

Episode guide

• 1956
  • Manassas
  • General Lyon
• 1957
  • Prison Boat
  • Fort Donaldson
  • Scalpers
  • Shiloh
    Battle of Shiloh
    The Battle of Shiloh, also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing, was a major battle in the Western Theater of the American Civil War, fought April 6–7, 1862, in southwestern Tennessee. A Union army under Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had moved via the Tennessee River deep into Tennessee and...
    
    
  • Second Bull Run
  • Haven
  • Guerrillas
  • Court Martial
  • Hannibal the Mule
  • Secret Staff Order Number 191
  • Undercover Mission
• 1958
  • The Copperhead Strikes!
  • Lincoln
    Abraham Lincoln
    Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
    
    
  • Angel Sabra
  • Under Cover
  • Alaska is a Woman
• 1959:
  • Socrates Graves
  • John Wilkes Booth
    John Wilkes Booth
    John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and, by the 1860s, was a well-known actor...
    
    
  • Spy (story incomplete when strip ended)