Art: It's a gasser!

Not so long ago, the fine gentleman behind When Is Evil Cool? posted an image of a small crowd of English bobbies in gas masks. I commented that they looked like a legion of Golden Age Sandmen, Wesley Dodds being my favorite comic character from the cape and cowl crowd. Then, coincidentally, the blogger behind the wonderful Horror's Not Dead posted a similar, but completely unrelated, picture of a town of post-WWI Era partisans (Spanish Civil War perhaps?) entirely in gas masks.

Curious, I wondered just how many of these group gas masks shots there were out there and, oddly enough, there were tons of them. After the First World War, it became something of a fad to trick out folks in surplus masks. Perhaps the grimmest symbol of the war, the masks quickly became novelty items for bright young things in the UK and US, where few of those who hadn't served had any first hand experience of the horrors of chemical warfare.

The pictures mix an almost strained wackiness with an edge of grim surrealism. I think, at the time, they were meant to be more funny than creepy, but that's not, I think, the modern effect.

Here's some of my favorite shots, plus the two that inspired the search.