Hey.
This is in the "I wonder if anybody has done this before" catagory:
As many of you know, for a couple decades DC Comics had an ongoing war comic book series called "The Haunted Tank", which was about a WW2 tank commander who happened to be named Jeb Stuart, who had a working relationship with the ghost of the Civil War Confederate general of the same name.
Most often in the series, the tank used by Stuart was an M5 Stuart light tank, also in some stories the Stuart was replaced by a cast-hull or welded-hull Sherman. And then there's a custom tank that was introduced in or around 1971 (real-life as opposed to storyline)...
It was rebuilt from a Soviet T-34 hull, with the suspension modified to handle four larger road wheels instead of the standard five. (Which had bigger road wheels?--T-34 or Cromwell?) The drive and idler sprockets were also changed, perhaps to accommodate American or British type tracks. The roof of the forward hull was modified by removing the original turret ring and using a smaller one more amidships, thus opening up space for driver and hull gunner hatches.
The turret doesn't match any I've seen, Allied or Axis. The hardware on the roof of the turret is akin to Sherman and Pershing, and the plan view resembles the Pershing, but the shape suggests a welded unit rather than a cast one. The gun is a British 17-pounder. If I were building the model myself, I'd probably use a Sherman Firefly turret and add applique armor plating to emulate the shape.
I found plan drawings via the search engine Usenet-Replayer and doing a .jpg file search for "combat comic". If anybody is interested in building the model I'd be glad to send them the .jpg file e-mail.
Stephen "FPilot" Bierce/IPMS #35922 Pilot's Log: