Author: NowReadThis

Posted on

Rebel


By Pepe Moreno & others (Catalan Communications/IDW)
ISBN: 978-0-87416-020-8 (1986)      978-1-60010-495-4 (2009)

Born in 1954, Spanish creator Pepe Moreno began his comics career, illustrating for horror and adventure anthologies and children’s papers such as S.O.S., Pumby and Pulgarcito, Star and Bliz.

He moved to America in 1977, briefly working for Jim Warren’s Creepy, Eerie 1984/1994 and Vampirella titles, as well as humour magazine National Lampoon before gravitating to Heavy Metal where his short, uncompromising post-punk strips (collected in the album Zeppelin) caught the attention of Epic Illustrated editor Archie Goodwin.

The breakthrough strip Generation Zero led to the graphic novel Rebel, as well as successor’s Joe’s Air Force and Gene Kong, but ever-restless, Moreno’s growing fascination with technology led him first into animation (Tiger Sharks, Thunder Cats and Silver Hawks) and eventually into the budding, formative field of computer illustration, resulting in a return to comics for the high-profile computer-generated futuristic Batman thriller Digital Justice.

He created an early CD-ROM thriller with Hellcab in 1993 and, these days, spends most of his time working in high-end video games.

Imagined and executed in the politically contentious and conservative mid-Eighties when dystopian dreams of fallen empires abounded and post-apocalyptic survivalism was the prevailing zeitgeist, Rebel – conceived and illustrated by the Spaniard and scripted by English-speakers Robb Hingley, Pete Ciccone & Kenny Sylvester (with an additional tip of the hat to Charis Moe) depicted, in a blaze of pop-art style and colour a future that never came…

2002AD: when Rockabilly gangs, Mohawks, Asian Zeros, Skinheads and a dozen other fashion-punks tribes warred and raced weaponised Hot-rods amidst the fallen skyscrapers of New York, whilst the authorities in absentia used their draconian Sanitation Police to cleanse the streets of young scum…

After a second Civil War and the fall of American civilisation, “decent” men and women retreated to purpose-built Cosmo City and left the Big Apple to rot. Now, decades later, gangs scavenge the shambles for food, tech and fuel for their hybridised, customised vehicles whilst the new civilisation’s fascistic forces attempt to re-establish order. However Sanitation Police commander Major Kessler, working closely with decadent Skinhead overlord Doll, is hiding a dark secret: every deviant captured either ends up a gladiator in slave games or spare-parts for a thriving organ-legging racket to extend the worthless lives of the elite of Cosmo…

After another destructive drag race through the streets, a number of gangers are arrested under the spurious “Social Hygiene Act” but a hidden sniper quickly and efficiently despatches the smugly murderous cops. The grateful bad boys have been saved by a legendary urban warrior – Rebel…

The mystery man has built a close-knit team from his base in Brooklyn and, when a supply run to scavenge food, fuel and beer leads to a pitched street battle with rival Black Knights, the scabrous Doll points out the hero to his paymaster with a scheme to end the charismatic leader’s resistance.

Kessler, however, recognises an old friend and deduces Rebel’s true identity…

Even as the assorted gangs fruitlessly and perpetually battle each other, Rebel is trying to organise a concerted resistance to the Cosmo City invaders. As well he might, since years ago when they were an honest army of liberation, he was one of their greatest soldiers.

Once the war was over and the victors became as bad as the oppressors they had overturned, the disillusioned and dangerous Lt. Lawrence disappeared and Rebel was born…

As Kessler organises a massive armed response in New York to ferret out the traitor, Rebel springs a brilliant tactical attack and decimates the Sanitation Police forces. In the aftermath, subversives from Cosmo approach him, begging the forgotten warrior to return and overturn the corrupt government of the austere super-city…

However, when the troubled Rebel returns to his Brooklyn base, he finds a scene of torture and carnage. Doll and his savage minions have destroyed the citadel and taken Lawrence’s lover Lori hostage.

Chained naked to the spire of the single remaining tower of the ancient World Trade Center, she is helpless, tantalising bait which Rebel cannot resist. Even so, not only must the living legend storm a tower filled with brutal thugs who hate his guts, but unknown to all, Kessler has engaged an entire division of helicopter gunships to eradicate the inspirational leader’s threat forever…

But the Rebel has a plan. A bold, spectacular impossibly dangerous plan…

Mythical, ultra-violent and rather nonsensical in strictly logical terms, Rebel is a powerful and exuberant paean to the fashions, memes and visual tropes of that tumultuous era, moulding social fantasy and grinding realpolitik into a graphic rollercoaster ride that combines the grimy meta-reality of Mad Max and Escape from New York with the gaudy, glitzy flourish of Xanadu and the dour stylish pessimism of Brazil.

In 2009 IDW and Digital Fusion released a remastered and expanded edition in a reduced page size (260x165mm as opposed to the original’s 269x208mm album format) with computer-enhanced colour that sadly sacrificed much of the vivid, pinball and poster hues which made the original such a quirky treat, but as both are still readily available online, one quick look at the teaser art for each should enable you to pay your money and make your preferred taste choice…
© 1986 Pepe Moreno. English language edition © 1986 Catalan Communications. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Footrot Flats Book 7


By Murray Ball (Orin Books)
ISSN: 0156-6172

New Zealand’s greatest natural wonder and National Treasure is a comic strip. Footrot Flats is one of the funniest comic strips ever created, designed as a practical antidote to idealistic pastoral fantasy and bucolic self-deception and concocted in 1975 by cartoonist and comics artist Murray Ball after returning to his New Zealand homeland, from an extended work tour of the UK and other, lesser climes.

The fantastical farm feature ran for a quarter of a century, appearing in newspapers on four continents until 1994 when Ball retired it, citing reasons as varied as the death of his own dog and the state of New Zealand politics. Such a success naturally spawned a multitude of merchandising material such as strip compendia, calendars and special editions released regularly from 1978 onwards.

Once Ball officially ceased the daily feature he began periodically releasing books of all-new material until 2000, with a net yield of 27 collections of the daily strip, 8 volumes of Sunday pages dubbed “Weekenders”, 5 pocket books and ancillary publications such as “school kits” aimed at younger fans and their harried parents.

There was a stage musical, a theme park and in 1986 a truly superb feature-length animated film. The Dog’s Tail Tale became New Zealand’s top-grossing film (and remained so until Peter Jackson started associating with Hobbits) – track it down on video or petition the BBC to show it again – it’s been decades, for Pete’s sake…

The well-travelled, extremely gifted and deeply dedicated Mr. Ball had originally moved to England in the early 1960s, becoming a cartoonist for Punch (producing Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero and All the King’s Comrades) as well as drawing numerous strips for DC Thompson and Fleetway and even concocting a regular political satire strip in Labour Weekly.

After marrying he returned to the Old Country and resettled in 1974 – but not to retire…

Ball was busier than ever once he’d bought a small-holding on the North Island to farm in his “spare time”, which inevitably led to the strip under review.

Taking the adage “write what you know” to startling, heartbreaking and occasionally stomach-turning heights, the peripatetic pencil-pusher broke most of the laws of relativity to make time for these captivatingly insane episodes concerning the highs and lows – and most frequently “absurds” – of the rural entrepreneur as experienced by the earthily metaphoric Wallace Footrot Cadwallader: a bloke never too-far removed from mud, mayhem, ferocity and frustration…

Wal is a big, bluff farmer. He likes his grub; loves his sport – Rugby, Football (the Anzac sort, not the kiddie version Yanks call Soccer) Cricket, Golf(ish) and even hang-gliding; each in its proper season and at no other, since he just wants the easiest time a farmer’s life can offer…

Wal owns a small sheep farm (the eponymous Footrot Flats) honestly described as “400 acres of swamp between Ureweras and the Sea”.

With his chief – and only – hand Cooch Windgrass (a latter-day Francis of Assisi), and a verbose and avuncular sheepdog, Wal enjoys being his own boss – as much as the farm cat, goats, chickens, livestock and his auntie will let him…

Other persons of perennial interest include Wal’s fierce and prickly little niece Janice – known to all as Pongo, the aforementioned Aunt Dolly (AKA the sternly staunch and starched Dolores Monrovia Godwit Footrot), smart-ass local lad Rangi Wiremu Waka Jones, Dolly’s pompous and pampered Corgi Prince Charles and Pew, a sadistic, inventive, obsessed and vengeful magpie who bears an unremitting grudge against Wal…

When not living in terror of the monumental moggy dubbed “Horse”, teasing the corpulent Corgi or panic-attacking himself in imagined competition with noble hunting hound Major, the Dog narrates and hosts the strip.

A cool, imaginative and overly sentimental know-all and blowhard, Dog is utterly devoted to his, for want of a better term, Master – unless there’s food about, or Jess the sheepdog bitch is in heat again. However, the biggest and most terrifying scene-stealer was that fulsome feline Horse; a monstrous and imperturbable tomcat who lords it over every living thing in the district …

One of the powerful and persistent clichés of life is that to make people laugh one truly needs to experience tragedy and, having only recently lost my own four-footed studio-mate and constant companion of 15 years, I can certainly empathise with the artist’s obvious manly distress as this otherwise magnificently hilarious collection is movingly dedicated to the uniquely charming real-world inspiration for the battered and bewhiskered juggernaut… which only makes the comedy capers contained within even more bittersweet and effective, beginning with the poem to his departed companion and the bluff, brisk photo tribute which opens proceedings…

Once again the funny businesses comes courtesy of the loquacious canine softie, taking time out from eking out his daily crusts (and oysters and biscuits and cake and lamb’s tails and scraps and chips and…) and alternately getting on with or annoying the sheep, cows, bull, goat, hogs, ducks, bugs, cats, horses and geese, as well as sucking up to the resolutely hostile wildlife and the decidedly odd humans his owner knows or is related to.

Dog – his given name is an embarrassing, closely and violently guarded secret – loves Wal but always tries to thwart him if the big bloke is trying to do unnecessarily necessary farm chores such as chopping down trees, burning out patches of scrub, culling livestock, or trying to mate with the pooch’s main rival Darlene “Cheeky” Hobson, hairdresser-in-residence of the nearest town. As is also the case with the adoring comradeship of proper blokes, Dog is never happier than when embarrassing his mate in front of others, which explains the pages extracted from Wal’s old albums, showing the man to be in various humiliating baby shots and schoolboy scrapes…

Following on is the epic adventure ‘The Invasion of the Murphy Dogs’ – barbaric hounds from a neighbouring farm only afraid of one thing…

This extra-large (262x166mm) landscape monochrome seventh volume again comes from Australian Publisher Orin Books and continues the policy of dividing the strips into approximately seasonal sequences, and after a few more all-original cartoons again opens with ‘Spring’ – the busiest season of the farmer’s year (apart from the other three) concentrates on Pew’s first attempts at avian home-making, Dog’s libido, horny farmers and hussy-hairdressers, loopy lambs, wild pigs, killer eels and cricket, as well as an extended sequence in which Wal and the Dog become involved in the local school’s curriculum and cuisine…

Once the long hot ‘Summer’ settles in, bringing fun with chicken-shearing, busy bees, a plague of carnivorous Wekas, thistles, Horse’s softer side(!) and his war with Pongo and Aunt Dolly, Hare infestations, river-rafting, Irish Murphy’s Pigs (far worse than his dogs), Cheeky’s picnic charm-offensive and the growing closeness of Rangi and Pongo…

‘Autumn’ brings piglets, scrub-burning, the revenge of dispossessed magpies, amorous bovines, fun with artificial insemination, fence-lining and back country cattle, honey-harvesting, darts and rugby, a confused ram who’d rather pursue Dolly than associate with eager ewes and Horse’s crucial role in the war against the magpies…

As ‘Winter’ again closes in, offering floods, the mixed messy joy of lambing season, mud, mad goats, whitebait fishing and footy, Wal unwisely agrees to take a class of schoolkids and their puritanical, prudish and priggish teacher on an eye-opening nature-lesson around Footrot Flats. Touched by the painful experience, the bluff cove then volunteers to coach the school’s sports and, after much humiliation, spends the rest of the book discovering how hard – and, for observers, funny – farming in a plaster cast can be…

As you’d expect, the comedy content is utterly, absolutely top-rate and the extended role played throughout by the surly star Horse all the more poignant…

Ball is one of those gifted few who can actually imbue a few lines on paper with the power of Shakespeare’s tragedy and the manic hilarity of jester geniuses such as Tommy Cooper or the Marx Brothers. When combined with his sharp, incisive yet warmly human writing the result is sheer, irresistible magic.

In the early 1990s Titan Books published British editions of the first three volumes and German, Japanese, Chinese and American translations also exist, as well as the marvellous Australian compendia reviewed here – as ever the internet is your friend…

Dry, surreal and wonderfully self-deprecating, Footrot Flats always successfully wedded together sarcasm, satire, slapstick and strikingly apt surrealism in a perfect union of pathos and down to earth (and up to your eyebrows) fun that was and still is utterly addicting, exciting and just plain wonderful.

Plant the seeds for a lifetime of laughs by harvesting this or indeed any volume and you’ll soon see a bumper crop of fun irrespective of the weather or market forces…
© 1981-1982 Murray Ball. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

The Town That Didn’t Exist


By Enki Bilal & Pierre Christin, translated by Tom Leighton (Titan Books & Humanoids Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-85286-147-6 (1989)      978-1-93065-237-8 (2003)

Here’s a masterpiece of subtle moody comics storytelling criminally out of print and long overdue for rediscovery in the frankly incomprehensible modern English language comics marketplace.

Enes Bilalović AKA Enki Bilal was born in Belgrade in 1951 and broke into French comics in 1972 with Le Bal Maudit for Pilote. Throughout the 1970s he grew in skill and fame, and achieved English-language celebrity once his work began appearing in America’s Heavy Metal magazine.

Although best known for his self-scripted Nikopol Trilogy (Gods in Chaos, The Woman Trap and Cold Equator) this bleakly contemplative anti-capitalist fable always felt like a tale the socially-concerned and intellectually aware Serbian would like to be best remembered for; again scripted by old comrade Christin, and arguably Bilal’s most evocative and plaintive work.

In recent years Bilal returned to contemporary political themes with his much-lauded, self-penned Hatzfeld Tetralogy…

As if writing one of the most successful and significant comics series in the world (the groundbreaking and influential Valérian and Laureline series) was not enough, full-time Academician Pierre Christin has still found time over the years to script science-fiction novels, screenplays and a broad selection of comics, beginning in 1966 with Le Rhum du Punch with Valérian co-creator Jean-Claude Mézières.

The truly prolific Christin has produced stellar graphic stories with such artistic luminaries as Jacques Tardi, Raymond Poïvet, Annie Goetzinger, François Boucq, Jijé and many others, but whenever he collaborated with the brilliant Bilal, beginning in 1975 with their exotic and surreal Légendes d’Aujourd’hui or in other classic tales such as The Hunting Party or The Black Order Brigade, the results have never been less than stunning.

In this captivating, slyly polemical parable, aspiration, disdain, idealism and human nature have never been more coldly and clearly depicted…

Beginning and ending with a dream of something better, The Town That Didn’t Exist focuses on the recent past and the country’s depressed industrial North, where a strike at the cement works has prompted the death of the aged oligarch who has ruled the town and district of Jadencourt like a feudal baron for decades.

Generations of Hannard have run the web of businesses that put food on the table of the workers, but now that their first ever industrial action has killed the old man, tensions, passions, opinions and rumours are running wild…

With Hannard’s cronies and yes-men equally unsure of their futures, the Board of Directors gathers to determine who will lead the company in the trying times ahead and are compelled to accept that the old man’s solitary, long-sequestered invalid granddaughter has to take the helm – even if in name only…

With workers terrified of losing even their meagre subsistence livelihood and the comfortably installed fat-cats fearing the surrender of so very much more, the pallid, ethereal Madeleine Hannard is dragged from the bleak, rugged and lonely beach and house which have been her refuge for seven years and moves into the morass of boiling cauldrons, bubbling and brewing amidst the closed and grimy alleys of Jadencourt…

She soon proves to be as powerful a personality as her grandfather and by charm, duplicity and force of will manages to unite the perpetually warring and self-serving sides on management and labour in an incredible, groundbreaking, benignly doctrinaire project.

Ignoring cries to rationalise the companies, lay off workers and reorganise the corporation, Madeleine counters with an insane proposal: expansion, full employment and a retasking of every commercial and design resource into the construction of a fantastic, enclosed and self-perpetuating City under a dome – a utopian paradise where everybody will live in perfect harmony forever free from want and need…

The hardest people to convince are the downtrodden workers who have the most to gain, but once they are aboard the plan proceeds apace. Within a year Jadencourt is gone and an utterly unique paradise under glass is filled with the once hopeless and aspiration-deprived citizenry…

However, some people cannot be satisfied even when they have everything they ever dreamed of…

A telling and effective portrayal of greed, self-interest, disillusionment and the innate snobbery plaguing every class of modern society, this lyrically uncompromising examination of the failure of even the most benign tyranny is a mesmerising, beguiling and chilling parable which methodically skins the hide from an idealistic dream and spills the dark hot guts of guilt, arrogance and the pursuit of power in a sublime example of graphic narrative’s unique facility to tell a story on a number of levels.

In 1989 Titan Books released The Town That Didn’t Exist in a captivating softcover album as part of their push to popularise European comics classics, and in 2003  Humanoids Publishing published a sturdy oversized (315x 238mm) hardback edition for the US market, either of which will delight any fan in search of a more mature and thought-provoking reading experience.
© 1989 Dargaud Editeur, Paris by Christin & Bilal. English language edition © 1990 Titan Books. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

The Sinners


By Alec Stevens (Piranha Press/DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-061-1

During the explosively expansive 1980s comics publishing exponentially enlarged with new companies offering a vast range of fresh titles and ideas. To combat this explosion of upstarts and Young Turks, Marvel and DC also instigated and created innovative material for those freshly growing markets, with the latter cartoon colossus especially targeting readers for whom old-fashioned comicbooks were anathema …or at least a long-abandoned dalliance.

DC created a number of new, more mature-oriented imprints such as Vertigo and Helix, but some of the most intriguing projects came out of their Piranha Press sub-division, which formed in 1989, floundered about for a few years and was finally re-designated Paradox Press in 1993.

When DC founded this mature-readers special projects imprint, the resulting publications and reader’s reaction to them were wildly mixed. It had long been a Holy Grail of the business to produce comics for people who don’t read comics and, despite the inherent logical flaw, that’s a pretty sound and sensible plan.

However, the delivery of such is always problematic. Is the problem resistance to the medium?

Then try radical art and narrative styles, unusual typography and talent from outside or on the margins of the medium to tell your stories. There were certainly some intriguing results but the product sadly did not reach a new audience whilst often simultaneously alienating those bold yet traditional comics readers already on board…

This eclectic and overwhelmingly effective tome was one of my favourites and, of course, simultaneously one of the least appreciated…

An American Air Force brat, Alex Preston Stevens was born in Salvador, Brazil in 1965, and grew up wherever his father was posted. A committed Christian, the junior Stevens was a professional illustrator by the time he was 20, working for The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Readers Digest, and musical periodicals Pulse! and Classical Pulse! Simultaneously he began selling comic strips, many of them adaptations of literary classics, to Fantagraphics, Kitchen Sink, Heavy Metal and Dark Horse’s Deadline: USA. After this particular all-original work and the companion piece Hardcore he moved on to work for Paradox Press and Gaiman’s Sandman before forming his own imprint Calvary Comics and dedicating himself to specifically spiritual graphic novels and pictorial biographies such as Glory to God, Sadhu Sundar Singh, E. J. Pace: Christian Cartoonist, Erlo Stegen and the Revival Among the Zulus and Clendennen: Soldier of the Cross.

The Sinners was created at a time when the industry was heading into a speculator-fed and gimmick-fuelled decline and deals adroitly – and with dreamlike meta-fictionality – the nature of a fall and road to redemption in its compulsive tale-within-a-tale…

An aged beggar travels from town to town, his hard life leavened by constant introspection. As he wanders he recalls his past, slipping further into dotage, abandoning and casting off snippets of  memory and personal history as he determinedly devolves into a blissful second childhood, free of doubt, worry or responsibility.

It was not always so.

As his life plays over in his head once again he sees the child he once was: small, lost in a large family and tormented by siblings who despised or ignored him. His father was an official in the Government, absent for long periods or at home and drunkenly inaccessible. Other than his dutiful mother, the boy was outcast, brimming with unexpressed love no one would acknowledge or reciprocate…

School repeated and intensified the situation: his only solace coming in the form of a passionate teacher who filled him with religious fervour. Years passed and he became a social leper. Nobody knew him or wanted to and as tensions grew in the household he became invisible even to his mother.

After a violent family confrontation he fled and was struck by a vehicle which propelled him into a world of joyous fraternity, a paradise of mannered elegance where the only directive was to be happy.

But even here his outsider’s gloom tainted everything…

When he awoke he was back in his room. He brother would no longer speak to him and his father had gone.

The shunned one left school after being blamed for torturing a simple-headed lad – a deed actually perpetrated by the most popular boy in class – and, forging graduating papers, attended a small obscure university. Even here he was an outsider, finding few friends or lovers and these only for the briefest of moments.

Leaving, he drifted, becoming ever more removed from a society that wouldn’t tolerate him, eventually falling into the distant and disassociated company of Absinthe drinkers. Eventually he returned to his childhood home, only to find it a charred ruin, just moments before his tormented father executed a harsh, self-imposed sentence for his life of cruel neglect and abuse…

Witnessing this act of self-immolation suddenly shattered the son’s brutally suppressed and repressed passions and, on a raging tide of emotion, the transformed outcast began a life of wandering, embracing each day and all people, eschewing plans and dreams and even anticipation, taking each day as it came until eventually they would come no more…

Wistful, playful, powerful and oddly elegiac, this moodily moving exploration of humanity and fate is a supremely effective and thoughtful parable for the unavoidable bad times in our lives, beautifully rendered and scarily evocative.

Challenging and strictly for mature readers, The Sinners offers a decidedly different comics experience for those readers in search of something beyond fights and frights and cosmic disasters…

© 1989 Alec Stevens. All rights reserved.

Posted on

W.E. Johns’ Biggles and the Golden Bird


By Björn Karlström, translated by Peter James (Hodder and Stoughton)
ISBN: 978-0-34023-081-7 (hb)          0-340-23081-9 (pb)

Although one of the most popular and enduring of all True Brit heroes, air detective Squadron Leader James Bigglesworth – immortally known as “Biggles” – has never been the star of British comics you’d reasonably expect.

Whilst the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Dick Turpin, Sexton Blake, Dick Barton and others have regularly made the jump to sequential pictorials, as far as I can determine the only time Biggles hit the funny pages was as a beautiful strip illustrated firstly by Ron Embleton and later Mike Western for the lush, tabloid-sized photogravure weekly TV Express (issues 306-376, 1960-1962). Even then the strip was based on the 1960 television series rather than the armada of books and short stories generated over Johns’ 56-year career.

Much of this superb stuff has been reprinted in French editions but remains criminally uncollected in the UK. Indeed Biggles is huge all over the Continent, particularly Holland, Belgium and France, which makes it doubly galling that only a short-lived Swedish interpretation of Biggles has ever made the transition back to Blighty…

Created by World War 1 flying veteran and aviation enthusiast William Earl Johns (February 5th 1893-June 21st 1968), the airborne adventures of Biggles, his cousin the Hon. Algernon Montgomery Lacey AKA “Algy”, Ginger Hebblethwaite and their trusty mechanic and dogsbody Flight Sergeant Smyth ran as prose thrillers in the magazines Modern Boy, Popular Flying and Flying – periodicals which he designed, edited and even illustrated for.

Initially aimed at an older audience, the Biggles stories quickly became a staple of boy’s entertainment in anthology and full novels (nearly 100 between 1932 and 1968) and a true cultural icon. Utilising the unique timeless quality of proper heroes, Biggles and Co. have waged their dauntless war against evil as combatants in World Wars I and II, as Special Air Detectives for Scotland Yard in the interregnum of 1918-1939 and as freelance agents and adventurers in the Cold War years…

“Captain” W.E. Johns was one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century and wrote over 160 books in total as well as innumerable features and articles ranging from gardening to treasure-hunting, aviation, crime fiction, pirates and historical fact and fiction.

He created many heroic novel series which shared the same continuity as Biggles: 6 “Steeley” novels starring Deeley Montfort Delaroy, a WWI fighter ace-turned-crimebuster between 1936-1939, 10 volumes of commando Captain Lorrington King AKA Gimlet (1943-1954) and a 10 volume science fiction saga starring retired RAF Group Captain Timothy ‘Tiger’ Clinton, his son Rex and boffin Professor Lucius Brane who voyaged to the stars in a cosmic ray powered spaceship between 1954 and 1963.

Although much of his work is afflicted with the parochial British jingoism and racial superiority that blights much of the fiction of the early 20th century, he was certainly ahead of his time in areas of class and gender equality. Although Algy is a purely traditional plucky Toff, working class Ginger is an equal partner and participant in all things, whilst Flight Officer Joan Worralson was a WAAF pilot who starred in 11 “Worrals” novels between 1941 and 1950, commissioned by the Air Ministry to encourage women to enlist in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

In 1977, veteran Swedish author and cartoonist Björn Karlström returned to comics when publisher Semics commissioned him to produce four new Biggles adventures; ‘Het Sargasso mysterie’, ‘Operatie goudvis’, ‘De tijger bende’ and ‘Ruimtestation Aries’ (The Sargasso Mystery, Operation Goldfish, The Tiger Gang and Space Station Aries, respectively) which were picked up by Hodder and Stoughton in 1978, deftly translated by Peter James and released as Biggles and the Sargasso Triangle, Biggles and the Golden Bird, Biggles and the Tiger and Biggles and the Menace from Space…

Although deeply mired in the stylisation and tone of Hergé’s Tintin, to my mind the most authentic-seeming to Johns’ core concept was the second, which I’ve chosen for today’s international festival…

Swedish designer, author and aviation enthusiast Björn Karlström began working in comics for the vast Scandinavian market in 1938, producing scale-model plans and drawings for the magazine Flygning. In 1941 he created the adventure strip ‘Jan Winther’ for them before devising international speculative fiction hit ‘Johnny Wiking’ and followed up with another SF classic which closely foreshadowed the microscopic missionaries of (Otto Klement, Jerome Bixby and Isaac Asimov’s) Fantastic Voyage in ‘En Resa i Människokroppen’ (1943-1946), before taking over Lennart Ek’s successful super-heroine strip ‘Dotty Virvelvind’ in 1944.

Karlström left comics at the end of the war and returned to illustration and commercial design, working on jet fighters for Saab and trucks for Scania.

Whereas most of his earlier comics were rendered in a passable imitation of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, when he was convinced to produce the Biggles books Karlström adopted a raw, lean version of Hergé’s Ligne Claire style which adds a welcome sense of period veracity to the tales but often offends and upsets Tintin purists…

Biggles and the Golden Bird is set in the early 1930s and begins when the aerial paladins are asked to pilot a new super plane in an attempt to break the world long-distance flying record. Fact freaks might be intrigued to discover that the “Fairview” of this story is closely based on the record-smashing Fairey Long Range Monoplane, which stars in a cool plans and diagrams section at the back that also includes the DeHavilland C-24 Autogiro which also features prominently in this ripping yarn…

When mysterious intruders brazenly steal the Fairview, intelligence supremo General Raymond dispatches Biggles, Algy and Ginger to track them down and retrieve the prototype air-machine. A crashed light plane and a rustic witness point the trio in the direction of Scotland and dashing North in a ministry-provided autogiro (that’s a cross between a plane and an early kind of helicopter) they rendezvous with a fishing boat whose captain also witnessed strange sky shenanigans only to be attacked and overcome…

Their enigmatic adversaries had anticipated the pursuit and laid a trap, but with a typical display of pluck and fortune Ginger turns the tables and drives off the thugs. The real Captain Gilbert then imparts his information and the autogiro brings them to a desolate ruined castle on a rocky headland, where Ginger and Algy are captured by an armed gang whilst poor Biggles plunges over a cliff to certain doom…

Naturally the Ace Aviator saves himself at the last moment and subsequently discovers a sub-sea cavern and deep-sea diving operation just as his pals cunningly escape captivity. Fortuitously meeting up the trio follow their foes and find a sunken U-Boat full of gold…

The uncanny reason for the theft of the Fairview and the mastermind behind it all is revealed when arch-enemy and all-around blackguard Erich von Stalhein arrives to collect the recovered bullion and flee to a new life in distant lands, leading to a blistering battle and spectacular showdown…

Fast and furious, full of fights and hairsbreadth chases – although perhaps a touch formulaic and too steeped in the old-fashioned traditions for grizzled purists – this light and snappy tale would delight newer readers and general action fans and is readily available in both hardback and softcover editions, since the books were re-released in 1983 in advance of the star-studded but controversial British film-flop Biggles: Adventures in Time.
Characters © W.E. Johns (Publications). Text and pictures © 1978 Björn Karlström. English text © 1978 Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

Posted on

I gather that there’s some sort of extended International Sports Day happening here in London over the next few weeks which its Corporate sponsors won’t allow me – or any other individual – to mention under pain of litigation.

Nevertheless, in what I perceive to be the true spirit of modern games – i.e. mercilessly cashing in for all you can get and exploiting the damned thing for all it’s worth – I’m going to dedicate the next couple of weeks to reviewing the works of international creators I might not have got around to for ages under normal circumstances.

As you’d expect, sometimes I’ve had to stretch a point to fulfil my own tacky criteria…

Posted on

The Rainbow Orchid Volume 3 (the Adventures of Julius Chancer)


By Garen Ewing (Egmont UK)
ISBN: 978-1-4052-5599-8

Plucky True Brit Julius Chancer and his fellow daredevil travellers began popping up around 2003 in self-published mini-comics and small press publications  – I wish there was a less loaded or pejorative term for magazines produced by devoted, if unpaid, creators – before migrating online (see www.rainboworchid.co.uk) to rapturous praise from industry and public alike.

Tintin publisher Egmont sagaciously picked up the series and in 2009 released the first part of the rousing trilogy which fabulously referenced old world fantasy romances for this new yarn of gripping globe-girdling, treasure-seeking derring-do, which has quickly become a notable addition to the ranks of magnificent all-ages full-colour adventure albums.

Splendidly extending the appeal of period dramas and classic adventures tales such as Rider Haggard’s safari sagas and Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories, and set in the fabled and fabulous Roaring Twenties, the first two books of the trilogy detailed how Chancer, young but capable assistant to renowned historical researcher and gentleman breeder of orchids Sir Alfred Catesby-Grey, undertook a mission to the wilds of the East in search of a legendary bloom mentioned in legends dating back to Alexander the Great.

Sir Alfred had been approached by Lord Reginald Lawrence, scion of an ancient and noble house, who was duped into an impossible wager by repellent entrepreneur Urkaz Grope. At stake was the “Trembling Sword of Tybalt Stone”; a priceless antique and the seat of the family’s honour since 1445, without which Lord Lawrence would have to surrender all his estates and titles…

To win the wager Lawrence needed an example of Iriode Orchino or the rainbow orchid, a mythical bloom last seen by Alexander over two thousand years ago. Although Catesby-Grey initially pooh-poohed the whole story, Julius was keen to investigate, perhaps as tempted by the prospect of adventure and a large fee as by the urgings of plucky Lady Lily, Lawrence’s daughter and a silent film actress recently returned from Hollywood to the heart of the Empire.

Grope had a highly secret agenda of his own and no principles at all, whilst the vulgarly intrusive journalist William Pickle had no scruples and definitely no fear as he sniffed out news and controversy like an obsessed bloodhound.

Moreover Lily’s Movie Publicity Agent Nathaniel Crumpole always seemed in the thick of whatever trouble was brewing – could even an American be that determinedly naive?

Chancer determined to risk all in tracking down the orchid and, despite a series of viciously calculated ploys by Grope and his gang of cutthroats, set off with Lily and Crumpole for Karachi and the fantastic flower’s last reported whereabouts…

Catesby-Grey once ran a very hush-hush government artefact-hunting department dubbed the Empire Survey Branch, but that ultra-discreet body had fallen upon hard times. When he pursued some enquires amongst his old clandestine colleagues, Sir Alfred found that lack of funding had placed them under the aegis of the military and twisted their working philosophy into a rabid hunt for ancient weapons of mass destruction…

After some deadly clashes with Grope’s murderous fixer Evelyn Crow and her hired thugs, Julius, Lily, Crumpole and pilot Benoit Tayaut reached India, narrowly escaping blazing doom as their aeroplane crashed. Rendezvousing with British Civil Servant Major Fraser-Tipping the explorers began the next stage of their trek with Crow and cronies in hot pursuit…

In England, Pickle, who had first broken the story of the orchid wager, was taken prisoner by an influential and affluent secret society, although his newshound colleague George Scrubbs diligently stayed on his trail whilst Grope’s plans to bully and buy his way into the upper echelons of English Society proceeded apace.

In India, after another brutal attack by Crow’s goons, the voyagers found an ally in Meru, manservant of incredibly aged missionary Father Pinkleton who claimed to have seen an actual rainbow orchid.

Heading into the wastes of Hasan Wahan, Julius and his enlarged party were unaware that they had a traitor in their group. After making one more incredibly lucky and fantastic discovery and nearing the end of their quest, Crow launched another murderous assault and one of our plucky heroes seemingly plunged to his death…

This final instalment opens with the survivors of Chancer’s party recuperating in a native village, when Crumpole – who hadn’t fallen far after hurtling over a cliff – wanders in, accompanied by Sir Alfred and Mr. Drubbin, an agent of the Empire Survey Branch. The pair have rushed to Asia in a desperate hope of finding something valuable enough to save the ESB from closure…

They are stalked by the remorseless Crow who, despite her wounds, is obsessively determined to complete her mission at all costs…

Following Pinkleton’s map the united expedition trudges off into the wilds and eventually reaches the mountainous region of Uskandagadri, from whence Meru originated years before. Drubbin then informs the explorers that they are being followed. Lying in wait, Chancer and Drubbin ambush and capture Crow as in England, Scrubbs – with the grudging assistance of Grope’s disgraced and discharged botanist Newton – infiltrates a meeting of the Black Lion secret society in a disastrous attempt to rescue Pickle and fellow prisoner Eloise Tayaut …

After seven days in the mountains, Chancer’s party find millennial clues left by Alexander and then stumble into a terrifying whirlpool before fortuitously washing up in a lost land of fantastic creatures and small levitating castles.

Unfortunately the warriors manning the flying fort recognise Meru and it’s clear that he is far from welcome…

Once the tragic hidden history of Meru and the incredibly ancient, super-scientific lost kingdom comes out, the explorers decide to escape but become embroiled in unrest caused by Meru’s return. Moreover, Evelyn is still trying to murder Julius. Drubbin, with an agenda of his own, takes the opportunity to pilfer knowledge and weapons from the city’s Great Library – secrets which caused the ultimate destruction of the magnificent civilisation eons ago…

As the explorers flee through subterranean caverns, Julius finally finds the rare bloom he’s been searching for and clashes with Crow one last time.

With the deadline for the wager fast-approaching and the Trembling Sword of Tybalt Stone seemingly lost to Lily and her father, the adventurers pile aboard a flying keep and head for Britain, unaware of the full scope of Grope’s plans.

Luckily Julius picked up a vital scrap of information in his climactic duel with Crow and after crashing to Earth at the British Empire Exhibition – and the moment of Grope’s ultimate triumph – delivers a nasty surprise which completely scuppers the monstrous usurper and resoundingly saves the day…

Enchanting, beguiling, astonishingly authentic and masterfully illustrated in the seductive Ligne Claire style, Garen Ewing’s stunning pastiche of the genre pioneered by Hergé and E.P. Jacobs places this magical yarn amongst the very best of graphic narratives, and in these books he has managed to synthesise something vibrant, vital, fresh and uniquely entertaining for modern readers of all ages.

Pure comics mastery – and where else could you get hot, fresh, thrill-a-minute nostalgia, just like your granddad used to love?

I can’t wait for more – and isn’t that the best test of a perfect book?
© 2012 Garen Ewing. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Stan Lee Presents the Amazing Spider-Man volume 2


By Stan Lee & Steve Ditko, with Jack Kirby (Marvel/Pocket Books)
ISBN: 978-0-67181-444-1

Perhaps I have a tendency to over-think things regarding the world of graphic narrative, but it seems to me that the medium, as much as the message, radically affects the way we interpret our loves and fascinations. Take this pint-sized full-colour treat from 1978.

It’s easy to assume that a quickly resized, repackaged paperback book collection of the early comics extravaganzas was just another Marvel cash-cow in their perennial “flood the marketplace” sales strategy – and maybe it was – but as someone who bought these stories in most of the available formats over the years I have to admit that this compact version has a distinct charm and attraction all its own…

During the Marvel Renaissance of the early 1960’s Stan Lee & Jack Kirby followed the same path which had worked so tellingly for DC Comics, but with less obviously successful results.

This is another brilliant glimpse at how our industry’s gradual inclusion into mainstream literature began and is one more breathtaking paperback package for action fans and nostalgia lovers, offering yet another chance to enjoy some of the best and most influential comics stories of all time.

After a few abortive attempts in the 1960s to storm the shelves of bookstores and libraries, from the mid-1970s Marvel made a concerted and comprehensive effort to get their wares into more socially acceptable formats. As the decade closed, purpose-built graphic collections and a string of new prose adventures tailored to feed into their all-encompassing continuity began oh, so slowly to appear.

Whereas the merits of the latter are a matter for a different review, the company’s careful reformatting of classic comics adventures were generally excellent; a superb and recurring effort to generate back-history primers and a perfect – if perilous – alternative venue to introduce fresh readers to their unique worlds.

The dream project was never better represented than in this classy little crime-busting collection. Marvel was frequently described as “the House that Jack Built” and King Kirby’s contributions are undeniable and inescapable in the creation of a new kind of comicbook story-telling, but there was another unique visionary toiling at Atlas-Comics-as-was: one whose creativity and even philosophy seemed diametrically opposed to the bludgeoning power, vast imaginative scope and clean, broad lines of Kirby’s ever-expanding search for the external and infinite.

Steve Ditko was quiet and unassuming, voluntarily diffident to the point of invisibility, though his work was both subtle and striking.

Innovative, meticulously polished, and often displaying genuine warmth and affection, Ditko’s art and storytelling always managed to capture minute human detail as he ever explored the man within. He found heroism, humour and ultimate evil; all contained within the frail but noble confines of humanity’s scope and consciousness. His drawing could be oddly disquieting… and, when he wanted, certainly scary.

Drawing extremely well-received monster and mystery tales for Stan Lee, Ditko had been given his own title. Amazing Adventures/Amazing Adult Fantasy featured a subtler brand of yarn than Rampaging Aliens and Furry Underpants Monsters which, though individually entertaining, had been slowly losing traction in the world of comics ever since National/DC had successfully reintroduced costumed heroes.

Lee & Kirby had responded with Fantastic Four and the ahead-of-its-time Incredible Hulk but there was no indication of the renaissance to come when the already cancelled Amazing Fantasy #15 cover-featured a brand new and somewhat eerie adventure character.

Of course, by now you’re all aware of how outcast, geeky school kid Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider and, after seeking to cash-in on the astonishing abilities he developed, suffered an irreconcilable personal tragedy and determined henceforward to always use his powers to help those in dire need…

After a shaky start The Amazing Spider-Man quickly became a popular sensation with kids of all ages, rivalling the creative powerhouse that was Lee & Kirby’s Fantastic Four and soon the quirky, charming action-packed comics soap-opera would become the model for an entire generation of younger heroes elbowing aside the staid, (relatively) old costumed-crimebusters of previous publications.

This second resized, repackaged Fights ‘n’ Tights bonanza (reprising Amazing Spider-Man #7-13 from 1963-1964) opens, after the mandatory Stan Lee Prologue, with an encore appearance of the Wall-crawler’s first super-powered foe, as a murderous septuagenarian flying bandit at first defeated his juvenile nemesis before falling to the Web-spinner’s boundless bravery and ingenuity in a spectacular duel above the city in ‘The Return of the Vulture’.

Fun and youthful hi-jinks were a signature feature of the series, as was Parker’s budding romance with “older woman” Betty Brant, a secretary at the Daily Bugle where Peter Parker worked part-time.

Such “Salad days” exuberance was the underlying drive in #8′s lead tale ‘The Living Brain!’ when an ambulatory robot calculator threatened to expose Spider-Man’s secret identity before running amok at beleaguered Midtown High, just as Parker was finally beating the stuffings out of school bully and personal gadfly Flash Thompson.

This riotous romp was accompanied by ‘Spiderman Tackles the Torch!’ (a short and sweet vignette drawn by Jack Kirby and inked by Ditko) wherein a boisterous wall-crawler gate-crashed a beach party thrown by the flaming hero’s girlfriend… with explosive consequences.

Amazing Spider-Man #9 was a qualitative step-up in dramatic terms as Peter’s aged Aunt May was revealed to be chronically ill – adding to the lad’s financial woes – and the action was supplied by ‘The Man Called Electro!’ a super-criminal with grand aspirations.

Spider-Man was always a loner, never far from the dark, grimy streets filled with small-time thugs and criminals and with this tale, wherein he also quells a prison riot single handed, Ditko’s preference for tales of gangersterism began to show through; a predilection confirmed in #10′s ‘The Enforcers!’, a classy mystery where a masked mastermind known as the Big Man used a position of trust at the Bugle to organize all the New York mobs into one unbeatable army against decency.

Longer plot-strands were also introduced as Betty mysteriously vanished (her fate to be revealed in the next issue and here the next chapter), but most fans remember this one for the spectacularly climactic seven-page fight scene in an underworld chop-shop that has still never been topped for action-choreography.

The taint of tragedy again touched Parker with a magical two-part adventure ‘Turning Point’ and ‘Unmasked by Dr. Octopus!’ which saw the return of the lethally deranged and deformed scientist – complete with formidable mentally-controlled metal tentacles – and the disclosure of a long-hidden secret which had haunted poor Betty Brant for years.

The dark, doom-filled tale of extortion and excoriating tension stretched from Philadelphia to the Bronx Zoo and cannily tempered the trenchant melodrama with stunning fight scenes in unusual and exotic locations, before culminating in a truly staggering super-powered duel as only the masterful Ditko could orchestrate it.

This tension-drenched tiny tome concludes with the introduction of a new super-threat and ‘The Menace of Mysterio!’ as a seemingly eldritch bounty-hunter hired by Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson to capture Spider-Man eventually revealed his own dark agenda.

Of course the menace was only ended after another mind-boggling battle, this time through the various exotic sets and props of a TV studio…

These mini-masterpieces of drama, action and suspense immaculately demonstrated the indomitable nature of this perfect American hero, and I suppose in the final reckoning how you come to the material is largely irrelevant; just as long as you do…

These immortal epics are available in numerous formats.
© 1978 Marvel Comics Group. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Rogue


By Howard Mackie & Mike Wieringo (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-0171-0

The mutant mystery woman known as Rogue began life as a super-villain and member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants: a disturbed young girl cursed with a power that stole traits, abilities and memories from anybody who touched her skin.

It was an ability she could not control or even turn off and any overlong skin-to-skin contact resulted in the victim falling into a coma with their entire history and essence drained into her. Rogue then became a reluctant jailer with stolen powers and personalities locked in her head forever.

After doing just such to Ms. Marvel whilst a member of the Brotherhood, Rogue joined the X-Men in sheer desperation and slowly became a trusted team-player, but she still had her secrets…

Played as a “bad-girl” and mystery woman for years, Rogue grew to become one of the most popular characters in the excessively large cast, and in 1995 won her own beautifully illustrated 4-issue miniseries which at last revealed a few more tantalising secrets, whilst dragging her through a very personal crisis that struck right to the heart of the burgeoning and increasingly convoluted X-franchise continuity…

Written by Howard Mackie, beautifully drawn by the late and much-missed Mike Wieringo and inked by X-Men veteran Terry Austin, the tale opens with ‘An Affair to Remember’ as the mighty, mysterious mutant is called to Mississippi and the bedside of a comatose boy named Cody.

Meanwhile in New Orleans the deadly External Candra attends a funeral for the recently deceased ruler of the Assassins’ Guild. The all-powerful mutant goddess bears the X-Men a grudge and wants to use leader-elect Bella Donna to exact her vengeance…

Donna’s ex-husband is Remy Lebeau and the Assassin-mistress has her own scores to settle with the man now known as Gambit and his new paramour…

Suffering from a love that cannot be realised, Gambit and Rogue have grown close. Now she reveals how, as kids, Cody was the first boy to kiss her and how her burgeoning power stole his entire vitality in that first tender moment, plunging him into an irreversible slumber and locking his memories within her…

Now Cody’s body is failing, but as Rogue visits him super-powered assassins attack and steal his inert body. Bella Donna, herself a victim of Rogue’s memory-stealing curse, appears as the assassins flee and warns the heartbroken mutant that everything she cares for will be taken from her…

In ‘Choices’ Rogue gets a much-needed heads-up from creole witch-woman Tante Mattie – currently the only thing keeping Cody from lingering death – and a warning to rush to Gambit’s side, whilst in New Orleans the Mistress of Death begins to realise the folly of her relationship with the autocratic External…

When Gambit is ambushed by Bella Donna’s agents, Rogue spectacularly saves his bacon but cannot bring herself to accept his help in finding Cody.

Flying alone to “The Big Easy” she plunges straight into an army of Bella Donna’s most lethal guildsmen, all powerfully augmented by Candra’s unlimited mutant might…

‘The Gauntlet’ finds Rogue battling hard and hopelessly, with Gambit frantically rushing to her aid, despite an injunction over his head. When he married Bella, Lebeau was an heir of the Thieves Guild and their union was intended to end a centuries-old rivalry, but his wilful nature scotched those plans and now he is forbidden from entering New Orleans on pain of death.

Despite one last warning from an old comrade, Gambit plunges heedlessly into the fray and is quickly overcome, but against all odds Rogue has battled her way through and is looking for a final confrontation…

One the double-dealing Candra is eager to facilitate, as she transports the exhausted Rogue to Bella Donna’s lair, before neutralising the frenzied foes’ amazing abilities and forcing them to battle with nothing more than fists and nails and mortal muscles…

The end comes brutally in ‘Back to Life!’ as, on the edge of victory, the Mistress of Assassins is again betrayed by the ruthlessly manipulative External, whose true interest all along has been Gambit…

Meanwhile the severely-wounded Rogue has finally overcome Bella Donna and still found determination enough to face and thwart Candra…

…And in the still and silent aftermath the battered but unbowed Southern Siren is granted one final moving moment with Cody…

Furiously fast-paced and action-stuffed, this gloriously illustrated, mile-a-minute mutant mayhem – with a crazed cod-Cajun flavour to it – is a fearsomely full-on Fights ‘n’ Tights thriller that will astound and delight all fans of the genre.
© 1995 Marvel Entertainment Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Showcase Presents the Losers Volume 1


By Robert Kanigher, Ross Andru & Mike Esposito, John Severin, Ken Barr & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-3437-9-8

The Losers were an elite unit of American soldiers formed by amalgamating three old war series together. Gunner and Sarge (later supplemented by the Fighting Devil Dog “Pooch”) were Pacific-based Marines; debuting in All-American Men of War #67, (March1959) and running for fifty issues in Our Fighting Forces (#45-94, May 1959-August 1965), whilst Captain Johnny Cloud was a native American fighter pilot who shot down his first bogie in All-American Men of War #82. The “Navaho Ace” flew solo until issue #115, (1966) and entered a brief limbo until the final component of the Land/Air/Sea team was filled by Captain Storm, a disabled PT Boat skipper who fought on despite his wooden left leg in his own eponymous 18-issue series from 1964 to 1967. All three series were created by comicbook warlord Robert Kanigher.

The characters had all pretty much passed their individual use-by dates when they were teamed-up as guest-stars in a Haunted Tank tale in 1969 (G.I. Combat #138 October), but these “Losers” found a new resonance together in the relevant, disillusioned, cynical Vietnam years and their somewhat nihilistic, doom-laden group anti-hero adventures took the lead spot in Our Fighting Forces #123 for a run of blistering yarns written by Kanigher and illustrated by such giants as Ken Barr, Russ Heath, Sam Glanzman, John Severin and Joe Kubert.

With the tag-line “even when they win, they lose” the team saw action all over the globe, winning critical acclaim and a far-too-small but passionate following. This magnificent monochrome tome collects that introductory tale from the October 1969 G.I. Combat and the complete formative run of suicidal missions from Our Fighting Forces #123-150 (January /February 1970-August/September 1974), after which comicbook messiah Jack Kirby took over the series for a couple of years and made it, as always, uniquely his own. For that seminal set you must see Jack Kirby’s The Losers Omnibus (no really, you must. That’s an order, Soljer…)

Kanigher often used his stories as a testing ground for new series ideas, and G.I. Combat #138 (October 1969) introduced one of his most successful. ‘The Losers!’, illustrated by the magnificent hyper-realist Russ Heath, saw the Armoured Cavalry heroes of the Haunted Tank encounter a sailor, two marines and grounded pilot Johnny Cloud, each individually and utterly demoralised after negligently losing all the men under their respective commands.

Guilt-ridden and broken, the battered relics were inspired by tank commander Jeb Stuart who fanned their sense of duty and desire for vengeance until the crushed survivors regained a measure of respect and fighting spirit by uniting in a combined suicide-mission to destroy a Nazi Radar tower…

By the end of 1969 Dirty Dozen knock-off Hunter’s Hellcats had long outlived their shelf-life in Our Fighting Forces and with #123 (January/February 1970) evacuated in the epilogue ‘Exit Laughing’ which segued directly into ‘No Medals No Graves’, illustrated by Scottish artist Ken Barr (whose stunning work in paint and line has graced everything from Commando Picture Library covers, through Marvel DC and Warren, to film, book and TV work) and picked up the tale as Storm, Cloud, Gunner and Sarge sat in enforced, forgotten idleness until the aforementioned Lieutenant Hunter recommended them for a dirty, dangerous job no sane military men would touch…

It appears Storm was a dead ringer for a British agent – even down to the wooden leg – and the Brass needed the washed-up sailor to impersonate their vital human resource. The only problem is that they wanted him to be captured, withstand Nazi torture for 48 hours and then break, delivering damaging disinformation about a vast commando raid that wouldn’t be happening…

The agent would do it himself but he was actually dead…

And there was even work for his despondent companions as a disposable diversionary tactic added to corroborate the secrets Storm should hopefully betray after two agonising days…

Overcoming all expectation the “Born Losers” triumphed and even got away intact, after which Ross Andru & Mike Esposito became the regular art team in #124 when ‘Losers Take All’ showed how even good luck was bad, after a mission to liberate the hostage king of a Nazi-subjugated nation saw them doing all the spectacular hard work before losing their prize to Johnny-come-lately regular soldiers…

‘Daughters of Death’ in #125 found the suicide squad initially fail to rescue a scientist’s children only to blisteringly return and rectify their mistakes, Of course, by then the nervous tension had cracked the Professor’s mind, rendering him useless to the Allied cause…

‘A Lost Town’ opened with The Losers undergoing a Court Martial for desertion. Reviled for allowing the obliteration of a French village, they faced execution until an old blind man and his two grandkids revealed what really happened in the hellish conflagration of Perdu, whilst in ‘Angels Over Hell’s Corner’ a brief encounter with a pretty WREN (Women’s Royal Navy Service) in Blitz-beleaguered Britain drew the unit into a star-crossed love affair that even death itself could not thwart…

In a portmanteau tale which disclosed more details of the events which created The Losers, Our Fighting Forces #128 described the ‘7 11 War’ wherein a hot streak during a casual game of craps presaged disastrous calamity for any unlucky bystander near to the Hard Luck Heroes, after which ‘Ride the Nightmare’ saw Cloud endure horrifying visions and crack up on a mission to liberate a captive rocket scientist, before the team again became a living diversion in #130’s ‘Nameless Target’. However, by getting lost and hitting the wrong target, The Losers gifted the Allies with their greatest victory to date…

John Severin inked Andru in OFF #131, in preparation to taking over the full art chores on the series, and ‘Half a Man’ hinted at darker, grittier tales to come when Captain Storm’s disability and guilty demons began to overwhelm him. Considering himself a jinx, the sea dog attempted to sacrifice himself on a mission to Norway but had not counted on his own brutal will to survive…

Back in London, Gunner & Sarge were temporarily reunited with ‘Pooch: the Winner’ (#132 by Kanigher & Severin), prompting a fond if perilous recollection of an exploit against the Japanese in the distant Pacific. However, fearing their luck was contagious, the soldiers sadly decided the beloved “Fighting Devil Dog” was better off without them…

Dispatched to India in #133’s ‘Heads or Tails’, The Losers were ordered to assassinate the “the Unholy Three” – Japanese Generals responsible for untold slaughter amongst the British and native populations. In sweltering lethal jungles, they only succeeded thanks to the determined persistence and sacrifice of a Sikh child hiding a terrible secret.

Our Fighting Forces #134 saw them brutally fighting from shelled house to hedgerow in Europe until Gunner cracked. When even his partners couldn’t get him to pick up a gun again it took the heroic example of indomitable wounded soldiers to show him who ‘The Real Losers’ were…

Issue #135 began a superb extended epic which radically shook up the team after ‘Death Picks a Loser’. Following an ill-considered fortune telling incident in London, the squad shipped out to Norway to organise a resistance cell, despite efforts to again sideline the one-legged Storm. They rendezvoused with Pastor Tornsen and his daughter Ona and began by mining the entire village of Helgren, determined to deny the Nazis a stable base of operations.

Even after the Pastor sacrificed himself to allow the villagers and Americans time to escape, the plan stumbled when the explosives failed to detonate and Storm, convinced he was a liability, detonated the bombs by hand…

Finding only his wooden leg in the flattened rubble, The Losers were further stunned when the vengeful orphan Ona volunteered to take the tragic sailor’s place in the squad of Doomed Men…

The ice-bound retreat from Helgren stalled in #136 when she offered herself as a ‘Decoy for Death’ leading German tanks into a lethal ambush, after which Cloud soloed in a mission to the Pacific where he found himself inspiring natives to resist the Japanese as a resurrected ‘God of the Losers’…

Reunited in OFF #138, the Bad Luck Brigade became ‘The Targets’ when sent to uncover the secret of a new Nazi naval weapon sinking Allied shipping. Once more using Ona as bait they succeed in stunning fashion, but also pick up enigmatic intel regarding a crazy one-eyed, peg-legged marauder attacking both Enemy and Allied vessels off Norway…

Our Fighting Forces #139 introduced ‘The Pirate’, when a band of deadly reivers attacked a convoy ship carrying The Losers and supplies to the Norwegian resistance. Barely escaping with their lives the Squad was then sent to steal a sample of a top secret jet fuel but discovered the Sea Devil had beaten them to it.

Forced to bargain with the merciless mercenary for the prototype, they found themselves in financial and combat competition with an equally determined band of German troops who simply wouldn’t take no for an answer…

‘Lost… One Loser’ revealed that Ona had been with Storm at the end and was now plagued by a survivor’s guilty nightmares. Almost convincing her comrades that he still lived, she led the team on another mission into Norway, the beautiful traumatised girl again used herself as a honey trap to get close to a German bigwig and found incontrovertible proof that Storm was dead when she picked up his battered, burned dog-tag…

Still troubled, she commandeered a plane and flew back to her home to assassinate her Quisling uncle in #141’s ‘The Bad Penny’, only to be betrayed to the town’s German garrison and saved by the pirate who picked that moment to raid the occupied village for loot.

Even with the other Losers in attendance the Pirate’s rapacious rogues were ultimately triumphant but when the crippled corsair snatched Ona’s most treasured possession, the dingy dog-tag unlocked many suppressed memories and Storm (this is comics: who else could it be?) remembered everything…

Answers to his impossible survival came briskly in OFF #142 and ‘½ a Man’ concentrated on the Captain’s struggle to be reinstated. Shipping out to the Far East on a commercial vessel, he was followed by his concerned comrades and stumbled into an Arabian insurrection with three war-weary guardian angels discreetly dogging his heel.

Back with The Losers again in #143, Storm was soon involved in another continued saga as ‘Diamonds are for Never!’ found the Fatalistic Five sent to Africa to stop an SS unit from hijacking industrial diamonds for their failing war effort. However, even after liberating a captured mine from the enemy, the gems eluded the team as a pack of monkeys made off with the glittering prizes…

Hot on their trail in ‘The Lost Mission’ the pursuers stumble onto a Nazi ambush of British soldiers and determine to take on their task – demolishing an impregnable riverside fortress…

Despite being successful the Squad are driven inland and become lost in the desert where they stumble into a French Foreign Legion outpost and join its last survivor in defending ‘A Flag for Losers’ from a merciless German horde and French traitor…

Still lost in the trackless wastes they survived ‘The Forever Walk!’ in #146, battling equally-parched Nazis for the last precious drops of water and losing one of their own to a terrifying sandstorm…

In ‘The Glory Road!’ the sun-baked survivors encountered the last survivor of a German ambush, but British Major Cavendish seemed unable to differentiate between his early days as a star of patriotic films and grim reality and when a German patrol captures them all the mockery proves too much for the troubled martinet…

Again lost and without water, in #148 ‘The Last Charge’ saw The Losers save a desert princess and give her warrior father a chance to fulfil a prophecy and die in glorious battle against the Nazi invaders, whilst #149 briefly reunited the squad with their long-missing member before tragically separating again in ‘A Bullet for a Traitor!’

This volume concludes with ‘Mark our Graves’ in #150 as The Losers linked up with members of The Jewish Brigade (a special British Army unit) who all paid a steep price to uncover a secret Nazi supply dump…

Although a superbly action-packed and moving tale, it was an inauspicious end to the run and one which held no hint of the creative culture-shock which would explode in the pages of the next instant issue when the God of American Comicbooks blasted in to create a unique string of “Kirby Klassics”…

With covers by Joe Kubert, Frank Thorne and Neal Adams, this grimly efficient, superbly understated and beautifully rendered collection is a brilliant example of how war comics changed forever in the 1970s and proves that these stories still pack a TNT punch few other forms of entertainment can hope to match.
© 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 2012 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.