American war comics have never been all that great. Most were unspeakably awful and near the top of the list of offenders is Sgt. Rock. His ludicrous band of heroes wandered the pages of US comics shooting Germans like mayflies, each one dressed in a costume so ridiculous that it felt like the Village People had gone to war. But, for all the dire writing, this was a kids comic. It was meant to be unrealistic, meant to be fun not clever. Now Billy Tucci brings us the Lost Battalion, a comic aiming for realism.
Good God but it misses by a mile.
Like so much American realism it falls into the trap of mistaking tiny details for great truths. Thus we see beautifully rendered planes, tanks and men. The uniforms, bar Sgt. Rock's motley crew, are authentic. It looks real, but it never feels real.
The artwork is detailed to the point of blandness. Panels collapse all over each other in a soggy mess. The limited colour palette leeches energy from the characters, everything becoming one great grey-green splodge. Not a single panel stands out, not a single one is memorable. The details intrude everywhere, fussy and over-neat. The poses are all too-stiff, like a book filled with mannequins. Mannequins in superb detail but mannequins.
Facial expressions seem to barely exist. Sgt. Rock in particular has clearly had plastic surgery done to give him a permament scowl. His face barely moves during the whole comic. Is he sad? Angry? Hurt? I can't tell and neither can you because Sgt. Rock scowling in conversation is the same as Sgt. Rock scowling at Germans as he mows them down in their hundreds. He has no emotions, no character, just beard stubble and a big gun. He's such a distillation of the hard-assed sergeant that he becomes that cliche, losing any sense of character into an archetype.
The rest of Easy Company are the same. Each one is a single character attribute taken to such extremes of blandness that caring is impossible and I began to feel a creeping resentment at these bland shadow-people. Where are the GI's, where are the men who fought? Why are these dull pretenders wearing their uniforms and carrying their guns?
Other characters are much the same. Witness the ludicrous comic Frenchman, incapable of speaking in anything but a comedy patois of French. He might as well wear a sign saying, "I Billy Tucci did research." He has no role but to glorify this research because his character, like the traditional single Briton shoved into other US war media, is a single archetype existing only as a sop to those nations. Look little Frenchies, here's a Frenchman, aren't we being fair?
No, no they aren't.
No poilou him, the token Frenchmen is a dreadfully dull character that I found almost offensive. He'd pop up every few pages to say something dreadfully silly, at one point quoting Marshal Foch to everyone as he charges forwards shooting! Aside from the impracticalities of a Frenchman having boned up on his History Channel the very notion is so ludicrous in a book claiming so hard to be authentic that I had to supress a giggle. Maybe Billy Tucci really thinks this stiff, swear-word less vision of war, where men are men and Great Moral Lessons are learnes, where nobody shits themseles and dies screaming in the bracken, calling for their mother, is war.
It reminds me of nothing so much as those same stiff illustrations and stories you'd find in Boy's Own in the nineteen-noughties. Pluck and derring do, fiendish enemies and brave actions. Mock heroic poses. Reality barely hovers into sight. This is an onanistic celebration of some sort of fictional spirit of the American soldier, some weird fever-image Tucci has developed of the GI from reading too much Stephen Ambrose.
Watch the introduction of the Nisei, Japanese-American soldiers. Another sop, another set of sterotypes. Not one soldier is racist to them. Not one racial epithet. Not even a reflection on their race at all. Every GI in the book is clearly not only cosmopolitan but forgiving, generous and post-Civil Rights. Internment camps? What are those?
And here we reach the real climax of Tucci's failure. This is a book about the GI, the common Joe. But ehere is he? The GI's Tucci gives us are so perfect, with their little dashes of period detail ("I did my research! Look! Admire! Praise!"), that they are completelly souless. The spirit of the GI is absent. The dialogue is stilted, the captions dull, the words stilted. These men could be anyone, anywhere. They are GI Joe's: oddly neutered men, dressed up to fit the occasion.
Tucci is clearly a devotee of Stephen Ambrose rather than Paul Fussell and it shows.
The Germans meanwhile, well, they're Saturday morning cartoon villains led by weak be-spectacled types and aristocrats (and if America wants to teach us anything, its that aristocrats are all weakling fools). The landser never even hoves into view. They're there are a landscape for the Americans to be heroic and patriotic on.
Worst though is a phrase towards the end. The German General, commisserating with himself talks about the American "Lost Battalion" from WW1 (there was a very dull film made about them recently). In his words they "held, thus allowing the Allies to exploit the pocket and win the Great War." How he asks, can this have happened again.
At this point the desire to burn the comic began to mount.
The Lost Battalion in WW1 played a role but a tiny, tiny role. The Allied victory in the First World War was not down to some single tiny battalion, no matter how impressive. It was down to four years of death, down to Allied reform, down to a British Army that with Franco-American help launched the biggest offensive of WW1, an offensive that crushed the Imperial German Army utterly. Perhaps this sounds like Euro-whining. Maybe, but then how would an American (or any historically aware person) react to someone saying that the victory in Normandy in '44 was down only to the battle for Hill 112?
If you're going to go for realism at least get it right...
(Oh, and did I mention the hilarious Deus Ex Machina ending as US planes annhilate the Germans in a precision strike, allowing Easy Company to attack and win. Beacause as we all know, air strikes solve wars!)
