One day my comics guy recommended this book to me. The thing that sold me was that Garth Ennis had given it a cover blurb. Then I realized that it was an old UK comic book, and that the art was fan-fucking-tastic. So I bought it.
It took me a while to get around to it, but when I did I was awestruck. This is a great war comic, but it's also very unconventional. You can very much see that Ennis's own war books were inspired directly by this story. You see, the heroes of this one are Nazis.
Right. I know. Once I realized that they were the ones I should be rooting for, I was turned off by it. But somehow I wound up liking this group of no-gooders, as BATTLE described them. Only one of them is a true Nazi, and none of them seem to be aware of the genocide their beloved Fuhrer was committing. No, these guys were doomed to the Punishment Battalions. They were called Strafbattalion in real life. And no, they didn't deal out punishment. Being in the squad WAS punishment. The Nazis made sure that these battalions were made up of fuckups and criminals and psychopaths because their job was to NOT survive. High Command sent these poor bastards into the wintry hellscape of Russia to soften up the Eastern Front. The expectation was that they would give their lives to kill as many Russians as possible so the real soldiers could sweep through and kill the remaining combatants.
As you can imagine, being forced into a situation like that did not do well for their morale. They had to develop tough skins and insanely dark senses of humor to survive.
And that's what our main characters do in DEATH SQUAD. These are funny bastards, but their humor is viciously evil. It's very clear that they don't want to be doing these things. In fact, when they finally get rewarded with a vacation, it turns into a brutal battle for survival against British troops raiding a town where the Germans placed their laziest soldiers. The Brits didn't count on Death Squad being there . . .
There are genuinely uncomfortable moments here, like when Grandad has to execute his idol and friend. Or when one of the members of Death Squad gets his back broken by a vicious Russian torturer only to be taken captive by freedom fighters because he looks like one of the Fuhrer's most trusted henchmen. And . . . holy fuck. The writer had this published under a penname. He says it was because he already had other stories being told in BATTLE, but I highly suspect that he didn't want his name connected to a group of Nazi protagonists.
Reading this collection of all the BATTLE stories of these no-gooders kind of makes me want to write about a similar group, but definitely not from the Nazi perspective. I'd kind of like trying my hand at writing an American version of these guys because when immediate death is inevitable, nothing is sacred. It would be interesting to sit in the mind of a person like that.
It's a fun story. The bonus chapters suck, but the story itself? Pure fun.
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