Agiel7
03-03-09, 03:32 AM
There's a great bunch of comics written by Garth Ennis of "Preacher," and "The Boys" reminiscent of Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun's "Charley's War" in terms of the amount of research put into it called "War Story." Among which include two stories related to the Battle of the Atlantic.
The first is called "Nightingale," which is about a British destroyer serving as a convoy escort through the Artic Circle. A battle with a German U-boat also ensues, and its cool to see the other side of the hunt. Its drawn by David Lloyd, who is probably best known for doing the art of Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta."
The second, while not related to U-boats, is about the exploits of a Spitfire flyer turned CAMship pilot. Whats a CAMship you ask? Well, with the U-boats doing a number to the British Empire's navy, there was a dangerous shortage of escort carriers in the Atlantic in order to defend against Luftwaffe torpedo bombers. So, the Brits come up with, in the words of Garth Ennis, "...a very British solution..." (i.e. bootstrapped) to the problem. This involved attaching a rocket catapult to the bow of a cargo ship that could launch a Hawker Hurricane in the event that torpedo bombers were detected. Unfortunately, the one fatal flaw to this idea was that while they had a way to launch the plane, the plane sure as hell couldn't come back the way it came. So the lucky bugger had a choice of either heading for the nearest mainland airstrip (this being the middle of the Artic Circle convoy run, this usually wasn't an option) or bailing near the convoy and pray that he gets picked up before he and his emergency dinghy gets run over by one of the convoy ships or freeze to death.
Bunch of other great stories in this series as well. My favorite by far is called "Condors," which tells the story of a shot-down German Luftwaffe fighter pilot, an English socialist, an Irish Republican turned fascist, and a Spanish freedom fighter who find themselves taking cover in the same shell crater and tell their stories of where they came from and why they fight while the Spanish Civi War rages around them. This was probably the first time I've cried from reading a comic book since "Persepolis."
The first is called "Nightingale," which is about a British destroyer serving as a convoy escort through the Artic Circle. A battle with a German U-boat also ensues, and its cool to see the other side of the hunt. Its drawn by David Lloyd, who is probably best known for doing the art of Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta."
The second, while not related to U-boats, is about the exploits of a Spitfire flyer turned CAMship pilot. Whats a CAMship you ask? Well, with the U-boats doing a number to the British Empire's navy, there was a dangerous shortage of escort carriers in the Atlantic in order to defend against Luftwaffe torpedo bombers. So, the Brits come up with, in the words of Garth Ennis, "...a very British solution..." (i.e. bootstrapped) to the problem. This involved attaching a rocket catapult to the bow of a cargo ship that could launch a Hawker Hurricane in the event that torpedo bombers were detected. Unfortunately, the one fatal flaw to this idea was that while they had a way to launch the plane, the plane sure as hell couldn't come back the way it came. So the lucky bugger had a choice of either heading for the nearest mainland airstrip (this being the middle of the Artic Circle convoy run, this usually wasn't an option) or bailing near the convoy and pray that he gets picked up before he and his emergency dinghy gets run over by one of the convoy ships or freeze to death.
Bunch of other great stories in this series as well. My favorite by far is called "Condors," which tells the story of a shot-down German Luftwaffe fighter pilot, an English socialist, an Irish Republican turned fascist, and a Spanish freedom fighter who find themselves taking cover in the same shell crater and tell their stories of where they came from and why they fight while the Spanish Civi War rages around them. This was probably the first time I've cried from reading a comic book since "Persepolis."