Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Graphic History: Archangel


'Sbeen a busy week, so, once again, I'm going to keep this one short. I was hoping to go a little longer before going to the WWII well (because so many people dip into it in historical fiction), but War Stories: Archangel by Garth Ennis and Gary Erskine is such a great shorter piece, I thought it was worth doing now quickly. So:
  • The three panels above give the hook, which grabbed me the first time I read it. Camships protected convoys in WWII. They were launched from smaller boats like a catapult when a German squadron came. There was usually one to a convoy. And they had no place to land. Think on that. No. Place. To. Land. You know, except the North Atlantic. Powerful hook.
  • So what kind of a person pilots one of these things? He's either got to be crazy, or just plain dumb unlucky. Ennis goes for the second, which actually works very well for the story, because flying the camship (which is what the story is about) is only one of a series of escalating disasters for the lead character. One of the others? The lead gets assigned to the camship for (unintentionally) shooting his own officer in the air -- a documented problem that doesn't often get addressed in war fiction, and certainly not comically.
  • This is the lightest of Ennis's War Stories series (which comprises eight one-shots so far, collected in two trade paperbacks).
  • One excellent sequence is a montage -- four or five panels in rapid succession, each just another instructor explaining just how bat$#!+ crazy flying one of these things is.
  • Ennis does the appendix thing with these, and I think it works. Talking about what you tried to get right and what you deliberately changed definitely helps sell the "painless history" part of your historical fiction. More on this later, as this is one of those things I'm wrestling with.
  • That's it for right now. Like I said, short. But I enjoy the hell out of this story.

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