Gerry Finley-Day is an odd specimen from the stable of the original 2000 AD writers. Hugely important, of course. When Rebellion held their celebratory events for the 45th year of 2000 AD, they published only two writer-based collections: one for Judge Dredd co-creator John Wagner, a gimme if there ever was one; and one for Finley-Day, whose work on Rogue Trooper alone would be enough to guarantee his place in British comics history. Add in his work as co-creator of The V.C.s, Black Hawk and Ant Wars, as well as serving as a writer on Invasion! and Dan Dare, and you can certainly understand why he’s highly regarded by readers of prime SF comics. And yet… there was always something about him that didn’t quite click with the 2000 AD spirit; a certain old-fashioned approach that stuck out like a perfectly clean thumb amongst his grimy pals.
Finley-Day was already a steady old hand by the time the House of Tharg was established in 1977, with experience in writing for both girls' and boys' magazines - from Tammy to Battle Picture Weekly. You can see examples of his early work in collections like The Sarge and Rat Pack: Guns, Guts and Glory, and ‘steady’ is as good description as any. These are fine comics, for what they try to be, but none of them stick out. Rat Pack, an obvious Dirty Dozen knock-off, is too clean for a story centered on a group of supposed scoundrels, and Finley-Day took the same steady-handed approach to most of his 2000 AD stuff. It was fun, but just ‘fun.’
Wagner’s Dredd was anything but typical in its approach to law and order; Pat Mills’ various serials likewise existed within familiar genre frameworks, from the cowboy story to the disaster tale, but arrived with baked-in anti-establishment aggression. Rogue Trooper and the V.C.s, for all their SF scenery, didn’t have that air of newness and danger about them. They had great ideas; the manner in which Rogue Trooper managed to put the round peg of a lone-man-on-a-mission story into the square hole of team banter through bio-chips1 was a strong gimmick, but the execution always felt safe. Traditional.
You can see much of Finley-Day’s style, for good or ill, in the collected Fiends of the Eastern Front, just reprinted (with some more recent stories added to plump up the page count) after years of unavailability. True to form, the original serial—which ran in 2000 AD in 1980—has a pretty great high concept. A Romanian unit, led by the sinister Captain Constanta, joins WWII on the side of the Germans as they invade the Soviet Union. It won't surprise you too much to learn that this unit, which only fights at night and tends to survive encounters that would kill any normal man, is composed entirely of vampires. The fact that the protagonist is a German soldier, who must come to term with the horrors serving alongside him while disregarding the horror he serves under, is a powerful idea that the story constantly undermines by ignoring it. This protagonist, one Hans Schmitt, is as typical as his name; that he serves the Nazi war machine makes not a bit of difference in the story. The war in the Soviet Union is just a setting, a recognizable historical location, a place Finley-Day probably recalled from one of his pre-2000 AD works.2
Still, it’s a strong enough concept to power a straightforward serial, especially a short one.3 And anyway, whatever lacks in the script is more than made up for by the art of Carlos Ezquerra, whom I hope is someone who needs no introduction by this point. He is one of those rare artists, like Stan Sakai and Sergio Aragonés, who seemed to have arrived fully formed, not losing a step until his death in 2018 at a too-young 70 years of age. I've read thousands of Ezquerra's pages, and I don’t think I can recall a single bad one. Some of his later work, done while the man was battling cancer, wasn't has polished as his prime period, and there’s a particular stretch of Judge Dredd (see the "Wilderlands" story, 1994, in particular) where new computer coloring clashes terribly with his style, but his pencils were always good. From his particular jagged line, easily identifiable but never imitated, to his immaculate structuring of the page,4 Ezquerra was consistently great at his job. All while working at such an insane pace5 that many of us (myself included) took him for granted. A Mike McMahon or a Brian Bolland page was a rare treasure; Ezquerra hit it out of the park so often we learned to expect it. We almost grew bored with it.
Reading through Fiends of the Eastern Front is a good reminder that Ezquerra was much more than a Judge Dredd artist. The harsh landscapes here almost appear cut into the page, black jagged lines like wounds in reality. He makes the world feel hostile, the contrast high between the snowy ground and the blackness that always envelops the characters - unsurprisingly, most of the action here takes place at night.
There was always a sinister edge to Ezquerra’s work, even when he was doing ‘plain’ war stories. Check out the way he draws the background in the mostly forgotten 1980 Battle Action short “The Iceman” (collected in The Art of Carlos Ezquerra), in which two soldiers leave black footsteps in white snow as they’re making their way towards the wounded trees ahead of them, as if unknowingly stepping into hell. In Fiends of the Eastern Front, Ezquerra prioritizes this uncanny atmosphere; Captain Constanta's constant shifting of forms, from man to bat to wolf to ghostly wraith, is another sign that reality is out of balance. Schmitt would like to believe in concrete reality, the glory of the fatherland and the superiority of the German war machine, but finds himself in a world gone mad.
Years later, 2000 AD would move entirely to color, and Ezquerra’s art would take another step towards the horrific, most notably in his spectacularly grim work on 1990's "Necropolis". In that story, the usual black comedy of Judge Dredd gives way to a true sense of revulsion, page after page of hopeless victims being ground to pulp by supernatural powers they cannot hope to contain. Of further note is a more cartoonish take on the vampire theme, 1988's “Costa Del Blood,” which mixes the classical Universal vampire design and atmosphere with the world of Dredd; again, taking a one-note story and elevating through sheer heroic artwork. Similarly, Fiends of the Eastern Front may not have been written with depth in mind, but Ezquerra makes it deep anyway. He supercharges the story with pencil and brush, locating the actual sensation of fear in something built on familiar cliché.
Yet despite ending as decisively as anything in 2000 AD history, you can’t keep a good (bad) vampire down. Hans Schmitt is allowed the dignity of death, so that readers are spared more of his personality-free antics, but the Captain Constanta character would be brought back several times, sometimes in the form of stories from elsewhere in the historical record. It’s not like the world lacks wars you can slot him into. "Stalingrad" (2006) by David Bishop6 & Colin MacNeil is another World War II effort, this time from the Russian point of view. It’s a pretty confused affair that keeps throwing new ideas at the reader—an anti-vampire unit fighting with silver sickles, a giant Golem brought to life by a communist Rabbi—that feels particularly disjointed in the manner it jumps between its narrator's framing story and the main action.
This is a follow-up that feels more like a cover version of the original story than an attempt to do something new with the same elements. It hits many of the same beats, from a German soldier slowly coming to realize who his been serving with to the climactic revelation of a vampire hiding under a mask of human skin, but in trying to make this iteration more 'mature'7 it only manages to lose the directness of the original. MacNeil is a good artist, and this was a particular good period for him, but he’s all wrong for this type of story; his sculptural figures run counter to the supernatural. There is no room for shadow and doubt on his pages, the vampires are just human-sized monsters instead of an unearthly presence.
The third and final long story in this collection8 is "1812" (2018), which at least shakes things up by radically changing the scenery to Russia in the time of Napoleon’s conquests. Writer Ian Edginton also makes the curious choice of using Joseph Conrad’s short story “The Duel,” more famously adapted into film as The Duellists in 1977, as its basis - complete with Armand d'Hubert as the human lead. I don’t quite understand why this was done; the story has nothing to do with Conrad's themes or plot, and it’s pretty distracting if you actually understand the reference.
Still, despite that, and story’s wild swings at Hellboy-lite (with Constanta now taking on other supernatural threats in a monster vs. monster war), it’s probably the best of the post-Ezquerra stuff, fittingly on the basis of the art. "1812" is drawn by Dave Taylor, a superb artist that I'm always surprised to learn isn’t part of the continental set. His smooth line and attention to detail—never straying into complication for complication’s sake—has little to do with Ezquerra or most of the 2000 AD pantheon, instead suggesting the likes of Enrico Marini or Matthieu Bonhomme. This is a man born to draw elegant soldiers on horseback, which he gets to do here a plenty.
None of the newer stories in Fiends of the Eastern Front feel particularly ‘necessary’ - the original still stands by itself, as a testament to Ezquerra’s talent if nothing else, but "1812" at least shows a way forward (while, ironically, walking back chronologically): through the pursuit of a new visual identity that has as little to do as possible with the first take. If you are going to revisit the same concept so much, at least make it interesting to look at.
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The post Fiends of the Eastern Front appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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