Adventures in the Rifle Brigade [Paperback]

Garth Ennis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2005

When all the chips are down, and it looks like the sun is about to set on old Blighty for good, there's only one team to call to keep Britannia ruling the waves: the Rifle Brigade! Acclaimed writer Garth Ennis unleashes his formidable command of both military history and violent absurdity to bring to life the most daring and insane band of commandos ever to hoist a Union Jack.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Ennis and Ezquerra's parody of jingoistic-Brit military adventures is just the thing MAD's gang of idiots knew they'd never get away with, and older AD devotees devoutly wish they had. The Rifle Brigade is six invincible (though not inerrant) World War II commandos: hard, handsome Captain Hugo Darcy; Second Lieutenant Cecil Milk, bit of a poofter but a superb marksman and pilot; Sergeant Crumb, largest man in the British army and expert neck wringer; cockney Corporal Geezer, charged with 413 counts of murder as a civilian; Hank the Yank, explosives specialist who jumped the pond to enlist in 1940; and the Piper, a Scotsman. Darcy and Milk engage in real dialogue; Crumb is disyllabic ("Ey-oop!"); Hank, trisyllabic ("Gawd dammit!"); and Geezer, quintisyllablic ("Yer aht of ordah!"). The Piper pipes, fatally to hearers (not including his mates), and can sing. Their encounters with various Nazi swine and collaborators are full of derring-do, sexual innuendo (seldom subtle), and much ado every time "mortally" wounded Milk implores Darcy to grant his dying wish for, uh, intimacy. Outrageous, scabrous, adults-only silliness. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Vertigo (January 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401203531
• ISBN-13: 978-1401203535
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #302,178 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Garth Ennis is the award-winning writer of Hellblazer, Hitman, Punisher, Preacher, Pride and Joy and War Stories. He is much in demand for his hard-edged, wickedly humorous style.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Goose-stepping Nazis & big-breasted SS dominatrices beware!, December 25, 2004

By 

Brian C. Grindrod "Brindrod's Guano Shovel Co." (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (Paperback)

The Dirty Dozen are about to get their position usurped as the most efficient fighting division. Adventures In The Rifle Brigade marks the debut of a new British Commando Unit that has all the wits and charm of the Monty Python team. Written by Garth Ennis, who has turned murder and gore on titles such as Punisher and Preacher into a side splitting laugh fest, this book is recommended to all who enjoy their humor a bit wacky.

The six members of this ragtag crew are paratrooped in Berlin during 1944 on an ultra top-secret mission. The things that these fiendish and cunning misfits pull against goose-stepping Nazis would make Mel Brooks and John Hughes so proud. Their hilarious hijinks come to a halt when they are captured by Gestapo torturers who plan to bring them in to be interrogated by big-breasted SS dominatrices.

Garth Ennis does a great job of capturing the absurdities and gags of a Peter Sellers Pink Panther type movie and blending it with the thematic slant of war films like Saving Private Ryan. The off the wall British stereotypes attributed to these characters, who loyally serve England and its King, brought on a few chuckles right from the very first pages. Their idiotic personas have all the elegance of a homicidal John Cleese and a funny Charles Bronson. I had one hell of a giggle when a Panzer commander wanted two frauleins to fiddle with his "main armament".

Carlos Ezquerra's caricature art style is perfect to deliver Ennis' outrageous story. The characters' anatomies and facial expressions are exaggerated and give this book the proper tone. From ski ramp like noses to insane empty smiles, Ezquerra captures all the quirks and silliness of this lovable bunch.

If you get a laugh out of people getting killed by eight foot tall creatures who have acid for blood (and are generally unpleasant) and believe that A Fish Called Wanda is a great comedy film, get this book and be prepared for zaniness at its best.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I wanted to like this one, but..., October 23, 2007

By 

Likes2Read (United States, TX) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (Paperback)

I've yet to read anything by Garth Ennis other than Preacher that I liked very much, and this one was no exception. This might have made a pretty good one-shot comic book, but the rather thin premise is barely enough to sustain a short six-issue series. It's occasionally pretty funny, and I'm giving it two stars instead of one because it did make me laugh a few times, but otherwise, it seemed to me that there just wasn't much else there. A lot of the gags are very repetitive, and I got tired of the running gag about the rather limited vocabulary of the Rifle Brigade pretty quickly. I can accept that this is a comedy and not anything resembling a serious war comic, but I didn't think it delivered in that department.

Fans of Garth Ennis may like this book, but people who mainly know him as the writer of Preacher (which even had a better Nazi villainess!) might be disappointed.

4.0 out of 5 stars Graphic SF Reader, September 3, 2007

By 

Blue Tyson "- Research Finished" (Legion clubhouse) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (Paperback)

Garth Ennis has produced a hilarious, over the top war story parody. Imagine if the Whizzer and Chips type kids grew up and joined the army, and you might get something like this. Gerta Gasch the evil nazi, and a completely crazy commando trouple, all mad, most of them incoherent. Through all that, they do manage to kill Rocky and Indiana Jones. Great stuff. "Hitler, he only had one ball"