Customer Reviews

Adventures in the Rifle Brigade

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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"

A great storyline with great characters. Monty Python fans will really get the most out of this story. Ennis manages to show the insanity of war and violence in his usual ingenious satirical style. His War Stories Vol. 1 and 2 are even better, as well as Bloody Mary, but only because Ennis just gets better with practice. Ennis has already tackled the great Sgt. Fury, think of what he could do with Sgt. Rock and Easy Company!

Sometimes humor, especially in a comic book, succeeds by being extreme (think Three Stooges, or Monty Python on a bad day), but this send-up of World War II special-ops commandos, unfortunately, isn't one of them. The first half of the book, which is the first three issues in the original series, introduces the six cliched characters, including an upper-class git as the captain, a gay lieutenant, a pathological giant as the sergeant, a lower-class corporal, "Hank the Yank," and (for some reason) a Scottish piper who is the captain's family retainer. Three of them never say anything beyond a single cliched phrase, and the piper never speaks at all. The Nazis are similarly borrowed from Warner Brothers. The second half of this collection is about the quest to capture the Fuhrer's mystical missing testicle, and it's somewhat better, if only because of the song everyone sings to annoy the Germans. But still. Bugs Bunny did it better.