This post is a long time coming. It’s taken me a year of
fits and starts to finish Peter Panzerfaust, but I’m sort of glad I waited to
consume this all at once. The book is so masterfully written, so well designed,
so beautifully drawn, that to read it serially I would have missed some really
important things that you can only catch when you really let a book take over
your imagination. Peter Panzerfaust, make no mistakes, is a spectacularly silly
sounding idea: “Imagine Peter Pan is real and lives during the German
occupation of France and joins the French resistance”. I skipped the book when
it came out, even being a sucker for modern takes on classic fairy tales AND a
Peter Pan fan, precisely because it sounded like a bad idea. Well, that was a
poor financial and literary decision because I missed out on some very valuable
issues of a wonderful comic book. I won’t spoil the book, so I’ll keep this
brief, but Peter Panzerfaust is a special book every comic book fan must read.
Kurtis Weibe doesn’t overwrite his books. The verbage is
sparse, there’s no editorial voice, and entire pages will go by just led by
Tyler Jenkins masterful pencils. It’s tonally appropriate for some of the very
heady content of any war book, but especially helps to drive this book, one
that could easily go off the rails with excessive magical realism if allowed to
do so. He writes emotion especially well, and portrays incredibly rich,
complicated, humanistic characters. I love the use of the “researcher” (pretty
easy to figure out who this researcher is over time, but I’ll let you readers
come to those conclusions on your own) to provide an analytic third-person
perspective on the stories told. In truth, Panzerfaust is not a straightforward
narrative at all; it’s a collection of war stories involving Peter, but often
centered on the rest of the characters, Tiger Lily, Wendy, Jacques, and other
familiar faces from the traditional Pan mythos. I can’t say enough good things
about the nature of the story construction. You have to read it to believe it.
The villain, as if being a Nazi weren’t enough, is a Nazi
version of Captain Hook, one of the original supervillains and an interesting
study in where villains come from and what makes a villain “super”. Like Hook,
he appears to be bumbling, nearly completely incompetent, but becomes something
else through his encounters with Peter, the Lost Boys, and another mysterious
figure, familiar to Pan fans and a truly pleasant surprise to all. Hook’s
henchmen, the Hunters, are nefarious and their storyline is one of the best
comic book revenge stories (short of Shunka in Scalped) I’ve read. Hook, like
any great villain, brings out the best in the protagonists and really raises
the stakes at important moments, driving the plot in exciting ways. He’s an
instant classic.
The fantasy elements of this book should not overshadow what
is really being presented here: a series of important war stories, emotionally
taxing, heroic, and challenging episodes in the fictional, but realistic,
portrayal of WWII. I was shocked to see the degree of attention paid to
painting characters as deeply affected by the war, by their relationships, and
by the loss and sheer chaos of the conflict in France. This is Band of Brothers
quality war fiction, high praise indeed. The use of the Pan characters sets up
a stirring analogy for archetypical geopolitical actors that a savvy reader
will notice immediately. It’s smart, it’s touching, and it’s frankly great
story-telling. I found myself laughing, I found myself grimacing, and I found
myself hurting for these very real feeling folks living the experience of war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3avyKIg_4s
Those of you that are comic fans should pick up the Deluxe
Hardcover. It’s beautiful, affordable, and looks great on the shelf. Contains
about ½ of the series to date.
No comments:
Post a Comment