Commando

D-Day – Fight or Die

Allen & Unwin 2009

Reviewer: Bob Estreich

“..a story of fighting men struggling against the odds to win out in the end.”

Commando war comics have been around now for nearly fifty years since 1961 and are still being issued at the rate of eight a month. They are pocket size – 7 X 51/2 inches – and around 68 pages. I remember them well from my youth when they and their many counterparts formed a part of my early reading. They were previously known as Commando War Stories in Pictures.

They were a good read. The stories were rather simplistic and dealt with stories of heroism, mateship, a certain amount of patriotism, and all the appropriate Boys Own themes. The drawings were high quality black and white, with colour being confined to the covers. They were also generally technically accurate although this particular edition does show some errors like a Bren gun ejecting shells from the top. Unlike many suitable kids’ stories, people actually died. (“Aaaarrrrggghhhhh”). In the mad librarians’ purge of the 1970s (?) they survived, unlike Biggles or Noddy, so they must have been seen to have some literary merit.

There were the usual stereotyped nationalities – the British were heroic in the face of adversity, the Germans were usually evil and said “Schweinhund” and “Gott in Himmel” a lot, the French were generally brave but low key, and occasionally the Canadians and Americans were acknowledged for helping Britain save Europe. Each story was completely self-contained and very few stories reused the same character.

This comic set contains twelve of the best D-Day stories. Many of the stories do not involve commando actions, as they gradually lost touch with the series title over the years. They range from the first beach landings to American paratroop landings further inland to the conflicts of older soldiers leading kids into battle. The stories are plausible if not historically accurate and the quality of the drawing is consistently high, as we came to expect from the series.

I looked on the Internet and these comics in their original form are now very collectible. They are also quite inexpensive, at around a couple of dollars each. Surprisingly, after all these years, I still found the comic to be a good read. It’s over forty years since I last read one, but the old feeling of pleasure from a good story returned.

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This review will appear in Volume 2 No.4 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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