"Heavy Water" - an AH comic book.
As you might have guessed from the title, and it being an AH story, this is a Nazi Germany wins The War by getting nukes first AH story. It ultimately does not work as a comic book, or as an AH story.
Our story begins in 1943, Norway, where a stern blonde Nordic fella in a parka with a sniper's rifle on some kind of mission hears an odd sound and goes to investigate it, switching from a rifle to a handgun in the process. He comes across a stunned young stern blonde Nordic fella in a silver mesh Quantum Leap outfit with either drool or vomit dripping off his lower lip. The Leaper asks the fella in English, "What year is it?" The native fella does not much care for this type of conversation and after a half-page of confused threats, our Leaper's insists he is Ben Haukelid and that he is looking for Knut Haukelid and that is he from the future and he's here to help him. To which our native stern blonde Nordic fella naturally replies, "I am Knut Haukelid." We then smash forward to an alternative future in New London, Reichsland, where Ben Haukelid goes about his Winston Smith from 1984 day, including his work in the memory hole of the archive in Speer's wet dream of a building. There he meets a ravishing rebellious redhead gal who naturally opens his eyes to how wrong all is around him and gets him in contact with The Resistance, who have built a time machine and want to change the past to save their present. To the surprise of no one reading this, Ben holds the key to unraveling the POD that led to this nightmare world: the Heroes of Telemark failed and the Nazis were able to use Norwegian heavy water to build a bomb which they then used to bomb London. Now, lets please aside the AH plausibility of the heavy water present in Norway at the time of WW2 outbreak being used to actually build a functioning nuclear bomb and focus on the story itself, which now twists and turns in such a fashion as to sideline the man The Resistance was planning on sending to the past and instead massively unprepared everyman Ben goes into the past instead. Much confusion results and many people die, but the good guys win in the end, and the timeline is restored.
To begin with, this is not a comic book story. The pacing, dialogue, twists and character turns are all wrong for it. This is a movie script from the early 2000s that was then adapted to comic book form. You can see the tell tale signs of it, from the cold open, to the by-the-numbers character-arc and three act breakdown. As a result of clearly starting life as a 90+ minute movie that was never made, it is a meat and potatoes story, lacking all garnish or veggies. There is no time for world building despite over a half of the story taking place in New London, because you do not want to bore the audience at home and have to hit that action beat every ten minutes, erm, pages. There is no time to watch a character mature, just throw an exposition and a handful of dialogue about how our heroes do not see themselves as heroes and are just everymen thrown about by the winds of fate. There is no time to have a fully defined female character, just make her a magical manic pixie girl who inspires our hero to cowboy up. Had this been a real graphic novel, with proper graphic novel pacing, we might have gotten something more. Instead we slam bang through it all so we can get to the gunplay every ten pages. And don't get me wrong, I love gunplay, but only if I care about the people getting shot at, if they're ciphers and cliches or if I know which ones must survive for the story to continue, it just becomes an exercise in drawing blood on walls and visualizing gun sounds ("Brakka Brakka" for an MP40 submachine gun in case you are wondering, and "BRAZZZAT" and "Brazzap" for an energy based guns of Future Gestapo).
The art is nice, if bland, though there are not many creative ways one can draw snowy wastelands. The Speerian monstrosities that make up New London are creative, but only last one splash page, after that we are restricted to one good shot of Xenomorph inspired Gestapo hovercraft, Nazi IKEA apartments and grungy underground bunkers of The Resistance until we get to Norway. Once in Norway, and once we get past the snow, we kinda realize all the clean shaven Norwegian characters look alike, and come to think of it, you can only visually tell them from the German soldiers by their headgear and uniforms. Maybe it was a profound statement about how we are all brothers, or it was just lazy art. The only way to tell the Haukelids apart from the others is by the fact they are only clean shaven blonde Norwegians in the story. In case you are wondering how the two are related is not exactly touched upon, but Ben claims his father brought Knut's journal out of Norway and hid it as a family heirloom.
The fundamental problem of not starting life as a comic book and being brought to life as a comic book hurts in other aspects as well. Our hero is the American film hero for the 2000s, the white guy hipster indecisive fella who must stress his averageness at every turn and goes at great pains to portray himself as just another guy who stumbled into it all, but cannot let down his new gal and his newfound pals. You can well imagine him played on the big screen by a bland slab of pale, a more grown up and far more Nordic version of Michael Cera perhaps or post-Spiderman 3 Tobey McGuire with platinum hair. Frankly after a while, you want the guy sent from the future to save humanity from a nightmare Nazi dominated world to... do more, be more, and speak less.
As you might have guessed from the title, and it being an AH story, this is a Nazi Germany wins The War by getting nukes first AH story. It ultimately does not work as a comic book, or as an AH story.
Our story begins in 1943, Norway, where a stern blonde Nordic fella in a parka with a sniper's rifle on some kind of mission hears an odd sound and goes to investigate it, switching from a rifle to a handgun in the process. He comes across a stunned young stern blonde Nordic fella in a silver mesh Quantum Leap outfit with either drool or vomit dripping off his lower lip. The Leaper asks the fella in English, "What year is it?" The native fella does not much care for this type of conversation and after a half-page of confused threats, our Leaper's insists he is Ben Haukelid and that he is looking for Knut Haukelid and that is he from the future and he's here to help him. To which our native stern blonde Nordic fella naturally replies, "I am Knut Haukelid." We then smash forward to an alternative future in New London, Reichsland, where Ben Haukelid goes about his Winston Smith from 1984 day, including his work in the memory hole of the archive in Speer's wet dream of a building. There he meets a ravishing rebellious redhead gal who naturally opens his eyes to how wrong all is around him and gets him in contact with The Resistance, who have built a time machine and want to change the past to save their present. To the surprise of no one reading this, Ben holds the key to unraveling the POD that led to this nightmare world: the Heroes of Telemark failed and the Nazis were able to use Norwegian heavy water to build a bomb which they then used to bomb London. Now, lets please aside the AH plausibility of the heavy water present in Norway at the time of WW2 outbreak being used to actually build a functioning nuclear bomb and focus on the story itself, which now twists and turns in such a fashion as to sideline the man The Resistance was planning on sending to the past and instead massively unprepared everyman Ben goes into the past instead. Much confusion results and many people die, but the good guys win in the end, and the timeline is restored.
To begin with, this is not a comic book story. The pacing, dialogue, twists and character turns are all wrong for it. This is a movie script from the early 2000s that was then adapted to comic book form. You can see the tell tale signs of it, from the cold open, to the by-the-numbers character-arc and three act breakdown. As a result of clearly starting life as a 90+ minute movie that was never made, it is a meat and potatoes story, lacking all garnish or veggies. There is no time for world building despite over a half of the story taking place in New London, because you do not want to bore the audience at home and have to hit that action beat every ten minutes, erm, pages. There is no time to watch a character mature, just throw an exposition and a handful of dialogue about how our heroes do not see themselves as heroes and are just everymen thrown about by the winds of fate. There is no time to have a fully defined female character, just make her a magical manic pixie girl who inspires our hero to cowboy up. Had this been a real graphic novel, with proper graphic novel pacing, we might have gotten something more. Instead we slam bang through it all so we can get to the gunplay every ten pages. And don't get me wrong, I love gunplay, but only if I care about the people getting shot at, if they're ciphers and cliches or if I know which ones must survive for the story to continue, it just becomes an exercise in drawing blood on walls and visualizing gun sounds ("Brakka Brakka" for an MP40 submachine gun in case you are wondering, and "BRAZZZAT" and "Brazzap" for an energy based guns of Future Gestapo).
The art is nice, if bland, though there are not many creative ways one can draw snowy wastelands. The Speerian monstrosities that make up New London are creative, but only last one splash page, after that we are restricted to one good shot of Xenomorph inspired Gestapo hovercraft, Nazi IKEA apartments and grungy underground bunkers of The Resistance until we get to Norway. Once in Norway, and once we get past the snow, we kinda realize all the clean shaven Norwegian characters look alike, and come to think of it, you can only visually tell them from the German soldiers by their headgear and uniforms. Maybe it was a profound statement about how we are all brothers, or it was just lazy art. The only way to tell the Haukelids apart from the others is by the fact they are only clean shaven blonde Norwegians in the story. In case you are wondering how the two are related is not exactly touched upon, but Ben claims his father brought Knut's journal out of Norway and hid it as a family heirloom.
The fundamental problem of not starting life as a comic book and being brought to life as a comic book hurts in other aspects as well. Our hero is the American film hero for the 2000s, the white guy hipster indecisive fella who must stress his averageness at every turn and goes at great pains to portray himself as just another guy who stumbled into it all, but cannot let down his new gal and his newfound pals. You can well imagine him played on the big screen by a bland slab of pale, a more grown up and far more Nordic version of Michael Cera perhaps or post-Spiderman 3 Tobey McGuire with platinum hair. Frankly after a while, you want the guy sent from the future to save humanity from a nightmare Nazi dominated world to... do more, be more, and speak less.
