Delcourt's "Wunderwaffen presents: Zeppelin's War"
Not Jour J, but AH with a side of ASB from the same publisher.
I read this comic book, and it was... odd.
We start on Page 1, in St. Petersburg, Capital of the Russian Empire, Mid-November 1916. A steam boat paddles past a canal near the Winter Palace and balloons dot the sky. The Empress and Tsarevich Alexei (the one with hemophilia) are chilling with their tea, when hipster bearded man-bun wearing Rasputin bursts inside and says he needs to get to Spitsbergen. Said journey will require an airship to fly over Finland and to the Arctic Circle, from where he will go on to find... stuff. Mystical stuff that is necessary, and so the Empress agrees, because Rasputin is healing her son.
We cut to next page, where a helpful caption says December 2nd, 1916, 23,000 feet above North of German-occupied France. A fleet of 36 zeppelins sails through the sky. A keen eye shows that they have hooks under their gondolas, from which airplanes hanged (four per each zeppelin).
A balloon caption of speaker lets us know that he feels cold.
A second balloon of his conversation partner tells us that he feels that cold makes you strong and addresses the first speaker as "Hauptmann Goering."
...
Barring the armada of zeps dragging fighter planes, this is not truly remarkable as yet, as Goering was indeed a flier and it would make sense for him to be associated with either the zeps or the fighter planes, though his rank was not that of captain even at the end of the war in 1918, much less by close of 1916 (the Germans were stingy on promoting folks, and Goering ended the war as a first lieutenant, but then wrote a letter to the ministry, saying he would forsake his pension if they were to promote him, which they were only glad to do, to save money).
The savvier among you might be already guessing who our second speaker will turn out to be.
And sure enough, the jet black mustached man with intense eyes at the helm is addressed as "Hauptmann Hitler" by an incoming Prussian caricature of a Lt. Colonel with a spiked helmet (on a zeppelin?) with a Blue Max around his neck, a monocle, and a fur trimmed cloak.
...
Rasputin. Hitler. Goering. Zeppelins.
I am expecting Stalin to guest-star sooner rather than later here as well, but first let us survive the caricature, who barks orders at everyone and acts as an ass. He specifically gets under Cap'n Hitler's thin skin by second guessing his orders and warning everyone that they must be on their best in order for this terror raid on Paris to work.
Just then a French airplane appears. It has the similar frame of a Great War crate, but also has a full glass shield canopy around the pilot's seat, triple exhausts running parallel to the body of the plane and six vertical exhausts jutting out from an exposed engine block just behind the propeller. Because that shit looks cool and screw you, aerodynamics. Unfortunately for the recon plane, they have no radio and are quickly shot down by the lead zep's defenses.
The Prussian Stereotype reams out Goering for not having his fliers out there providing cover, to which Goering points out that it is cold and dark and his men don't breath ice and don't have night-vision eyes, which Hitler muses upon as maybe once again Germans will have it. This makes Goering want to face palm as apparently the whole ice-men with night-vision is a thing from a book that is popular and it sets the blood of the Stereotype boiling as the book is also controversial. ST and Hitler get into it over the book and Goering wanders off to talk to his pilots instead.
The pilots are relaxing in the mess room, wearing uniforms that appear to be stolen from an anime about the Great War rather than anything any pilot would wear even in a diesel-punk Great War era. After some banter establishes that Goering is popular with his fellows, they go down the hatch and into their planes that are hooked to the zeps. It is cold out there, and the men grouse.
Goering flies about, hoping to catch glimpse of legendary French aviator Guynemer so he can kill him.
And speak of the Devil, G rushes to his fighter as do French pilots at nearby camp as the alarm was sounded over the glimpse of the zep armada. G's crate is a sight to behold, it retains the lines of a Spad fighter, but now has exhausts on either side of the engine block and there appear to be missiles (?) between the two wings of his plane.
Meanwhile, Goering and his fighters fly around the zeps, bored stiff, until missiles (!) strike them and the zeps and the French begin their attack. Goering, flying a red triplane because, well, ya know, favors the action and leads the sortie. The French fighters are caught off guard by the size of the armada and by the sheer number of planes the Germans brought with them. There follows a confusing aerial battle that is hard to follow, but has a few strange and quirky moments that are hard to follow, to look cool.
A German zep gunner is propelled by a fireball out of his gunner's seat and falls down out into the sky. As he falls, his body hits the propeller of a passing French fighter and his leg is cut off from the rest of his body, and said leg then flies out and catches itself against the throat and the side of the neck of a French flier, breaking his neck and causing him to fall with his crate.
This sequence, however, means nothing, as the falling fighter harmlessly sails past Goering and G as they fly about and shoot down others, all the while Goering trying to spot G.
As this goes on, two zeps turn back from the fleet and fly back home, citing engine troubles and two more are destroyed, Hitler tends to think this attacking is not going well, but Stereotype wants to press on with all might.
G finally gets caught by Goering, but as Goering has him dead to rights after G has sliced through another German fighter, G runs out of ammo and Goering spots this and waves him off, sparing him, because this is not equal combat that Goering was savoring.
...
I really find it odd that a smattering of AH fiction seems to have a soft spot for the fat bastard during his fighter years. I guess this it to make up for all those years of fiction where young Goering had to show eeeeevil tendences, or something? It's just odd. As someone who has written AH about Goering myself (thumb up, cheap plug), I find nothing heroic about him, like, at all.
Anyway, back to the action, the zeps near Paris, and G flies back to his base, jumps out and demands ammo and fuel, as he has a fight to get back to.
By the way, one thing you can clearly tell, is that the artist learned how to draw planes from movies and aerial shows, which do not have ammo tracks, and so where the ammo is stored is an utter mystery to him, and you can tell he learned his aerial tactics from video games as there is a lot of upside down flying and various other biplane Kama Sutra moves in this comic.
G returns to the fray and we get a gorgeous splash page of Paris under attack, but fighting back with artillery and planes, as the zeps take heavy damage, including the lead one, where Cap'n Hitler tells the Stereotype that there are troubles and a fire on the zep and they should rethink the approach. ST tells him to go take care of it, which Hitler does, surrendering the helm of his airship to the ST, though much reluctantly.
If this ends with ST and Hitler killing each other, I will not be disappointed, like, at all.
Now comes a very odd sequence, the firemen are scared of the fire, because it is in a sensitive area, so brave Cap'n Hitler takes their stuff and goes to put out the flames himself, while spewing stuff about bravery securing victory for Germany. Now, I have quite a few problems with this vision of heroic Hitler. Yes, you do not have to show him as cowardly, and the creature did win an Iron Cross 1st Class (somehow, despite us having no record of him ever being awarded 2nd Class, but to be fair even Germans did not keep good track of Iron Crosses 2nd Class towards the last two years of the war, as regimental commanders were just handed them in boxes and told to award as necessary to motivate the men, which actually de-motivated them as the 2nd Class became devalued in their eyes). But, I still think it is not entirely responsible for folks to show cool and daring Goering and brave and heroic Hitler in a comic book with Zeppelins on the cover that kids might buy. I'm not a sensitive soul, but still.
The ST is pissing off everyone on the bridge of the lead zep and the crew are near mutiny level as G makes one more pass and thinks (via a word balloon) that he will finally be able to sink the Zep with one more round of shots. Goering is on his tail, but is running out of fuel and is on fumes and must break off the attack as his engine is starting to misbehave.
Hitler makes it back to the bridge and order ST to stand down, so he can fly the zep back. ST loses his shit and pulls out a broomhandle Mauser '96 (I know it is a stereotype, but one, we already have a giant Stereotype doing stereotypical things, and two, it is a cool looking gun and I like seeing it). Before ST can kill Hitler, G rakes the bridge and misses Hitler by inches, but stitches ST through. Dammit.
G's crate loses a wing due to his acrobatics and he ditches it and jumps out, with a parachute.
Hitler takes charge of the zeppelin (there's a sentence I never thought I'd type) and orders it back.
Goering flies back as his plane tries to nosedive (I have played enough Great War airplane video games with realism settings turned to tell you that that is no fun) and manages to catch his hook against the bottom rigging of Hitler's zeppelin right as his fighter runs out of fuel.
Goering finds dead Stereotype and Hitler at the helm, Hitler tells him the abridged version of what happened and pilots the airship back to the German occupied zone. However, they have a rather rough landing of it.
We're on pg. 27 of a 48 page comic by this point by the way.
Pg. 28 opens with an island in the Arctic Ocean, where Rasputin, on skis, finds the All-Spark or something. He asks for the airship from his three companions, who laugh at him and tell him that it left due to bad weather and that they will have to drive down in a diesel-punk tractor-jeep-snowmobile with Gieger type exhausts. Rasputin is mad by this turn of events and goes partly mad as a result as well. Until one of his companions pull a gun on him (Nagant revolver, naturally) to get him (Rasputin) to calm down. Rasputin does, or feigns it rather. As he murders the three men in the snowmobile.
As the murders occur, we are only shown the outside of the snowmobile, but from the screams and shouts we are left to incur that Rasputin is using other-worldly means to annihilate his companions.
He gets to an ice-breaker twelve miles down at the coast in three hours on skis, where the Russian crew greet him warily, note that he stinks pretty bad and that they do not buy his story about the car having an accident and the others simply perishing. But they let it go and sail off, as the the three missing men were not part of their crew and were therefore not their responsibility. They do, however, lament the loss of the car. All this reads like that scene in Blazing Saddles, where the white overseers are horrified at the prospect of equipment getting stuck in the quicksand, but care not a whit about the lives of the black laborers.
The next day, we learn the Zeppelins fly out towards France yet again. The lead Zep is commanded by Major Hitler, who is sporting an Iron Cross 1st Class around his neck. Now, this is dumb for a variety of reasons. One, as I said, Germans did not promote as freely as the Allies, so Cap'n Hitler would not have been promoted over a single act of... what exactly? He led the wounded Zep back behind the lines, from an attack that went bad? That's not how German Air Force worked in those days. Two, the Iron Class 1st Class is not worn around the neck. There are variations of the Iron Cross that can be worn around the neck, IIRC, but this is clearly an Iron Cross 1st Class.
But if you're looking for more fun, guess who is Hitler's second in command.
Go on.
Guess.
Give you a hint - Hess.
Now, IRL, Hess was a pilot, so this is not entirely unlikely, and in a comic book where infantry corporal Hitler became a Cap'n in the German Zeppelin Service, why not? Right?
G comes a-flying to destroy the Zep, but Goering is right there to intercept him, except now it is Goering's plane that suffers mechanical issues and has its rigging come free as he loops about. He then crashes into G's crate. G tries to pilot the wreck or at least control the descent, while Goering jumps out with a parachute and hopes to land on the right side of the trenches. G's descent does not go well and he crashes in a fiery wreck, but his body is pulled out. Two days later, he is bandaged and we see he has lost all four limbs and is hideously burned. The French general standing over his body authorizes an experimental treatment of G by a mysterious doctor who has recently been condemned to be guillotined.
On the next page, a train arrives into the Nicolas station in St. Petersburg from Arkhangelsk. That makes sense and shows some research was done, as indeed the Nicolas station would have been the only station at that time that could take train traffic from Arkhangelsk, despite being setup as a terminus for Moscow-St. Pete traffic. Man-bun hipster-beard Rasputin emerges, and others passenger mention how much he reeks. He gets to the Winter Palace, where he convinces the Empress that he has found a way to cure Alexei of hemophilia. Using the All-Spark he commences to make some magik, and then to prove that Alexei is cured, he cuts him with a knife in front of horrified Empress and indeed Alexei has been cured, permanently of hemophilia.
Not yet willing to name his price for helping the Empress, the reeking hipster goes to his apartment, where his landlady also mentions that he smells bad and mentions lots of women "in heat" have been coming to see him while he was away and she disapproves of such things, which Rasputin laughs off. She makes a reference to the Lord's plan for him, which he nods off, but then laughs off at this room, saying it more like Berlin's plan. Because apparently Rasputin is a spy for the Germans.
Now, this is almost clever, as in IRL, there were many a rumor that Rasputin was in fact as a spy for the Germans and was using his position to undermine the Russian throne and the whole of Russia. These rumors were spread by his enemies, but they had a tendency to stick. Certainly the misguided and overstretched Imperial secret police thought the rumors had merit and followed him, for a time.
Rasputin goes to have a bath, but before that, he unwraps the All-Spark and finally shows us that it is a black mirror with rune sigils carved around its perimeters. He asks to see the future of Russia, and is stunned to see Lenin in the vision. Other visions include: a Soviet airship bombing a Russian church, Soviet airship being struck by a crude Imperial Russian missile in the middle of a Civil War, and the entire Imperial family murdered in a cellar by Bolsheviks. This horrifies him, for a variety of reasons, as he deduces that if the family gets it, then so does will he.
Once again, this is clever, as Rasputin repeatedly warned the Empress IRL, as a form of insurance policy, that should he be killed, the House of Romanov will fall within a year. So here, Rasputin is working backwards, deducing that a fallen House of Romanov brings ill tidings for him as well.
Rasputin decides that he must now exfiltrate from Russia to Germany. He goes outside, and we see he is being shadowed by an agent, who works for Prince Usupov (who IRL led the assassination attempt on Rasputin). He goes into a church, where he tells an Orthodox priest that he healed Alexei. The priest thinks that means that Romanovs will now eat of his hands, but Rasputin is more worried about getting out of dodge and tells the priest (his contact) to get him out of Russia, stat.
And so, while the Kaiser and von Hindenburg are strolling along the Western Front, they talk of how to get Rasputin out of Russia.
...
Rasputin is a spy run by such top circles that both the Kaiser and von Hindenburg know of him personally and the decision to exfiltrate him is discussed by them? Don't they have a war to run?
The Kaiser is ambivalent about Rasputin and helping him, but Hindenburg thinks it is their duty to help him as he helped them and besides he is worried what Rasputin might do if they were to not help him. Besides, Hindenburg thinks it would hurt Russia were Rasputin to be proven to be a German prisoner, and he wants to bide their time and see which of the two would do more damage to Russia if released back into the land of the Tsars one more: Rasputin or Lenin.
The Kaiser tells Hindenburg to take care of it. He says that he knows just the man to get Rasputin out.
Hitler, Hess and Goering return from a bombing of London run and are told that Hitler is wanted.
and "To Be Continued" shows in the lower right hand corner.
This was... odd.
The comic starts goofy, very goofy, but then tries to make sense internally and settles into a groove. Still, the Young Sturdy Heroic Nazis of Hitler and Goering make for a very odd reading.