Iron Squad

I am sitting here trying to think of how I want to open this piece. There are about three or four different ways I can say the same exact thing but not a single one of them seems to fit what it is I am trying to accomplish. So, I think at this point I am going to just jump right into it and hope for the best. It will be a bit blah in the idea that it isn’t anything grand or cool, just the basic idea of what the heck I am thinking. Maybe we can pretend I have something witty to say…

Anyway, Comixology Unlimited follows the same pattern of traditional comics. They bring in new titles on a monthly basis. Some of them are part of series that had seen earlier issues become available and sometimes there are entirely new comics coming in that hadn’t been part of the program at all. This is where you find your available reads grow in huge leaps. Yeah, I have yet to run out of comics to read (I am so far behind in everything I am trying to read right now). And amazingly, that is what I was trying to say. Seems so simple now that I have it out of my head…

Ok, there is a point in here aside from my inability to voice my thoughts and we are getting to it. So, this month a new publisher came into CU. By new I mean one I had never heard of before. This is a French publisher by the name Delcourt (Soleil in English. No, I know that the words don’t translate like that. I mean to say that Soleil in English is the publisher handling the foreign rights). In Either case, I had never heard of them.

I have been working my way through a number of the titles that have now become available (through CU). And I dare say that not a one has disappointed me. These aren’t the typical super hero comics that is the expected from publishers like DC and Marvel. These comics explore stories in a number of different genres. Without getting into all of them, I am actually just going to be looking at one of the comics I have read over the past couple weeks.

Iron Squad Vol. 1 Red Commando by Jean-Luc Sala is an exploration of alternate history. Not just alternate history but we are transported back to WWII and a dieselpunk timeline. The Russians are trying to stop the advance of the Nazis with a cobbled together force of battle-mech soldiers. Just as you would expect, the alternate history changes a number of things we know of our own timeline. I mean sure, when you add in battle-mechs, things aren’t going to go quite the way we knew them to go.

A big part of all those changes ends up with the Nazis dropping the bomb (yeah, that bomb) on Moscow. That alone can turn the tide of how we remember our history. But I digress, because the story isn’t necessarily in the grand things. It is the smaller parts, the stories of the people in the wars that make these tales worth reading.

That is why you should probably pick up the series and explore some stories in a new light. It’s the little parts of life that have the most meaning. There are times where we do some of the biggest and grandest of things, but for what seems like little reasons. But for us, in that moment, those little reasons are the biggest reasons.

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