Darkie's Mob - classic or dud

does this work:

http://www.frothersunite.com/files/marbles/fanboy/imag/darkiesmob/bullets%20for%20the%20japs.JPG

More here: http://www.frothersunite.com/files/marbles/fanboy/DarkiesMob_Intro.html

Well it sticks in the mid more than most of that sort of thing. So on that basis classic.

Though what about that other lost behind enemy lines classic: Kampfgruppe Falken. Which seems to have left almost no record on ye web.

Is that Warlord's only good story ever?

Almost certainly - I can't think of a better one.

piece on this in Word magazine's first issue. they say that the more racist language is being changed.

the other thing they mention as also being slated for reprinting soon is Charlie's War which i vaguely remember.

andy

Charlie's War is straightforwardly completely brilliant. One of the best comics ever. and it went on FOREVER. I can't wait.

I was reading the Darkie's Mob story in the Megazine... the language is still pretty racist, for all that they claim to have toned it down. for all that nothing else about Darkie's Mob could claim to be documentarily realistic, I suspect that in practice soldiers do actually use racist language about the soldiers on the other side. You can hardly say it's alright to kill Japanese soldiers but not to refer to them as "Rice Eaters".

someone could do (or already has done) a great PhD thesis about representations of the Japanese in British war comics. They tend to be portrayed as much less "like us" than the Germans, even down to the way they say "AAIEEEEE" when they get killed (the Germans say "AAAAARGH"). I even remember some Warlord artist who basically couldn't draw people with East Asian features, so all his Japanese soldiers ended up looking vaguely African.

I can only recall one war comic told from a Japanese point of view... it was in Battle and was about some squad of Japanese troops during the advance through Malaya & Burma. In that the Japanese were honourable soldiers who hated the excesses of the SS-style Kempe Tai special troops.

was Kampfgruppe Falken the one where it was a group of "outsiders" who had an 88 field gun, usin it to full effect, succeeding on the russian front despite the bureaucratic inflexibility of the German army?

I used to enjoy that one.

KF was about some German punishment battalion who kept being given all all these jobs where the higher ups didn't care if any of them came back alive or not. aside from the KF characters themselves there was a great cynical aristocratic General who would send them on missions. He was kind of a bastard, but cool with it.

that's the feller, I remember a story where they locked an officious quartermaster up in a barn for the Russians to find while they went off with all his black bread and coffee. It might be fronm the 1982 annual.

be careful though - Battle had another story with a similar premise, about a much smaller squad of punishment battalion troops. The Battle one was done more for laughs. "the fun we had on the Russian Front, wheh wheh wheh". etc.

oops, that could be it. I remember tanks (old decrepit ones) going through a marsh to have a go at a load of T-34s too.

I wish my memory was better.

if there were tanks plural, it was probably Kampfgruppe Falken.

yeah, there were a few, old decrepit panzer 2s I think. Whereas the waffen had top of the range panzer 4s and got battered.

mmmm, tanks.

It's essentially the ancestor of Bad Company, isn't it? I look forward to seeing Darkie's appalling violent-buddhist secret revealed.

Yeah, it is hideously racist, but at least it's hideously violent as well.

This is a very illuminating thread.

I used to get in trouble for reading Warlord.