Broken Frontier

Seven Psychos marks Sean Phillips his assault on the European market. The bande dessinée is published by the french publishing house Delcourt and is part of a themed series. The theme being the number seven and the premisse that everything is centered around a team with seven members that undertake a high-risk mission. Every book in the seven-issue series is a standalone with a different artist and a different writer. Artist Sean Philips (Sleeper, Criminal, Marvel Zombies) and writer Fabien Vehlmann (Alone) take the opening shot.

In the London of 1941, a depressed colonel tries to give his life meaning by embarking upon a preposterous strategy. He accepts a plot to accomplish the inexecutable: hire seven psychopaths to kill Hitler. Seven men who are unpredictable, who are the incarnation of chaos. Seven men who will enter Germany and do the impossible. When all logic fails, it’s time to try the illogical.

Writer Fabien Vehlmann is best known for his all ages comic Alone, made in collaboration with Bruno Gazzotti from Soda fame. The basic concept for Seven Psychos can be summed up by the tagline of the Dirty dozen ‘Train them! Excite them! Arm them!...Then turn them loose on the Nazis!’ Vehlmann tries to inject some humor in the action/adventure template but the feel of the story never seems to live up to its promise. The characters stay a bit flat and that’s a bit of a shame because there’s a lot of interest going on in these pages. From the mythical warrior to the crazed visionary, from the sniper with an angst neurosis to the megalomaniacal master of disguise; there’s a lot of material to work with. Unfortunately the story needs to be told and we never really get a feel for the characters apart from the two page introductions most of them receive.

I would expect that having these characters work as a team would be the challenge for the writer but Vehlmann decides to split them all up as they enter Germany and therefore a lot of story potential is wasted. Instead of character development, we get to see a few different vignettes of stories of the inviduals’ efforts in killing Hitler. At the end, there is a nice twist to the mission objective but the twist itself is not that wholy original and it kindoff falls flat.

The dialogues are kept nice and breezy so everything goes smoothly along and it does provide ample entertainment but in the end, you have the wonder what the intent of it all is.

The real star of the bande dessinée is the artwork of Sean Phillips. His scratchy, chunky art gets a rare chance to shine in this large and beautiful designed package. It is a hardcover in - what Americans would perceive to be oversized - large format with glossy paper and is in total 64 pages long. Due to the large format, the reader can see all the detail in the ink stains, all the scratchy lines, and all the different techniques Philips uses in order to bring this story to life.

His naturalistic and blotchy art style is always more suited for real life settings than for spandex and in this period piece, it is even more appropriate for the war torn decade of the forties. His large spots of blacks become shadows and forms, given accurate shape by his scratchy penwork. You can watch the development of his art and the different phases of pencilling on his blog.

Seven psychos is Dirty Dozen light with a twist but it ultimately disappoints in its superficial handling of the characters and straightforward take on the story. It serves mostly as a showcase for the superior artwork of Sean Philips who layers the ink on the pages and manages to elevate Seven Pychos to an enjoyable read.

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Seven psychos is available in Europe in comic shops and bookstores. As of this article going to press, no English translation of the book has been announced by an American publisher.