Broken Frontier

When missions get too weird or the paranormal rears its head, the U.S. Army calls in the Lost Squad.

It’s 1942 and as the Nazis threaten to overrun Europe, another equally frightening threat comes into focus. Following their Fuhrer’s obsession with the occult, the Third Reich has been dispatching agents to recover artifacts of mystical significance. One of these is the fabled Second Seal, an ancient stone disc that will supposedly unleash War, one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It’s up to the mysterious U.S. military unit known as the Lost Squad to prevent this from happening.

The "weird war" genre, a mix of World War II and the paranormal, has a storied history in comics, with elements cropping up in many of DC’s old war comics and even in Hellboy. It’s nice to see this concept making a comeback with Lost Squad. The possibilities for 1940s period drama and arcane tales of supernatural lore offer a great deal of story potential. This debut issue shows promise with a pleasant mix of action, drama, humor, and the bizarre. Kirby establishes the personalities of each of the squad members well and plays them off each other to good effect. We have many of the familiar soldier character types present, such as the hotshot, the farmboy, the intellectual, and the stuffy British major. This could lead the comic dangerously into cliché territory but Kirby promises that surprises and twists in the characters’ backstories are forthcoming.

Alan Robinson’s art has a slightly stylized cartoonish quality to it, giving Lost Squad a look distinct from many of its war comic forebears. For the most part, I found this style appealing, though the characters’ oblong faces and thick eyebrows occasionally made it difficult to tell them apart. The looser, more rounded forms in the art should make it a good fit for the supernatural aspects of the story. Indeed, Robinson’s rendition of the Horseman of War had an appropriately garish and unsettling appearance.

Lost Squad’s hybrid of military drama and the unexplained looks as though it may produce an interesting tale, one a bit off the beaten path.