Light Brigade

AUTHOR: Tomasi, Peter

ARTIST: Peter Snejbjerg (illustrator); Bjarne Hansen (colorist and cover artist); Rob Leigh (letterer); Ken Lopez (letterer)

PUBLISHER: DC Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2004

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2005

Publication History

Light Brigade began as a four-volume prestige-format, creator-owned limited miniseries published by DC Comics in early 2004. Its four issues, unusually large for serials, were gathered together into a two-hundred-page trade paperback in 2005.

Creator Peter Tomasi is more than an editor and writer for DC Comics. He is also a fan of military history and was intrigued by the story of Longinus, the centurion that pierced the side of Christ as he hung on the cross. Tomasi’s love of history and his orthodox upbringing led to a mythical fascination that eventually spawned the idea for Light Brigade, a book ten years in the making.

Tomasi first approached Vertigo, a company he thought was the perfect choice for a war comic. However, Vertigo had just published a plethora of war comics, so the publisher passed on the project. Tomasi then reached out to Joey Cavalieri, and DC Universe took on Light Brigade as a creator-owned miniseries. Once Tomasi began work in earnest, Light Brigade took about two years to finish.

Tomasi asked Peter Snejbjerg, an artist with whom he had worked on other projects, such as DC’s The Sandman, to do the artwork. He appreciated Snejbjerg’s realistic work and considers him “one of the most underrated artists around,” as he is an artist more familiar to fantasy readers. While Cavalieri helped edit Light Brigade, he suggested Bjarne Hansen for colorist. With the addition of Hansen, a beautifully wrought collaboration was fixed.

Plot

In Light Brigade, just as the heavenly battle between good and evil is being waged overhead, the Battle of the Bulge (1944) is in full swing on Earth. A group of American G.I.s is hunkered down in a World War I-era cemetery, where Christopher Stavros has just received word that his wife was killed and his son orphaned in the United States. Two hundred Germans are headed toward the Americans, and the impending battle would seem to be the G.I.s’ last stand. What is worse, the group’s enemies are not simply Nazis but zombie Nazis who cannot be stopped by mere bullets. When the skirmish comes to a close, only a dozen G.I.s escape.

The heavenly war merges with this scene, as the archangel, Sauriel, destroys the renegade, Azbeel, but loses the sword of God. One of the war-torn G.I.s is really the immortal Marcus Longinus, a man looking for atonement. He recruits his remaining buddies in the age-old battle against the evil Grigori.

The angelic Grigori were sent to Earth to protect humans, but they eventually mated with their charges, producing the half-breed Nephilim. God could not abide this abomination and sent the Flood, but some Nephilim and Grigori survived, and they desired revenge against God. The fallen angel, Zephon, has recovered the sword of God and marches toward the eternal flame to create a weapon powerful enough to challenge God himself.

The only thing that will kill this heavenly horde is iron, so the G.I.s’ first mission is to make iron bullets. They capture a German ammunition factory staffed by slave laborers, who readily agree to produce custom-made bullets to destroy the Nazis.

Once their task is finished, the American soldiers head for their last stop, the Augustine monastery where the eternal flame is housed. The monks welcome the G.I.s into the ranks of the Iron Guard to defend the true cross as it burns with the eternal flame—the flame the Nephilim plan to use to ignite the sword of God. The G.I.s are granted superhuman power by walking through the immortal flame, and performing this ritual will keep them fighting even as they sustain grave wounds.

Once the Nephilim Nazis reach the monastery, the fallen Zephon takes up the sword and sprouts wings, leading his zombie forces to the final battle. The G.I.s and the Iron Guard let loose with their bullets and iron-edged arrows, cutting through the zombie ranks, but there are too many Nephilim.

The evil Zephon plunges the sword of God through Marcus Longinus, who drops his spear and crumples to the ground, wrenching the sword from the archangel’s hands. Stavros retrieves the spear smeared with Christ’s blood and launches it at Zephon, piercing the Grigori’s heart and annihilating the fallen angel.

Only two G.I.s survive the battle between good and evil: Chris Stavros and the baseball-loving Hal. Hal decides to remain at the monastery, helping rebuild the Iron Guard, while Stavros returns to the United States and collects his son. He and his son visit the cemetery where Deborah Stavros is buried before heading off to deliver the letters of his fallen comrades.

Characters

•Private Christopher Stavros, the protagonist, is of Greek extraction. He is tall and dark-skinned and has a straight aquiline nose and a three-day beard. He has lost his faith in God as a result of his wife’s death, which has left his son orphaned. He is given the knowledge of God in order to enlist his help in the coming showdown between good and evil.

•Mark, a.k.a. Centurion Marcus Longinus, is a member of the American Fourth Infantry Division. His square, clean-shaven jaw and blue eyes top a scar-covered body. He is the Roman soldier who pierced the side of Christ as the latter was dying on the cross, and he carries the blood-covered iron spear tip to fight the fallen Nephilim and Grigori. He leads the G.I.s in their fight against the Nephilim, hoping to atone for his misdeed.

•Colonel Zephon, the antagonist, is a pale Nazi with blond hair, who is really a fallen angel. He is the last Grigori. He is after the sword of God, which has been brought to Earth by a renegade angel, and once he lights it in the eternal flame surrounding the true cross, he will have enough power to challenge God and take revenge.

•Hal is a member of the American Fourth Infantry Division. He has a dimpled chin and scruffy orange hair and keeps his lips pressed shut. He is a baseball-loving American, with a gruff exterior that hides a kind disposition. He is concerned about the men he has killed, insisting on burying the dead with dignity, and remains behind at the monastery to help rebuild the Iron Guard when the battle between good and evil is over.

•Jesse, another member of the American Fourth Infantry Division, has a lantern jaw and blue eyes and bears a strong resemblance to Stan Laurel of the comic team Laurel and Hardy. He takes orders lightly, totes a six-shooter, and is trigger-happy. However, he is one of the first to give his life to save his comrades.

•Nick is a member of the American Fourth Infantry Division and has short-cropped hair and the mashed nose of a pugilist and talks out of the side of his mouth. He loves epithets and comes off as a tough guy with no tolerance for jokes, but he stands tall in the face of danger and cares for his fellow soldiers.

•David is another member of the American Fourth Infantry Division. He smokes a corncob pipe, has blue eyes and combed-back dark hair, and seems to be a bit older than the others. He is sensible and reminds his comrades of their duties as soldiers, helping to keep them alive, while acting as the young Simon’s personal guardian.

•Simon is a member of the American Fourth Infantry Division and the youngest of the G.I.s. He is a young and has a pock-marked face, a wide, blue-eyed stare, and a hopeful enthusiasm that does not match his situation. His blond hair is long on top and compliments his two large front teeth. He loves comic books and believes his fellow combat veterans are a justice society. He dubs them the “Light Brigade” and knows they cannot lose because good always triumphs over evil.

•Pete, a member of the American Fourth Infantry Division, wears round-framed glasses and has short spiky red hair and two large front teeth. He is intelligent, knows inane facts, and has a penchant for conspiracy theories. He is not confident in commanders, believing they consider soldiers little more than cannon fodder.

•Billy is a member of the American Fourth Infantry Division. His blue eyes complement a round face. He has light brown hair, which he wears tight on the sides. He has the skills of a farrier and produces iron crosses for his fellow G.I.s. He goes down in the first line of defense at the battle between Heaven and Earth.

•Nisroch is a Nephilim disguised as a Nazi and the right-hand man of Colonel Zephon. He has a pug nose and blond hair and always wears goggles. He never swerves in his duty to Zephon, but he occasionally antagonizes the fallen angel. He resents being reminded that he is a half-breed.

•Sauriel is an archangel wrapped in a blue light who wears proto-Roman armor. He is responsible for handling fallen angels and kills the renegade Azbeel, who has stolen the sword of God. He dies at the hands of Zephon, but not before revealing all, including the presence of God, to the remaining G.I.s and recruiting them in the showdown between good and evil.

Artistic Style

Light Brigade is a gorgeously illustrated book in which the cartoon-style realism of Snejbjerg is complemented by Hansen’s sensitive colors. Perhaps because they both come from Denmark, they get the snowy scenes of Light Brigade exactly right. The winter light is captured in sharp angles that provide small areas of intense light and long shadows that are not just a bunch of crosshatches. Snejbjerg’s strong-lined sceneries are highlighted by aquamarine skies and the blue shadows of winter nights.

The cross-era, cross-genre epic battles are fused, not confused. The frozen lake containing the parade of dead Nephilim also features crusaders of the Middle Ages frozen alongside the soldiers of modern world wars. The images of the lake capture the differing uniforms and weapons in a collaborative blend that lends to the story instead of mashing up historical periods in an overworked frenzy. The battle scenes are realistic even when fantastic. For example, zombie dogfights pit P-51 Mustangs against one other, the plane’s wide-eyed G.I. pilot struck with perfectly drawn disbelief and fear as a zombie Nazi tosses him from the cockpit.

Light Brigade contains a preponderance of gore, from blood- and brain-dripping soldiers to tooth-flying emaciated zombies. However, the gore is essential to the story. When monks are cut in half, the reader is presented viscera that look like something from a biology textbook, while the variety of wounds struck by a variety of weapons perfectly translates the desperation of G.I.s fighting the battle between good and evil.

More than just beautifully rendered gore, landscapes, and castles, Snejbjerg gives each character a personality. Whether it is the buck-toothed, pockmarked Simon, who marches into battle with a backpack filled with Golden Age comics, or the disillusioned and grim Stavros, who has to survive in order to get home to his orphaned son, the characters are distinguishable and identifiable, not only in speech but also in appearance, outlook, personality, and gestures.

Light Brigade is a darkly themed comic, but it is brightly illustrated with a sumptuous rendering that brings its world to life. There are no over-the-top splash pages leading nowhere; this is a comic that combines top-level storytelling with high-grade art. Text boxes are nonexistent, and the limited dialogue, lettered by Ken Lopez and Rob Leigh, reflects each character’s personality, while adding to the storyline. The dialogue does not repeat the art, and the art reinforces the emotion with flair.

Tomasi first pictured Light Brigade’s opening scene in the World War I-era graveyard as a film sequence. Many critics have noted that Light Brigade is a natural fit for the big screen, and a lot of this enthusiasm is based on the realistic rendering of a fantastic world in which angels battle alongside zombies against a bunch of G.I.s led by an immortal.

Themes

On its surface, Light Brigade is a story about good versus evil. Whether it is Heaven versus Hell, fallen angels versus archangels, or Nazis versus American G.I.s, this story seems to delineate explicitly the good guys from the bad. However, not all zombies are Nazis; there are a couple of G.I.s in their company. Also, while it is easy to paint the Nazis as evil, the fallen Grigori do seem to have a point when it comes to their feelings of betrayal and the desire for revenge against God. They disobeyed his command, and God tried to destroy them in the Flood; however, the text questions whether or not complete annihilation is a fair punishment. The Grigori and their half-breed descendants think it was not.

When his wife is killed in a car accident, Stavros has a crisis of faith, marking another theme of the comic. When Heaven comes crashing onto the battlefield, however, an angelic soldier forces enlightenment on the remaining G.I.s, including Stavros, who has to come to grips with a world in which God exists and bad things happen.

Light Brigade is not simply a Sunday school lesson in Christian tenets, however; it is a story that uses the readily identifiable framework of Christianity to explore humanity and the human response to crisis.

Heroism in the face of overwhelming odds is at work in Light Brigade and is directly addressed when the Grigori sneer at the dozen remaining G.I.s, a lost cause resembling that of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae. What motivates the men is also explored. The American soldiers are waiting to go home, which gives the work a sense of urgency. Failure on the part of the soldiers not only affects their personal world but also all of mankind. They are noble and honorable during a war in which inhumanity seemed at its worst.

Hope is another theme explored in Light Brigade, exemplified in both the fresh-faced Simon, who believes in the superhero world in which good always triumphs over evil, and Stavros, who has to live just long enough to get back home. The characters infect readers with that same enthusiasm to triumph, so that mankind can live on and one man can make it back home.

Impact

The comics of the Golden Age and a love of history influence Tomasi. He also loves Westerns and war-story comics, à la Archie Goodwin, and in Light Brigade, the inserted Golden Age comics within remind readers that these comics were a major source of reading material for World War II soldiers. Tomasi cites Bob Kanigher, Russ Heath, and Joe Kubert as influences on his artistic leanings, but war comics seem to be the greatest influence, from Golden Age World War II titles to Silver Age Vietnam War works, as well as more recent works such as Garth Ennis’s Preacher (1995-2000) and War Story (2001) series.

Classic American comics artists influenced Snejbjerg’s art for Light Brigade. He heavily researched war comics and was influenced by their style, believing they fit the book’s setting. Tomasi saw Mike Mignola and Eric Powell in Snejbjerg’s simplistic, strong-lined approach. Light Brigade’s storyline is often called a “mashup” of genres, from horror and fantasy to war and “weird tales,” but this does little to highlight just how strangely fascinating and well done this work is.

Further Reading

Arcudi, John, et al. A God Somewhere (2010).

Tomasi, Peter, et al. The Mighty (2009).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Outsiders: The Hunt (2010).

Bibliography

Flagg, Gordon. “Review of Light Brigade.” Booklist, 102.8 (Dec. 2005), 32.

Harahap, Al. “The Light Brigade #1 Review.” Comixfan.net, Feb. 28, 2004. Available at http://comixfan.net/forums/showthread.php?t=26069.

Marshall, Rick. “Adapt This: Light Brigade by Peter J. Tomasi and Peter Snejbjerg.” Splashpage.mtv, May 6, 2010. Available at http://splashpage.mtv.com/2010/05/06/adapt-this-light-brigade-by-peter-j-tomasi-and-peter-snejbjerg/.

Montgomery, Paul. “Inglorious Angels: Charge of the Light Brigade.” iFanboy, August 25, 2009. http://www.ifanboy.com/content/articles/Inglorious‗Angels‗‗Charge‗of‗the‗‗Light‗Brigade‗.

O’Shea, Tim. “Peter J. Tomasi: Follow the Light.” Comics Bulletin. Available at http://www.comicsbulletin.com/features/107751537050471.htm.

Renaud, Jeffrey. “Arcudi and Snejbjerg Find “a god somewhere.” Comic Book Resources, June 2, 2010. Available at http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=26490.

Singh, Arune. “Justice Editor of America: Peter Tomasi talks DC and . . . Hal Jordan?” Comic Book Resources, Oct. 27, 2003. Available at http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=2782.

Snejbjerg, Peter. The Light Brigade. Available at: http://snejbjerg.com/gallery/light‗brigade01.htm.

Tomasi, Peter. “Peter J. Tomasi: Follow the Light.” Interview by Tim O’Shea. Comics Bulletin, February 22, 2004. http://www.comicsbulletin.com/features/107751537050471.htm.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Tomasi’s on Fire with The Light Brigade.” Interview by Jennifer Contino. Comiccon, March 12, 2004. http://www.comicon.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=325371.

Velez, Catherine. “Can’t miss comics: Light Brigade.” Austin Comic Books at Examiner, July 15, 2009. Available at http://www.examiner.com/comic-books-in-austin/can-t-miss-comics-light-brigade.