- Hans Vogel is Dead, volume 2
- Dark Horse Comics
- Written & illustrated by Sierra Barnes
Deceased Nazi ace pilot Hans Vogel continues his journey through an eerie afterlife populated by figures from German folklore in this second installment of Hans Vogel is Dead.
Just when he’s begun to take responsibility for his actions in life, direct confrontation with the Erlking, his vicious allies, and Hans’s own past may send him spiraling back into denial- leaving Reineke, the young fox-girl in his care, in danger. Can he muster his postmortem morality to make a stand for what’s right, or will he return to complicit cowardice?
Sierra Barnes weaves a rich anti-fascist fairytale about the importance of recognizing past wrongs, even (especially) when it’s easier not to.
“A rich anti-fascist fairytale.”
That was the hook that pulled me in. Okay, that may not be entirely true. That tagline is on the back cover, but it really started with the title… “Hans Vogel is Dead”. Between that and the mystery unfolding in Sierra Barnes’s cover art stuck in my brain. I needed to read this book.
The story begun in volume 1 is that Hans Vogel is Dead. Okay… neat. The meat underneath that title is that Vogel was an ace fighter pilot & celebrated member of the Nazi Party during World War II. Not so neat. Now, making his way through an afterlife populated by people from German folklore, Hans is coming to grips with the fact that he was not an awesome human being in life.
Sierra Barnes has a great handle on the pacing of Hans’s journey through the afterlife. Barnes takes some deep dives into Germanic history and lore, drawing inspiration from the likes of Rapunzel and Siegfried von Xanten. All of that would be fine entertainment on its own, but Barnes adds depth and the occasional gut-punch to her story as she hits Hans with the realization that he was never the hero of his story.
Pulling double duty as both writer and artist, Barnes hits a balance in style and substance. Up front, readers are given a fairy tale world full of fantastical characters. Hans meets heroes and legends in all their glory, walking side by side with a collection of anthropomorphized critters and creatures as he struggles with the life he’d lived. There’s an element of “Disneyfication”, no doubt, but that cartoony softening is cut with hard edges and character-driven shards of underlying horror. Like the deceptive world Hans finds himself in, very few things in Sierra Barnes’s work are what they immediately appear to be.
Hans Vogel is Dead volume 2 is a beautifully told story revealing some very ugly truths. Heroes are subjective, legends are created by the powerful, and before we can be better, we should work to do better. If you needed just a little more icing for your comic book cake, Sierre Barnes lived a past life as a historian, drawing from that background to add historical notes and references throughout the book.
Final Score: 12/13
