cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22263288

Assuming you choose to believe Adolf Hitler’s sister-in-law, then apparently the Fuhrer really did live in Liverpool between 1912 and 1913, staying with his half-brother Alois and family in an attempt to avoid conscription. Comics writer Grant Morrison took that basic premise and ran wild with it, producing a 48-page fantasia on Hitler’s life that he gave to regular collaborator Steve Yeowell to draw. In 1989 it was serialised in a Scottish magazine called Cut, where it incurred the wrath of co-editor and Hue and Cry vocalist Pat Kane, who insisted the comic promoted fascism. The following year it had a UK-wide outing in Crisis, the lefty adult spinoff from 2000AD, only for the controversy to crank up all over again with accusations of Morrison actually being a Nazi. In the subsequent decade and a half, all attempts to republish the strip have failed, and these days Yeowell suspects that the original colour artwork doesn’t even exist any more.

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Yeowell’s black and white drawings show his usual skill at storytelling, even when depicting Morrison’s wildest flights of fancy. But the art escalated to a whole other level in its Crisis reprint. A team of colourists led by another wildly talented artist - Nick Abadzis, whose beautifully observed Hugo Tate must be due for reappraisal by now - avoided the obvious approach of simply colouring in Yeowell’s pictures, and used the emerging computer technologies to layer berserk collages of imagery on top of them. The fragmented mindscape of Hitler is even more vividly depicted in this version, as the disconnect between colour and linework becomes more and more extreme until, by the end, the final page’s panels have images from the first page bleeding through them. Colourists rarely get the respect they deserve in comics reviews, and the work of Abadzis and crew deserves more respect than most.

The New Adventures Of Hitler may have a jokey title, and there are certainly laughs aplenty to be had from it: both in the bathetic portrayal of the young Hitler as just another one of Morrison’s Neurotic Boy Outsiders, and in the satirical extremes of the depiction of his descent into insanity. But it still manages to send chills down your spine at all the right moments, culminating in the revelation that it’s more the story of England than it is of Hitler.

Spank the Monkey

Wikipedia