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Peter Panzerfaust: Volume 1: The Great Escape.
Kurtis J. Wiebe and Tyler Jenkins
I have really enjoyed Wiebe and Jenkins re-imagining of
J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. In this beautiful graphic novel, the titular Peter Panzerfaust is an American teen who rescues the lost boys from an orphanage in Calais
during the French Occupation in World War II. The framing device of the narrative is that a
present-day John Parsons is interviewing Tootles, one member of the lost boys,
who then recounts their adventures following Peter. Wildly charismatic, Peter leads the boys on
the search for a ship to take them to England.
When that plan goes awry, Peter
encourages them to go on the march for Paris.
Along the way, the Lost Boys cross paths with Kapitan Haken, the SS officer
that will soon become Peter’s nemesis.
Peter courageously crosses blades with Haken, leaving him one hand short
and setting the stage for him to become the hook-handed villain he was fated to
become. The boys then rescue Wendy
Darling and her two brothers, British ex-pats who were heading home when their
plane was shot down. Ultimately, the
lost boys find themselves in the path of the invading German army, an exchange
that weighs heavily of Peter and the surviving boys. Most remarkable is how well the story
re-imagines elements of the original fantastical Peter Pan story within the semi-realistic
context of a World War II boys’ adventure.
While there is some bloodshed, it’s relatively tame, with just enough of
an element of gritty realism to keep the story grounded in semi-plausible
events.
Eschewing the fantasy of flying fairies, mermaids, and
pirates, Weibe’s version makes wry references to the source material in
inventive and clever ways. For example,
there is an escape where Peter jumps from one building to another, encouraging
the boys to fly to freedom. In another
scene, Peter survives an escapade that leaves his silhouette in a riddle of
bullets, reminding readers of the Peter’s shadow. And while she is not fully revealed in this
story, we are introduced obliquely to Belle as the reason for why Peter, an
American, was in France in the first place. The story is chock-full of neat literary allusions to the source material, little gems for the reader to discover.
Jenkins’ art style is clean, simple, and generally pleasing, and Wiebe
trusts in the power of illustration to show us the action sequences with little
narrative redundancy. The only quibble I have is that there is very little effort made to differentiate the
lost boys visually, and so it is sometimes confusing as to who is doing what. It appears that Jenkins spent time with the
character sketches for Peter and Wendy, but his passel of boys are generally unremarkable
from one another, a hairdo or hat about the only distinguishing feature between
them. That’s a minor quibble for what is
an otherwise wonderful comic book re-imagining of the Peter Pan story. The TLA Maverick committee had every right to laud this book in its most recent 2014 awards.
I’m looking forward to more Panzerfaust stories.
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