Review: The Devil's Pilot

The Devil's Pilot by Richard D. Nolane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Rating 3 out of 5 | Grade: B; WWII dogfights with Nazi Jets

Here we are back again, indulging in the junk food of Alternate history fiction; what if the Nazis won the war. Only this time around they didn't. As what happened in the real world, WWII happened, and the allies defeated Imperial Japan by dropping the nukes on Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Everything is quiet on the eastern front.

Only, the western front is still very much a contested battlefield. Downright catastrophic weather conditions saw the Landings at Normandy, as well as D-day, turn into a devastating failure. Much like the Persian fleet on the Greek shores, the allied naval offensive was blunted, and the Axis powers got a brief respite, allowing them to stay in the war late into 1946.

The coinciding launch of the Lippisch .13a, the German ramjet prototype, swung the scale more in favor of the Germans, especially when it came to aerial engagements.

Skies above Europe became a graveyard, where slower propeller driven aircraft flying at lower altitudes, became fish in a barrel for the faster higher altitude Nazi jets. Now, I can already imagine the armchair historians start winding up to argue how just because they're faster jets, doesn't necessary mean they'd have been able to take out the WW2 level fighters. Something about heat seeking weapons, maneuverability and the likes.



I'm not arguing with you. Like most fictional stories, this wouldn't hold water under scrutiny. But, for the sake of reading a pulpy entertaining what if? tale, let us assume that Nazis developed jets, and successfully put them in service to them completely outclass the allied counterparts. After all the story has to happen.

With greater losses, and the loss of the technological edge, the Allied offensive is on the backfoot, trying to catch up fast (If this goes like the other alternate history stories, they will soon). But for now, the Nazis rule the skies, and have managed to defend Germany and the bulk of their empire.

Now Hitler being the neurotic f**k that he is, starts ordering more and more Wunder-waffen (wonder weapons) out of R& D to be developed so that they might turn the tides of war. Which has resulted in a stalemate, between the vast industrial capacity war machine of the allies, versus the limited in number, but technologically superior German Luftwaffe.



But hey man, you might wonder, 'Why haven't the Americans dropped a couple of nukes on Berlin to end the war like in Japan?' For which there is an in-story answer, one which you'd have to read the story to know.

Anyways, this is the first of 16 issues for what I'm hoping for is a good series. But before proceeding, some thoughts.

Story, Art & Dialogue

The story, as I mentioned above is interesting enough that you'd want to keep reading the formulaic alternate history fic. And it seems to fall under the sub-niche within the 'Nazis won WW2' genre; the 'Nazis didn't win the war, but have the allies in a stalemate, leading to a bloodier war'.

The highlight of the comic is its art, with the visually gorgeous, action-packed dogfights between the German Jets and the allied air force. the Illustrators were able to capture the sense of urgency, chaos and impending doom of aerial warfare. The frames with the jets are dynamic and pages filled with dogfights and debris make for pages with a lot happening.



The same cannot be said about the people design, where faces are drawn in wooden and unemotive manner.

Which might be apt considering the wooden dialogue. Reading through the dialogue was stilted, artificial sounding and didn't really sync with the character expressions or pace of the story. It just seems broken and disjointed, which makes you think this was written by someone for whom English is not the most fluent second language (Which might be the case, as I peruse the author section on Goodreads)

So far, the pay off between the great art vs bad dialogue is towards the art, and I'll keep with the series. Hoping things would improve.



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