I am always looking out for pulp inspired comicbook series, and had seen comments about Stephen Mooney‘s Half Past Danger (2014) from IDW. While interesting and fun read, it seemed more inspired by comicbook characters and concepts, but with a little more realistic element than a clear pulp influence.
The story is set in WWII, summer of 1943 to be exact, and in the Pacific Theater. We meet one of the main characters first off, Staff Sgt. Tommy “Irish” Flynn. He’s actually from Ireland, but joined the U.S. Army to fight the Axis.
He and his squad land on a remote island and find Nazis there, which is unexpected. Worse, it seems that this island is also inhabited by dinosaurs, which the Nazis are rounding up for some reason. This set reminds me of the long-running DC Comics series The War That Time Forgot, which has WWII soldiers encountering dinosaurs on a remote Pacific Island.
Irish is the only survivor, and back home he goes AWOL and is recruited to join a special team that is part of the 1st Special Service Force (a real commando group from WWII known as “The Devil’s Brigade”). This team is made up of a mysterious British MI-6 agent, Elizabeth Huntington-Moss, Marine Capt. John Noble, and Ishikawa Minamoto, an ex-Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces member and ninja.
John Noble is a Captain America type: stronger, faster, more fit due to a genetic anomoly, as his father and grandfather were. The government uses him to develop a group of similar super-soldiers, but they all die of heart failure, and Noble faces the same fate in about a year. Ishikawa defected from the Japanese Empire as he felt the attack on Pearl Harbor was dishonerable. I found it hard to believe such a person would be used in the Pacific as the U.S. sent servicemen of Japanese descent to fight in Europe, but as this team is fighting the Nazis, maybe it was allowed. But I am not aware of anyone defecting from the Japanese.
Landing on the island, they meet and capture Greta Schmidt, an Austrian palaeontologist studying the dinosaurs, who doesn’t like the Nazis, as they are killing the dinosaurs.
The team works to stop the Nazis taking the dinosaurs, which is being done for a sinister purpose, and they get betrayed by one of the team. The remander get back to the U.S., and we are promised that Half Past Danger will return. That appeared in 2017 and collected in hardback in 2018 as Half Past Danger 2: Dead to Reichs, and a third and final volume is promised. While overall an interesting read, as I noted I saw more comicbook influences than pulp. But I would like to see this new story to see how things turn out.
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