3 out of 5

First part of four of Glenat’s English translations of their D-Day series, presented under 2000 AD’s ‘Battle’ banner.  While I’m a big fan of war comics, I think this is an awesome use of floppy space – sort of testing waters for a new publishing outlet; previously unseen by those of us with only English-reading eyes.  From the blurb on the deal in the Meg’s contents, it sounds like Operation Overlord will act as various one-shots concerning the op from various perspectives.  This one takes us through the liberation of a particular French town, and thanks to the isolated nature of the tale, we’re not stuck with hero characters that are required to get through: people are named and then they die, sometimes with “meaning,” sometimes without.  Davide Fabri’s art captures sky and land antics effectively, though while he gives characters distinguishing characteristics – scars, hair color – the story suffers from the same thing as every war comic in that you can only do so much when everyone is wearing the same outfit to differentiate them, and, unfortunately, Le Galli’s script doesn’t cue us in enough as to who says / does what at times, including some odd ‘why would he say that?’ dialogue that might be an off translation.

It’s all rather incidental feeling, which I think is what the series is going for (that these are “normal” stories of what went on), but that equates to something not particularly memorable at this stage.  Perhaps, though, as we get more of these collections, it’ll build to something more impressive as a whole.