Review: ‘Hellman Of Hammer Force: Downfall’ — The Greatest Brit War Comic? Certainly One Of The Darkest

This second collection of the Gerry Finlay-Day and Mike Dorey-created Hellman of Hammer Force is an essential and quite brilliant collection of one of the finest Brit war comics, following Hellman and his crews, brave Germans all, fighting equally against whatever enemy they face and their Nazi leaders, from their earliest campaigns to brutal defeat and downfall in Berlin.

This was one of those collections that I opened up on a Monday afternoon, perilously close to publication deadline, intending to dash off a pretty thorough preview, complete with plentiful art from all three quite magnificent artists involved here – Mike Dorey, Jim Watson, and Patrick Wright. The thing is, as far as I’m concerned, a preview isn’t just a case of whacking the cover and a few preview images up along with the publisher press release or back-cover bumph. No, a preview is almost a mini review, encapsulating what the book is about and giving you some idea of whether it’s any good. And the problem with that is that, sometimes, when a book is so engrossing, so damn good as I found Hellman: Downfall to be, you end up going way more in-depth than you expected to and end up writing a full-blown review of it instead. So, back to the drawing board for the preview that you may have seen already (and you should, as there’s loads of great art and story to enjoy there) and double the work by doing preview and review. However, with something as good as this, the review tends to write itself.

Simply put, before I start giving you the details of the book and why it’s so good, I’ll just come out and say that this was one of the best war comic strips of all time as far as I’m concerned, with Finley-Day and the three artists here excelling at all points, giving us a very different look at the horrors of war in a comic, lest we forget, that was aimed at young boys. It’s an excellent collection and one that you really should have on your shelves.

That’s a couple of panels from early on in Downfall that give you much of what you need to know about the character. Innovative and ground-breaking at the time of publication – 1976 – Hellman was a German Panzer commander fighting against the Allies in WWII. That alone made it different from all that had come before, taking a look at the enemy through sympathetic eyes, but, as I’m going to show and tell you, Downfall went places that the majority of war comics of the time just didn’t dare go.

Of course, having a German as your lead was no easy thing, but it did help that Hellman was no Nazi, just an ordinary, if brilliant, soldier pressed into fighting for both his country and its people, but never for the Nazis, most often seen in the strip as sadistic and evil SS officers. He was the noble soldier, believing in fairness and the rules of war, something that we sometimes saw reciprocated from the opposition, such as this piece from Downfall where Hellman meets an equal on the battlefield and both refuse to fire on the other…

This second collection of Hellman contains the stories from Battle comic from 1977 to 1978, ending with the incredible and never-before-reprinted Fall of Berlin storyline that sees the end of Hellman’s war and the end of the strip itself.

The early strips here are something of a collection of greatest hits if you will, titled The Early Adventures of Hammer Force. A series of short adventures, all very enjoyable and very fast, with Finley-Day having to pack so much – and doing it so well – into three- or four-page weekly strips, we travel with Hellman through 1939’s invasion of Poland, onto the rapid push west through into France, and then down to the war in Greece. Like I say, all very good work, with some absolutely beautiful artwork from all three artists – with all three adept at capturing the full technical might of the weaponry and the character work all the way through the book.

But it’s when Hellman and the Germans turn east towards Russia that the book really begins to go into somewhere very different from your average war comic of the time.

Instantly, Hellman and his troops have met their match, the Russian T34 tanks every bit as devastating a machine as their own Panzers. The sheer brutality and cruelty of the Russians really stands out here and suddenly Hellman has two evil foes, his own Nazi leaders and the SS representing them and now the vicious Russian soldiers whose only role is to kill more and more Germans. Against this, we see the terrible reality of 1941 on the Russian Front as an ill-prepared German war machine grinds to a halt in the freezing Russian winter where it was just as likely to be the cold that killed them as the enemy.

And then, finally, comes The Fall of Berlin, the long storyline that takes up the lion’s share of Downfall. The strip jumps forward to 1945, with Hellman and his crew four years into the Russian Front. The Germans have been pushed back through Russia and towards what will be a final stand in Berlin, something quite impossible for their Nazi masters and the SS to imagine.

Here we see Hellman hounded by the SS, who are killing any soldiers in retreat, and coming across all the nightmares of WWII – lynch mobs of SS officers stringing up retreating German soldiers, the full horrors of the extermination camps, civilians and children killed, it’s all here in this final part of Hellman’s saga as Finley-Day doesn’t spare us, or Hellman, the descent into hell.

As well as the Russians now, Hellman finds himself fighting SS commander Kastner, the man who swore he’d see Hellman dead. Against all this desperation and the final throes of the Nazi regime and the fall of a country, we have Kastner perfectly representing the zealotry and brutality of the Nazis.

Like I said, it’s important to remember that this lesson in the true nightmares that ended WWII was all happening in a war comic still designed for young boys. It’s quite amazing they got some of this stuff through at the time. But that’s down to Finley-Day’s writing, pushing things ever forward, his storylines of necessity short and punchy, yet never falling short of some highly charged plots and as much character development as was possible given the constraints.

And of course, a lot of the credit for how good, how powerful Hellman of Hammer Force was is down to the artists tasked with drawing the strip. The early strips feature the return of original Hellman artist Mike Dorey, whose work here is as incredible as you’d expect, reproduced quite beautifully by the Treasury. After that, still in the early strips, we have work from Jim Watson and then Pat Wright, who would go on to trade art duties with Dorey until almost the end of the series. It’s all quite stunning, the evocative artwork, the perfect inked lines, the machinery and the men in this descent into hell captured so well.

All in all, this is the essential Hellman volume. The first one might have been great, but here we have both an encapsulation of what the best of Brit war comics were about and a storyline with the Fall of Berlin that pushes the boundaries like almost nothing else of its era.

HELLMAN OF HAMMER FORCE: DOWNFALL – by GERRY FINLEY-DAY, MIKE DOREY, PATRICK WRIGHT, & JIM WATSON
Published by The Treasury of British Comics on 28 March 2024.