Friday, January 23, 2015

Another Hugo Pratt Li... Er... Mystification or Ernie Pike - Coda #6 - A Revisionist Take

I was unfair to Hugo Pratt this time, methinks...

Let's look at those images again:



There are two ways of reading the prep drawing above: 1) the soldiers are returning to the rear from the battlefield (they are haunted by all the death that they've witnessed); 2) they are going to the battlefront, being obvious cannon fodder. Judging from the cover of Hora Cero #1 below I would say that reading # 1 is the correct one, but, maybe the editors feared reading #2?


On the other hand what was published has a dubious meaning as well. If we compare the two photos below it seems to me that it's safe to say that the dead soldiers are German soldiers (photo 1.), not North-American soldiers (photo 2.): notice the boots... What is the American soldier's skull ominously doing above all that destruction and death, then? Beats me, to be honest. Is it there to indicate that the Americans did it? Isn't that a bit redundant? Would it be a lot different if the Red Army did it instead? Is it there to indicate that American soldiers died too? As I put it above: who knows?... 


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