D-GRUPPE -Germanys FIRST Super Team -OUT NOW!

D-Gruppe:Revenge Of The Ice Queen
Hooper-Scharf/B.R. Dilworth/John Erasmus
black & white
31 pp
Comic Album (A4)
£5.00

Growing up in rural Germany wasn’t so bad.  No British comics, of course, but I had access to Bastei comics such as Silberpfiel, Buffalo Bill, Lasso, Schwarzer Wolf as well as the ubiquitous Disney comics and those produced by Kauka Verlag.

But in the UK I’d been used to The Purple Hood, Billy The Cat, The Steel Claw in British comics as well as US super hero comics.  Wastl was the only German character in a costume I could find and it turned out he was Belgian!  In the 1980s came Mykros and Fotonik but they were French.

There simply were no German super heroes.  Of course, later in the 1980s Helge “Herod” Korda (writer) and Stefan Dinter (artist) produced the parody Heroes From The Black Lagoon.  But that was a loong time later.

Fairy tales were big on German tv and there were quite a few involving dwarves.  So I created a German dwarf hero who was quite an acrobat.  Later I thought that rather than just make him athletic I’d make him a genius -Klaus von Happe (“Kopfmann”) was born.

The full story of how Revenge Of The Ice Queen came about and how it was published is in this book as are a few previously lost pages!

The very talented John Erasmus drew a Deutscher Michael back-up strip in the 1980s which was in full glorious colour.  Sadly, its only grey-toned here!

The real surprises in D-Gruppe’s lives start with Zeitgeist which should be out around July/August of this year. New faces, the power back-up Kopfmann always wanted for D-Gruppe and more.