Back in the mid-1980s when I finally got the first published story of Germanys first super hero team into print I was happy (only a momentary happiness but then -it was the 1980s!). I was far -far- from happy with my artwork. I had been drawing since "a toddler" I was told and never stopped drawing and later at Secondary school I taught others who wanted to try their hands at drawing comics just as a bit of fun. However, as D-Gruppe had been with me since I created them in the tiny village of Dalborn in the 1960s I wanted their first published adventure to look good.
Ben Dilworth looking over my newer pencils on one of his visits to Bristol offered to ink the pages. That was an offer I was never going to refuse!
And so was drawn The Revenge of the Ice Queen / Die Rache der Eiskönigin. There was a brief art preview in Zine Zone before the strip was published in the new comics talent comic Preview -which got a few UK creators their comic breaks. From there the strip was later published in Chris Dohr's Watcher publication in Germany which looked at pulps, TV, movies and comics -it has never been a secret that I hated the re-texting as even a national monument -Externsteine- was miss-spelt but comics is comics.
There is a secret about what D-Gruppes aircraft design was based on and I will tell you now..it's staying a secret!
As it turns out the Ice Queen was probably not responsible for "The Externsteine Incident" that took many lives and that was revealed during The Trial strip as featured in Black Tower Super heroes. At one point the German company Bastei Verlag were very interrested in developing the D-Gruppe comic and I put in a lot of work and even had the vastly under-rated John Erasmus draw a full colour Deutscher Michael strip.
The final words of Klaus von Happe the diminuitive leader of D-Gruppe that they needed far more power in their ranks was where the story ended. The intention was to add characters in over the following stories but by the time Bastei had expressed their interest Ben was off to Japan and one after another "new talent" fell by the wayside or decided that having to draw more than five pages a month too exhausting and not what they expected (it involved work).
One thing the editor at Bastei wanted was a back-up strip and that was where multi-billionaire LeCorbeau came in. His life had been saved when Pete Forrest and Geni got involved in tackling the Crimson guardian (way back in the first Small Press run of Black Tower Adventure) and LeCorbeau decided that he wanted to set up national groups to deal with super threats (novel idea, right?) and so he went about setting up a new Task Force Europe after its betrayal by Mastermind and then came the South Asian Task Force and smaller versions in Europe combining into the world-wide Special Globe Guard. Anyway, before it gets too confusing, LeCorbeau wanted to set up Tasl Force Germany and Enrique and Santiago Ruiz produced some pages.
Then Egmont purchased Bastei and...wave goodbye to a year's worth of work!
And so I set to work on drawing everything myself because there is only so long that you can keep things in your head before said head explodes. That meant that all the new members were introduced in a new story -Zeitgeist which had been drawn in the 1980s but what the heck.
To my mind something was always behind the events in Zeitgeist other than the entity calling itself that. But we got to see heroes from other parallels and some nice action scenes before the climatic ending (see D-Gruppe 1-4 or The Collected D-Gruppe). Once the story was redrawn and new text added and then published it was out of the way. Or so I thought.
I then woke up after...a ten minute long sleep (nothing new there) not feeling too good and I said outloud "Zeitgeist isn't dead!" Which is how I realised that my brain had once again been hiding things from me and thus proving that I was correct and not paranoid!
This time the action started below D-Gruppes HQ and we finally found out just what Zeitgeist was -"Maupassant" is a BIG clue! But even more was later revealed in The Green Skies as the story unfolded and I realised that several characters in unconnected books all had links to the menace involved. It's annoying when you sit there and think "I drew that years ago and its linked to this?!"
But before The Green Skies Ben Dilworth had returned to some D-Gruppe stories such as a one off Evangeline story, one involving David Holmes (the British lawyer now a dual British-German national and fighting crime as the Owl); one based in Earth Parallel 667 in which that D-Gruppe investigate a large "object" in space and then the much acclaimed "The Grandfather Paradox" and who knows whether he might return to our German heroes?
However, before the first adventure was published I had planned for the rather dark ending -alluded to by various characters including the Gipsy Sorceror Tarot. It is said that the first meeting between von happe and Waldmeister was "orchestrated" but by whom? In the last published D-Gruppe story von Happe is given an item and while everyone else is mind-swiped he knows what the item is for and when to use it.
In The Green Skies it is clear that Holmes and others suspect something is going on. That the predicted "Days of Darkness" are coming. But von Happe vanished along with other team mebers while pursuing a UFO in The Return of the Gods so who knows what to do? And can whoever does know actually do what needs to be done when it means killing a member of their own team and a close friend?
Only time will tell and in 2019 it was the 50th anniversary of my creating D-Gruppe so perhaps a big special is long overdue?
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