Storming Paradise #1 (OF 6)

I picked this up on a whim. I have been wanting to grab something new off the shelf for a while now. Something that had nothing to do with registered/unregistered superheroing or any sort of crisis. Something different. Something on issue one. Something I had heard nothing about. The soldier on the cover of this comic was a regular G.I. Joe (not of the type that "Yo's"). Nothing extraordinary. The idea of a regular war comic is the kind of book I have been jonesing for. And I know I have heard someone say Chuck Dixon is a competent, if not pretty darn good, teller of war stories. So I picked this thing up. Low in behold, it is not the straight World War 2/Band of Brothers drama I was expecting. Nope. There is a twist to this one, It is a What If. See, Oppenheimer went and blew himself (and all of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project) up while testing the world's first atomic bomb. So the US has to end World War 2 with a massive land invasion of Japan. This issue sets all of that up, and fairly well I say. We get introduced to soldiers on both sides for whom the war has already worn them down. A civilian priest who is trying to spare Japanese children from having to go off to suicide themselves in battle. Some shifty Germans hiding out in a U-boat who are up to no good (could they be trying to get atomic secrets to the Japanese... maybe). And, towards the end of the issue, is that John Wayne signing up for the war? Dixon weaves a compelling beginning, spinning a well thought out twist to something I was expecting to be straight forward. Guice captures a lot of detail in the war machines he draws and and an equal amount of drama in the people he portrays. I give this my highest recommendation for anyone who enjoys war stories in a slightly unreal world but with the appropriate, uncelebratory, tone.