The webcomic site katushagirlsoldier.com began running a page-per-day serialization of historical graphic novelist Wayne Vansant’s Katusha Book Two: The Shaking of the Earth on January 25. The site, which began a year ago with a serialization of Katusha Book One: Edge of Darkness, has had more than 100,000 page views and more than 10,000 unique visitors since.
The webcomic debut of the second book of Vansant’s Eastern Front trilogy begins its run on the website not as a seperate volume but simply as Chapter 7 in the story, and comes as anticipation builds for the publication of Katusha Book Three: On Wings of Thunder. As the first three pages unfold, two motorcycle-riding German soldier survey their newly conquered territory while singing the classic love song “Lili Marleen“. The song, based on a poem written in 1915, was popular on both sides of the European theater. In America, it was recorded by Marlene Dietrich as part of anti-Nazi propoganda efforts during World War II, and was later featured in the film Judgement At Nuremberg (1961), in which Dietrich starred, and became a hit with Allied soldiers across Europe and a staple of Dietrich’s subsequent one-woman cabaret shows. In 1962 the song became German chart hit for American singer Connie Francis, who released six previous singles in German. The song has been featured films and television productions, including Lilli Marlene (1950), The Right Stuff (1983), War and Remembrance (1988), Bad Day to Go Fishing (Mal día para pescar) (2009), and in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 film Lili Marleen, itself a loose history of the German singer Lale Anderson, who was known for her 1939 recording of the song. By page two the soldiers spot a supposed peasant girl bathing in a local pond and their attention is drawn elsewhere. This short sequence, featuring two unsuspecting German soldiers thinking of nothing more than love songs as they traverse an occupied country, illustrates the great depth of Vansant’s research and the strength of telling history with graphic novels: he doesn’t simply report the event in the history books – he places the reader inside the Eastern Front, with all it’s tactics and players. This is but a prelude to the full Chapter 7, in which Katusha, Milla, and Taras are reunited with a beloved family member in the midst of the horrors of the siege of Stalingrad before the sisters are sent off to tank school.