I recently bought these comic books at Amazon. WW2 comic books have seen a real boom the past 2 years. Most of them are WW2 aviation related, but some are specifically airborne related, so they deserve to be mentioned on this blog for paratrooper enthusiasts.
For starters, all three are in French. I would have gotten them in Dutch, but La Nuit des Paras and Normandie came out at a very small publisher in France and aren’t even sold in Belgium, let alone translated. They deserve to be though, as both are worthwhile illustrated accounts of the British and American airborne part in the Normandy invasion. Nuts! is in fact a reworked reprint of a book from 1991. The old edition also exists in Dutch. It is about the Battle of the Bulge as you might guess from the title.
This is not the first post about new paratrooper related comic books, so I added a new section for it within the book reviews section.
The makers of the first 350 jump wings were Bailey, Banks & Biddle Company of Philadelphia. All of these first wings bear BB&B on the back and they are a rare collector’s item. I just wanted you to know that recasts are now turning up at eBay, also of other rare maker versions such as Sugarman. The current seller honestly lists them as repros, but they are really well made and might later be sold as originals.
At last, Denix seems to have picked up on feedback from collectors and re-enactors and is now bringing us the early M1 carbine without the bayonet lug and with the early flip-flop rear sight. Thanks Hugh for pointing this out to me! I can’t wait to inspect one up close, but I expect it to be good as the bayonet lug and the rear sights were my only gripes about the late-war model Denix released first. Now they can only one-up this with a paratrooper folding stock. Repro stocks elsewhere go for almost the same price as the repro carbines, making a put together piece quite expensive, so if they can offer one even at about 250 euro, it would sell like hotcakes.
