Reading this collection puts me back in the 1970s when I would get a chance to read my cousin's Sgt. Rock and Sgt. Fury comics while my mom had her taxes done. Plenty of tanks, quick tales, violence, and betrayals. The ending makes me think about trying to find out what happened next. If you enjoy war comics from the 1970s, you will not want to miss this title.

Not, as the title might lead you to expect, a mayonnaise sidekick of MC Hammer – just a panzer commander. And not even a Nazi, at that; Action may have been boundary-breaking as UK comics go, but there were limits, so a German tank commander in the Second World War was one thing, but he had to be one who bridled at the unnecessary taking of life, was constantly screwing over the Nazi political officer assigned to his unit, and generally played the chivalrous 'good German'. Not that such officers didn't exist – just look at von Stauffenberg and co – but to a large extent it does feel like having one's cake and eating it. Still, compared to the plucky Brits and uniformly dastardly Jerries in most British war comics, I suppose at least they were trying. And in terms of sheer derring-do, you can see why this was considered worth excavating – the quality of daring escapes and two-fisted action is high, with the art managing to pack plenty into the three-page installments without ever becoming cramped or even losing the sense of scale. As the story goes on, with Hellman and his redshirts deployed to pretty much every theatre of Germany's war, even the ones where tanks are manifestly not useful (they go along 'as observers' in a glider for the invasion of Crete, which is quite the stretch when you consider the payload of a glider), any plausibility the story may have had starts to look shaky. But then you could say the same about most any ongoing war comic based around a single lead, and at least it's not a whole plucky gang surviving everything Dunkirk, El Alamein and even Kursk can throw at them - the implacable, eponymous Major makes it through, but Hammer Force get replaced in full at least once, and after the second wipeout Hellman is left commanding a penal battalion who don't even merit the name. More of a problem is that, once the action relocates yet again, from North Africa to the Eastern Front, for a time the art starts to feel stiffer, lazier, at times outright comical. Mercifully, that soon passes, and as we hit history's biggest tank battle, and even more so its drawn-out and brutal aftermath, the story attains a blend of action and excitement with sheer horror at the inhumanity of war fit to stand alongside a Garth Ennis comic on the same theme.

(Netgalley ARC)

I can't say I found any enjoyment in reading these to be honest. Logically because I was never their demographic.

I ended up wanting to read them for some historical context but also because of the line "But this man is no Nazi - he avoids taking life wherever possible...!" from the summary.

I feel like that line and the entirety of this comic really represents an attempt in its own right of reframing. Rather then focusing on the Nazi ideology that was enforced with violence and death, this felt like it was acting like this ideology wasn't something bad or worth noting in any significant way.

Do I think it is good to some extent for keeping this around for seeing societal shifts. Totally.
Would I buy this for someone in my life? Probably not.