Tripwire Reviews Rebellion’s Fiends Of The Eastern Front Volume Two

Fiendishly Inventive

Tripwire’s contributing editor Tim Hayes casts his eye over Rebellion’s Fiends Of The Eastern Front Volume Two by Ian Edginton and Tiernan Trevallion…

Fiends of the Eastern Front Volume Two
Writer: Ian Edginton
Artist: Tiernan Trevallion
Rebellion

A catchy title no longer going to waste, the revived Fiends of the Eastern Front hits its stride in Rebellion’s second collected volume, not least since the unmistakeable art of Tiernen Trevallion arrives and takes up residence for this entire book. After the one original Fiends appearance in 1980 by Gerry Finley-Day and Carlos Ezquerra (and a single story in 2006 drawn by Colin MacNeil), the strip’s revival in 2018 started with art by Dave Taylor, whose smooth sensuous European style lifted it into the realms of a gothic fairy tale. But writer Ian Edginton at the controls of the relaunch is now busy world-building, taking the high-concept hook of a World War I vampire and driving simultaneously back into Romanian legend and forwards towards more recent conflicts. With its protagonist vampire Constanta ranging across a wider field and multiple eras, the strip has become more self-aware, more down and dirty, and more in need of an aggressive horror stylist like Trevallion.

The first of three stories in Volume Two is a different kind of world-building though, the kind that comes directly requested by the publisher. When Rebellion acquired a large cohort of old British comics characters from publishers IPC and Fleetway, it picked up the rights to the distinctly vampire-adjacent 1970s character Black Max, a German WWI fighter pilot with telepathic control over giant bats. Tweaking the title to Fiends of the Western Front Edginton puts Constanta and Black Max together, retrospectively making them kindred species fighting for dominance. An inconclusive end leaves the door open for a repeat battle of UK vampire IP.

The other two stories here are Constanta’s alone. There’s a long and complex origin story involving a man-cub adopted by a she-wolf Tarzan style, a seven-headed dragon, a troll, and three witches in the traditional mother maiden and crone formation, before Edginton jumps forward to 1963 and puts Constanta into the Cold War, a new angle on the character’s historic enmity for Russia and Russians. Characters wear the skin of other characters, Biblical powers arise and clash, and the British occult secret service employs characters named Green and Doleman, suggesting that this department of HMG is being run along the lines of The Ipcress File.

Trevallion has applied his style to a few 2000AD characters including Judge Dredd but always seemed particularly suited to the horror-detective hybrid Absalom, set in another modern-ish Britain where supernatural forces lurked around all the corners, and Fiends is playing in similar spaces. The art has some clear hints of a Mike Mignola flavour, although Trevallion’s monsters are more energetic when they start flaying the skin off each other or hacking off heads, and all his figures have harsh edges and vivid snarls. It’s not really the artist’s fault that Constanta and Black Max are hard to tell apart in the first story – blame Central European vampire genes – but their gothic combat is a showcase for Trevallion’s greyscale shadings and use of shadows. For Constanta’s origin story he breaks into a carefully controlled form of colouring where the tints sometimes look like mineral seams, the kind of chromatics that an artist with a perfect sense of black and white would deploy. On this showing, Constanta has a few more years of death ahead of him.