Web Wanderings Web Exclusive - The good ol' escapism of The Specialists

There is nothing better than a good comic book as a means of good old escapism.

And in this day and age you can find some very good ones serialized online. One of the titles to check out is The Specialists (thespecialistscomic.com).

This is a title that owes much of its style to Saturday morning cartoons and superhero comic books of the 1960s and 1970s. This is not the darker and grittier tale seen in most comic books these days.

The book centres on WWII and the existence of super soldier teams; the German Übermenschen and the American Specialists.

The theme of course is not new, or unique. Captain America was born out of WWII, and when you check out the Q&A page on the website they admit borrowing from the past in terms of theme and even character development.

“We’d certainly never try to deny that there are similarities between some of our characters and other, better known characters. Captain Victory is obviously cut from the same cloth as Captain America, and The Bombardier shares a defining trait with The Rocketeer. We intentionally based our characters on the same archetypes that those other characters made famous, and we’re certainly not the first to do so. There have been many patriotic superheroes since Captain America, and The Rocketeer was not the first hero to don a jetpack. Also, these similarities are only skin deep. There may be parallels between Captain Victory and Captain America, but Luke Jensen bears little resemblance to Steve Rogers,” details the page.

And that’s fine by me. In the world of fiction there are few, if any, completely new, or unique ideas. The key is creating enough differences and building a good story. The Specialists is a good story. It’s fun. It’s not overly dark, it just goes back to the basics that I remember from my younger days.

There is a good chunk of pages online so you can relax one evening and have a good read. The site suggests a page a week is added (Mondays), although like many things online that does not appear etched in stone. Still worth checking out though.