Review: Harrier Squadron: Armistice Day
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Charles E.P. Murphy.
1993, the middle of the Third World War, the Asian Bloc and the Western Federation battling for the fate of Europe. Among WESTFED’s greatest assets are the multinational Harrier Squadron, piloting their state-of-the-art jump-jets against the ASBLOC menace. But what happens if there’s a shot at peace? Flight Lt. “Hob” Hogget wants to believe in an armistice but can’t quite trust that it can happen after all the bloodshed. And that’s before he has to provide security at the ceasefire summit with the enemy ace Captain Navickiene, who almost shot him down just yesterday…
Commando Picture Weekly is one of Britain’s longest-living comics. It is both the last of the once-ubiquitous war comics and, more significantly, the last of the once-common digests: sixty-plus page tales at a size that fits in your pocket, with one to three panels per page and a lot of use of captions to carry the compressed story along. People still routinely try to do anthologies in the style of 2000AD and the Beano but Commando stands alone. In recent years, Commando has started running stories about DC Thomson’s old stable of war comic characters from old titles, such as the secret agent Peter Flint, Codename Warlord from Warlord, Braddock of Bomber Command from The Rover and The Victor, and Victor's Cadman the Fighting Coward, a WW1 Flashman. This month they’ve brought back Harrier Squadron and its naval spinoff Bligh of the Fastsure: an alternate history tale of a Cold War gone hot.
Well, it’s alternate history now. In the 1980s issues of Warlord, the Harrier Squadron fought in the near future of the early 1990s against a massive invasion, the Warsaw Pact renamed "the Asian Bloc" just as early 2000AD had the Volgans. Everyone flew Harriers because of their presence in the recent Falkands War; as Armistice Day’s writer James Swallow said while promoting the comic, “the Harrier was the Spitfire of its day, an exciting exemplar of British military might and technological prowess”. Even having a Yank leader doesn’t stop the squadron flying Harriers! Like other technothrillers set thirty seconds into our future, Harrier Squadron and Fastsure have now become AH retrohistories, and Swallow & artist Esteve Polls delve right into the once-cutting-edge aircraft and naval craft (with ‘futuristic’ drones appearing halfway through) to show us a war that wasn't.
Armistice Day is meant to be in the tone of an older war strip, the style before IPC’s Battle made everything edgier, and it does pull that off. Polls’ highly detailed, old-school art is how many war comics looked once upon a time and it stands out in 2026. If you like highly detailed retro computer consoles, fighters jets, and hydrofoils, you’ve probably been reading this blog for a while already! Hob, Bligh, Navickiene, and the others all look like real humans in real crumpled uniforms in a real place rather than comic book pin-ups, grounding the technothriller tale and all its pulp.
Swallow’s script also carries an older tone, with very professional soldiers doing a mission and a lack of exaggerated reactions or dialogue in the combat scenes – but it also carries a modern edge in its treatment of violence. We don’t see gore and only so much on-panel death (Commando aims all-ages) but the first thing we see our heroes doing is bombing the enemy, and we see the enemy reacting, Polls’ very realistic and normal men, with fear and attempting to flee as the bombs come to kill them. Later, a submarine is sunk and we see part of the crew before we're told they all drowned. It's necessary military action but not prettied up.
To fully enjoy Armistice Day, you will need to get used to the digest format if it’s new to you. There’s little room for pausing and taking a breather, and while the use of narrative captions to move the plot along is years out of fashion in English-language comics it's a necessity in this more compressed format. In eleven panels at the start, spanning five pages, we meet the Harrier Squadron, get told what the setting is and what their mission is, have an introduction to the four pilots, and see Hob succeed in their mission only for them to detect enemy jets inbound. A resulting aerial duel between Hob and a Yak-38 lasts three panels on one page. (One exception to this breakneck pace is a scene when Hob, unhappy about working with the enemy, looks out on at the desolation of coastal England – a scene that lands because of how slow it is, focusing on mood.)
This is the style of the digest format, you’re either onboard or you’re not. If you do get on board, Armistice Day is a well-crafted AH war story with high quality aerial combat scenes and some nice twists in its tail.
However: an elephant in the room is that right now, there really is a big grinding war in Europe and armistice is a way away. In one scene, Navickiene admits that this fictional war was started by ASBLOC (who she, as a member of it, believes was provoked) but says there has been devastation done by both sides. The real war has been far more one-sided. While honourable soldiers from opposing blocs teaming up is a staple of both Cold War tales and various war stories, your mileage may vary on how current events effect your appetite for those tropes.
Charles EP Murphy is an author who, among other works, wrote the books Chamberlain Resigns, and other things that did not happen and Comics of Infinite Earths for Sea Lion.
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