From Where All This Got Started

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I got so tired of reading about how great "Maus" was that in 2012 I started drawing a comic I called "Chat", about Dien Bien Phu, cats vs. mice, the Furry Legion, France against the Viet Minh.  This was the last major paratroop battle.  Airborne has it's uses but full scale divisional assault is not one of them, to say the least.  To go a little further, such attacks have always failed.  The best executed of them all was Crete, and the Germans never used airborne troops again after that.  Had General Freyberg concentrated on protecting the airfields instead of scattering his forces the Brits would have won hands down.  General Freyberg, VC, was a great officer but his command decision turned out to be wrong.  C'est l'guerre.  In this drawing Marcel Bigeard discovers that a Major Hubert Lysenfeldt has been overseeing a critical counterattack with his radio set tuned to the wrong frequency.  The French are being chopped to pieces and their commander is sitting in a dugout deaf to their pleas for help.
My comic sucked but the furry thing stuck with me.  And, Maus is great, make no mistake about that.  I just wanted to show an aggressor take on warfare.  I very quickly realized that drawing comics was much harder than I realized.
My rabbit was originally a cat with the Furry Legion but in order to give the story some oomph I made him a bunny among carnivores, and some very mean carns at that.  He used to drive Traction Avants for Pierott le Fou, and needed a place to lay low.  He may have miscalculated!






Billie Le Chat, soon to be Billy D. Bunny.






The Traction Avant Gang.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Loutrel  


There was such a person at Dien Bien Phu and he was a Sergeant.  My primary source of info is Hell In A Very Small Place, by the French/Anglo writer Bernard Fall.  Fall, as a journalist, joined the French Foreign Legion and parachuted into Dien Bien Phu.  He died when he stepped on a land mine during our Vietnam war, eerily reminiscent of the death of David Douglas Duncan and Robert Capa.  40 years old.  It should be obvious that I cannot speak too highly of this man.  Oh, yeah, he also fought with the French Resistance.
Talking about putting your money where your mouth is.





Bernard Fall with American troops in Vietnam.





Citroen 11, Traction Avant.  (Front Wheel Drive).  The '34 Ford of it's day.



Au revoir.




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