Snowman: 1944 Special

Cover #1A.

  What a difference a year and another publishing company make. Snowman 1944 was supposed to end with issue #4. But for some reason be it creative, financial, both, Entity Comics never got around to publishing it. So in 1997, Avatar Press became the new home for Snowman and saw and end to the 1944 miniseries with this special one-shot.

    The creative team stayed the same with the move to Avatar. So, you'd think that would have kept the quality of the book up to the same level of the original 3 Snowman 1944 issues. Well, you'd be wrong.

   First of all, the book starts out with an 8-page rehash of everything that happened so far in this story. I understand that since so much time had elapsed between issue 3 and this special, that some sort of reminder was needed. I appreciate that. But none of the artwork was new! It was all cut and pasted from issues 1-3! For a $4 comic from the 90s, that's unacceptable!!!

   Then comes the story itself. When we last left Tommy Gunn, his Nazi hostage had been killed by the Snowman. Though Tommy seemed to hate to see her go, there didn't seem to be any love lost. Yet most of this issue becomes some sort of twisted fantasy between the American soldier and the Nazi officer as Tommy seeks to escape Occupied territory in a stolen German plane. Yet all this daydreaming really detracted from the story.  Not to mention that the language was (now) left unedited and nudity abounds in a book known only for being violently gritty.

   Lastly, the story does something completely unexpected and really dumb- it becomes a time travelling romp with a trio of characters that didn't even appear in either the Snowman 1944 or Origin story from the Entity books. Maybe those characters are from the original Snowman book. But if they are, I'd expect some sort of mention of them somewhere (ANYWHERE) in this book's summary or issues 1-3.

 Speaking briefly on the Snowman #0 story. It's completely gone from this issue. But I did learn that with Avatar's undertaking of the Snowman franchise, that story finally got to see print as a stand alone series. Yet, with how god awful this special was, I'm not sure if I ever want to venture out into the frigid world of the Snowman.

   Not Worth Consuming

   Rating: 3 out of 10 stars.