Lieber Herren und Damen:
It’s the Return of the Peach!
Now I know what the fabulous Donna Barr has been moiling at all these months. The Desert Peach is my hero: suave, courteous, self-controlled, brave, tender-hearted, with a core of steel (if you’re a gay officer in the Afrika Korps, you better have that) and an earring of pearl. “Love, Honor, Death, and Tea”: who could contrive a better motto? (Especially the tea.) The early chapters of his adventures have been catch-as-catch-can for years, like so many independent comics turned out by small presses. Now, starting right at the beginning, we can have the Daily Peach!
And if that isn’t enough, all the old chapters will be back in single-issue format through the POD site Lulu, which rocks.
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I have not given up on my ambition of seeing the musical version of the Peach’s story return to the stage. There is a director with a bad back, who knows the director of the local company that likes musicals, and she stands ready to tip me the wink when she senses that he is restless for a new property. We have a collection of sound clips assembled by her partner who works in radio (you can listen — oh go on, hover on the music icon at: Song Clips from the Desert Peach Musical to get the player). Readiness is all.
I’m a big fan of webcomics, so i’ll check out the adventures of this gay wehrmacht sand opera and see if it’s a fit.
Surely the only thing funnier than Nazis would be gay Nazis.//
Pfirsich isn’t a Nazi. just trying to survive in their world. Having collected the original series, of which this is a revival, I think it gets ever better as the scenario takes shape, with horse-stealing, Tuareg wedding customs, aerial dogfighting by the Peach’s pilot lover, and Erwin Rommel learning to surf. And the Peach has a VERY close call with the Australians in the Allied forces (“Oo’s that? Walks like a bloody Pommy dancing-master.”)
If you can read the later issues – the post-War period – without being affected, you probably shouldn’t be reading comics.
I’ve read “Tongue” over and over the Dear knows how many times. And the Return of Udo: anyone who can read that issue dry-eyed probably shouldn’t even be walking around loose.
I put then on coffin lids because I didn’t think anybody could surf on coffin lids — and then a surfer told me you CAN. I can’t out-weird reality. I don’t make any of this stuff up.
Hi! Stupid author tricks: I’ve sent a lot of my sketch and one-shot page art to the San Diego collection. You have a NICE scan of the Peach and Udo discussing the war; can I get a tiff of that? Or of any other good print-quality scans of other art?
[...] residents: “Mom’s parents had to put up this gay lieutenant” [shades of Barr's Desert Peach!] “who would play the Marseillaise on the piano, until the other officers warned him he could [...]