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The Black Order Brigade (also published as The Ranks of the Black Order) is a translation of Les Phalanges de l'Ordre Noir in French) a political thriller graphic novel written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Enki Bilal and translated by Frank Wynne.
Using contemporary Europe as a backdrop, the French team of Bilal and Christin have produced a stark, somberly illustrated exploration of revolutionary politics and the attendant brute fanaticism. As he reads a dispatch describing a savage, right-wing terrorist attack on a tiny village in Spain, Jefferson B. Pritchard, a London newspaper editor, recalls the bloody battles he fought there in 1938 as a member of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. He recognizes the assailants as Franco nationalists, now regrouped into the "Black Order" and resolved to murder liberal and radical European politicians. Contacting the former members of his unit, Pritchard creates a left-wing faction to oppose fascist violence with yet more violence. Although somewhat implausible (the characters, nearly all septuagenarians, climb, hike, swim and bike all over Europe like a geriatric A-Team), Christin's treatment is otherwise commendable. Bilal's drawings, which combine linear precision with richly modulated color, mark him as one of the great comics artists working today