Donna Barr

Steinheld Lowhard, a half-horse (not centaur, please! Half-horses are quite civilized, thank you...) enlists in the Army and serves a vaguely Germanic country for eight years in a Great War with no real winners. There are a whole series of comics and graphic novels that deal with Stinz's life upon his return; Charger deals with the events in Stinz's military career, an experience which changed him (and not all for the better)... Humorous, poignant, and saddening at points.

it's a whole world of centaurs (the half-horsed) suddenly meeting with the human world (the two-legged), with practical and cultural consequences. so far so good. it's also a bit curiously set in a pre-WW1 pocket within Germany. is there a bit of a discrimination subtext? maybe (but shouldn't i know?). but it's surprisingly sexist too - okay, stallions and mares, i get that, but still...). and slightly creepy if you take it politcal. i want to like it, especially because female creators are show more still much rarer in comics than they ought to be, and it's indie besides. it does have a sprightly faux-naive narrative. but on the whole it makes me a bit uneasy in the corners. show less

Stinz is always fun. Several stories I'd read elsewhere - probably online - and several I'd never seen before. Stinz as a colt; as a young stallion, courting Bruna; as a father, with Andri as a very young colt; and some when Stinz is relatively old (having trouble jumping a fence, for instance). Not in chronological order, quite - the last batch, where Stinz is something of a secondary character, are back in his courting days. Lovely. Of course, now I want to find more Stinz...

This book (all text, no images) is the parts of Pfirsich's life we didn't see in the Desert Peach comic, both before and after. Childhood, WW1, and after WW2. There are a couple of chapters that deal with his time with the 469th. We also see his first meeting with Rosen.