The Bluecoats are Sergeant Chesterfield, a squared away NCO trying to do his best, and Corporal Blutch, who will do anything to survive the Civil War. Blutch is a bit harder to handle as he is not a coward or a sad sack or even a shamming E-4. There’s no risk of desertion here, but Blutch is not opposed to playing dead right before the cavalry charges. The old saw about the only brains in the cavalry are in the horses’ heads is not going to die any time soon.

Half the book is gag and contrivance, bouncing Chesterfield and Blutch from one branch of the army to the next, failing out of cavalry, infantry, and artillery, until they fall as far as any soldier can go:

They end up in the Navy.

The gags are rather innocent and bloodless, a sort of Looney Tunes meets Beetle Bailey innocent good humor that plays on dumb officer stereotypes with a real 20th Century Sunday Comics feel here.

And then, a shadow moves across the waves in pursuit…

It is the Merrimac, the Confederate ironclad. An unsinkable ship that claims three of the Bluecoats’. And then Sergeant Chesterfield and Corporal Blutch get assigned to the USS Monitor.

At this point, the goofy gags get shelved for the historical sea battle. Chesterfield and Blutch drift through the ship on their duties, allowing the reader to see the events and decisions made on the USS Monitor that day. These are played straight, with an admittedly Union-centered view, and the heroics of the real men unmarred by silliness. It is only after the two ships slink away from their stalemate that the humor returns.

I may be too cynical to review this, coming from the age of PVT Murphy’s Law and Terminal Lance, an age where it is not the officers that will ruin a soldier, but the whole ludicrous system that is the military. But with this look at American history from the Land of Asterix and Obelix, it may be that outsiders are doing a better job preserving American history than ourselves.

This isn’t my first encounter with such an inclination, as Japanese pop science fiction like Mobile Suit Gundam and Space Battleship Yamato actively homage long neglected American writers like C. L. Moore, and the tie between H. P. Lovecraft and Chuunibyou (8th Grade) Syndrome is worthy of a Connections episode. But it strikes me with more than a little melancholy that something of 1940s and 1950s American innocence is preserved in French comics as well as the history.

The Bluecoats: Navy Blues may be too innocent for some veterans, but younger readers may enjoy it. Be warned that The Bluecoats as a series won’t shy away from controversial aspects of the Civil War, such as military prisons and the draft riots, though.