Comic Review: The Crogan Adventures: Last Of The Legion

The dearly-missed Comic Bento once sent me a copy of one of writer/artist Chris Schweizer’s The Crogan Adventures, a kid friendly graphic novel series where a modern day father tries to teach lessons to his two young sons by telling them stories about their many, many colorful ancestors.

That said, Schweizer has produced a new one since 2012, so it looks like there are only three of them in total and I finally got around to the last one (for me) titled Last of the Legion.

After the usual series intorduction, the book jumps to 1912 in the desert of North Africa to see one Peter Crogan.  Peter joined the French Foreign Legion at one point, he has only a month left on his five year contract, and he’s missing lost friends.  The group he joined up with has shrunk down to a handful, with one more missing as the story starts and Peter waking up in a dune after a sandstorm.  His Legion unit is regularly harassed by the regular French army soldiers, and they seem to get little respect from anyone but themselves.

Schweizer’s story has what I have come to expect in the form of a largely kid-friendly plot while introducing a variety of moral and philosophical viewpoints regarding the French’s occupation of the land.  Arguably, the only one that is really wrong comes from a flamboyant officer characterized as an idiot.  If anything, the one issue I had with this book was the artwork seemed a lot more cartoonish than I remember it being in the past.  Maybe this comes from the book having a much bigger cast than the others and Schweizer felt the need to rush some of the character designs, or maybe it’s just been too long since I read the last one and just plain don’t remember.

All that said, I would like it if Schweizer ever gets back and does another of these.  The family tree that appears on the inside covers shows a lot of different Crogans with a number of potentially exciting professions going back centuries.  Since he’s already designed and named all these characters, does that mean they have stories already more or less planned out at least in Schweizer’s head?  I know I want to see another one at some point, even if I didn’t care for this one as much as the others.  7.5 out of 10 cave monsters.