Overview
The comic is set during World War II, and the protagonist - Ernie Pike - doesn't play an active role in the stories, being just a narrator. Unlike genre standards, the comic doesn't show any battles nor the Allies and Nazis cliché of being part of a conflict between good and evil. Instead, it centers on tragic events involving soldiers of both sides. Generally, those tragedies are misunderstandings that end up badly: characters who go mad, who kill their own friends by mistake or because they believe them to be traitors, who attempt to get killed in a specific way to avoid a more gruesome death, or who must mercy-kill badly hurt comrades, to cite several examples. Oesterheld, thus, utilizes war comics to reflect his personal dislike of war itself. The character never formulates positive or negative opinions about the allies, the nazis or specific events of the war, but about the morality of the soldiers in the anecdotes narrated. The stories take place at multiple locations of WWII, such as the European Theatre, the South Pacific ocean, the Sahara desert or the Russian Steppe.
There are no recurring characters besides Ernie Pike, and in many cases even his presence is small: he appears in just two panels in "Kumba", only one in "El amuleto", and in some stories he is completely absent. The character also evolves along the published issues from a war correspondent character acting in a first-person narrative to a narrator with an omniscient point-of-view, aware of stories and information beyond the capabilities of a real reporter.
Read more about this topic: Ernie Pike