There have been any number of pulp stories set during World War II, but most of them show heroic Americans fighting on the homefront or abroad against the Nazi menace. Iron Ghost blends the Golden Age "our world at war" setting with the pulp vigilante behavior of The Shadow or the Green Hornet, along with an unusual look inside Nazi society without an outside point-of-view, to craft a solidly entertaining action/mystery. Dixon's take on the Nazis may present them as cartoonishly villainous as any Golden Age comic, but that's in keeping with the book's tone, which aims more for a lurid murder mystery tone than of a real look into the psychology of evil and those who would perpetrate it or go to great lengths to punish it. Iron Ghost has a setting that is unusual, but the story is an old fashioned mystery, focusing less on the "who" in whodunit and more on the "why."
Iron Ghost starts off with a murder, as a German officer (most likely corrupt), is killed by a shadowy figure even as bombs fall on Berlin around him. Dixon plays a fair amount with this contrast, that our two lead characters (I hesitate to call them protagonists, because I suspect that Iron Ghost is really the protagonist) are investigating relatively small murders in a country that is for all intents and purposes dying on a larger scale. The glimpses of various characters show people trying to figure out what's next, because what they have known is essentially ending. It's a relatively lawless setting and thus, like the old west or the bootlegger '30s or the mafia subculture of the '70s, a perfect place for a deadly vigilante, who does what the actual law seems incapable of doing: punishing the guilty.
The book is at its strongest when Dixon and Cariello are playing to their strengths, which is presenting the Iron Ghost as a sort of Punisher/Shadow type character, a merciless and mute enforcer of some mysterious revenge equation that only he knows. The opening assassination and the destruction of the German beer hall are both pretty effective and violent action sequences, and the visual design of the Iron Ghost (courtesy of Flint Henry) is a really good one as well. The book's failure is probably in failing to get past the surface more, to really explore the moral ambiguity of the situation or the setting. In general, Dixon does a pretty good job of portraying the characters of Iron Ghost as people, perhaps a little arrogant or self-delusional, but people caught up in a bad regime rather than cartoonish villains. Unfortunately, he doesn't always strike that balance, and so we get characters like the ridiculously cold and cruel Fraulein Scholer, or the piggish soldiers in the beer hall.
In terms of artwork, Iron Ghost is a solid effort, but could definitely have used a little more subtlety in terms of mood and color. Cariello's work conveys the story effectively enough, but it's almost too straightforward for this tale, leaving little to the imagination and thus failing to heighten the threat of the Iron Ghost. There's definitely a sense that he's deadly, but one doesn't get the moody presence of the Shadow or the seemingly inhuman resilience and resolve of the Punisher. Nor does the shelling of the city really come through in the artwork, aside from on the first couple pages. The disintegration of society is in the script, but it's not as evident in the artwork, which gets across the isolation effectively enough but doesn't present the chaos of war as effectively.
Iron Ghost is a model of solid storytelling, but it lacks a really strong hook beyond its intriguing premise and setting. The murder mystery angle is its strongest hook, and I'm definitely curious to find out who the Iron Ghost is and why he's killing the people he is killing, but the characters thus far seem sketchy and ill-defined. Until we know more about the Iron Ghost's purpose, the action is interesting but ultimately a little bit meaningless, because of the nihilistic nature of the time and setting. At this point, color me intrigued but not yet sold. 6/10
