Otto
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
“
|
The past several years have numbed us to carnage but this... this is more than the horror of war. This is the natural world itself--consuming us without mercy. For all our imperial might, the untamed earth gives no quarter.
|
„
|
— Otto on the crew's second day on Skull Island. |
Otto was a captain in the Imperial German Navy during World War I. He is the protagonist of the horror comic book Kong: The Great War by Alex Cox and Tommasso Bianchi, published by Dynamite Comics, which ran from 2023 to 2024. Otto was assigned command of the submarine U-184 in 1917, and tasked with establishing Imperial control over sparsely charted waters in the Pacific Ocean, which led to he and his crew becoming stranded on Skull Island.
History
- Kong: The Great War #1–6 (2023–2024)
Kong: The Great War
"Chapter I: The Beach"
Otto awoke on the beach of an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean with no clear memories of how he got there. He walked down the beach and remembered the carnage of his shipwreck and soon found the beach was littered with bones and bodies belonging to his crew. He instinctually sought the sea, and the safety it had provided, but was soon faced with a strange sea beast like a reptile with tentacles. He ran away as its head was blown off by a surviving bit of the ship's artillery, and managed to meet up with the ship's survivors. His men gave him updates on their situation and then asked him what they were to do. Initially Otto was confused why they would be asking him such a thing, but ship or no ship he was still their captain. He regained his bearings as he remembered the moments before the U-184's destruction. Otto gave orders to climb the steep sea cliffs toward a distant peak where he planned to light signal fires and wait for rescue. Otto remembered climbing mountains back home, and resolved that as long as his men looked to him for guidance, he would keep them all safe.
After hearing a strange roaring sound, the crew sheltered in a small cave halfway up the cliff, where the men became fearful after something crossed the cave's mouth and managed to block the light completely. A man volunteered to check it out and the cave went dark again. When the light returned the man was gone, and a giant pair of eyes looked in on them. Otto crept to the cave's mouth, listening to the man from before screaming for help before his body was ripped and crushed. Outside the cave was a gigantic ape looking down at him. Otto was certain at that point that they were all going to die on this island.
"Chapter II: The Swamp"
On top of the cliffs, Otto asks a wizened sailor called Werner for an estimate of how long it will take the crew to reach the mountain he had spotted the day before. Werner says two days, and the crew begin the journey on their captain's orders. A sailor named Heinrich takes the scout position, and the captain reflects on his duty to protect the men who are so eager to prove their worth in an emergency. He is then forced to watch as giant insectoid legs rise out of the muddy ground beneath them and crush Heinrich's body before dragging it into the earth. While it happened quickly, Otto was at a loss for what if any orders to give. Had they fired on the beast, they would have killed the man, but the captain suspected that may have been a more merciful death. He assured his surviving men that nothing could have been done, and they all continued on. They were then immediately attacked by the legs from the ground. The party fired on them and took them down, but the captain bid them to cease fire, as he heard a mysterious sound. Another sailor heard it too, and Otto ordered the men to get down. A group of strange red dinosaurs then appeared before them and charged. Otto and many sailors stayed down in the mud and managed to avoid them, but a Lieutenant named Meyer, who Otto remembered was a dainty boy from a wealthy family in Düsseldorf, took up a wrench and beat each of the red feathered beasts to death. While Otto was thankful for Meyer's assistance, he also knew that whoever the boy had been before was gone now.
As they trudged on Otto realized that the survivors were regretting their "luck," and that all they could realistically do was hope for a quick death, and only a miracle would allow them to see home again. He called for the men to pick up their pace, and promises to buy the men "beer by the barrel" when they return to Berlin. He soon conferred with a man he learned was the ship's cook Hugo, and between them and Werner they made a plan to march until nightfall and then make camp and cook their rations. The men then heard the footsteps and see the silhouette of the huge ape-like beast the captain had seen before. They decide to do their best to avoid it and continue. He asked Werner if he had ever seen anything like this island before, and the old seaman told him of various maritime horrors he had witnessed in his day, proclaiming that most men never learn the true savage nature of the world. The ship's engineer then found a safe enough place to camp: a depression in the earth guarded by a great log. As Otto laid down to rest that night, he wondered if maybe they could survive together, and imagined that maybe the Beast would leave them alone, not knowing they were camped in one of its gargantuan footprints.
"Chapter III: The Chasm"
On the morning of their third day on the island, the crew were chased from their camp by a huge blue meat eating dinosaur covered in spikes. It chased the men towards the sea cliffs, which gave way under their weight causing them to fall to their deaths. The meat eater stood on the ledge, and snapped a sailor named Fritz out of the air before he hit the ground below. Seeing the carnivore's precarious balance, Otto took the opportunity to shoulder rush its leg, which was enough force to send it over the edge. With five men lost that morning, he assured the survivors that as long as they could fight they had hope for survival, despite knowing that there was no such hope. Some of his men found a narrow rock ledge bridging a deep chasm, and they began making their way across. After Werner tied a rope at the other side, the first sailor made his way across. At the halfway mark he was picked up and skewered by a giant Pteranodon. The beasts ate their fill and flew away, and the captain turned his focus to the men who had fallen into the pit below. Three of them had survived the drop, and Hugo called for a rope. The captain halted the action and saw that the men were being approached by gigantic insects. Hugo then tried to rally the men to kill the bugs and save the men, but the captain stopped him again, telling him that gunfire would only draw more of them and that the three in the pit were already dead. He did however give Hugo three shots from his pistol to spare them the agony of being eaten alive. Meyer, who had scouted ahead reported a clearing where they could make camp, and the captain reflected on how the island was taking not just his men's lives but their military training and even their basic conceptions of morality. He resigned himself to "one more night in Hell, with no hope for morning," while Kong watched them from a distance.
"Chapter IV: The Jungle"
TBA
"Chapter V: The Mountain"
TBA
"Chapter VI: The Wall"
TBA
Gallery
"Chapter I"
-
-
-
-
-
-
Otto with some of the survivors -
A flashback to the bridge of the U-184 -
Otto remembers climbing back home -
Otto enters the cave
Comments
Showing 2 comments. When commenting, please remain respectful of other users, stay on topic, and avoid role-playing and excessive punctuation. Comments which violate these guidelines may be removed by administrators.
|
|
|