The premise of "7 Psychopaths" is pretty simple - a team of 7 people need to be assembled with the mission to hit Hitler - and stop the war. This kind of a scenario can very easily lead to a boring cliched story. Fortunately that's not the case here.

Opening at the end of October 1941, the story starts more than expected - the British are trying to find a way to stop Hitler. And in the Bethlehem Psychiatric Hospital, an aging gentleman named Joshua Goldschmidt had written a letter that might change the history. Except that this man is not exactly what he seems to be (one of my minor grips is that we never really understand why he does that...) and a colonel decides to trust him.

The plan is absurdly easy - Hitler is still alive because noone in their right mind would believe that he can be killed... so let's pick up 7 insane people and let them kill him. And the colonel and Joshua Goldschmidt start on their mission to find the other 6 members of the team (one of them is insane after all...). Except that insanity comes in many disguises - ex-soldiers broken by the war, people hearing voices, plainly crazy individuals. But at the end they have the 7 - 6 men, 1 woman and it is time for the big action.

And Hitler dies. No, this is not an alternative history story. The history remains as we know it.Nor it is supernatural one - Hitler is not a vampire, ghoul, ghost, you name it. He is just a man.

Vehlmann's way to explain all this is elegant and even if he is not the first one to attempt it, it's one of the better ways to make it. Could it have happened this way? Yes. Had it happened that way? Most likely no... but we will never know.

When I started reading the story I was ready for an alternative history tale - or maybe something in the vein of Jason's "I killed Adolf Hitler" (in a different style obviously). Or a highly unsuccessful mission (although all those 7s and the talk of our aging gentleman were hinting at a success). But I could not have been further from the truth. So when the end started to get clearer a a few pages before the end, it caught me by surprise a bit. But it was not an end coming from nowhere - it was a logical end of the book - after a few very confusing panels which made sense after you finished the book, the story just led to its end. Which is not that easy when you deal with such a topic. And the way the story was fast-tracked to 1944 for the actual book end was interesting -- not your usual "3 years later" or a similar caption-- even if the main story was already resolved, some threads needed to be picked up.

Add to all that the art of Sean Phillips and the book is worth a read. I wish we had seen a bit more of the backstory of most of the involved though - it did not feel exactly rushed but we got just glimpses. And some of them are interesting enough. I would be checking the other works from Fabien Vehlmann though (that's the first time I had read anything from him I believe) - I really would like to see his storytelling in a less familiar setting. ( )