Wayne Vansant's KATUSHA: GIRL SOLDIER OF GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, which despite its wide-eyed anime girl cover is not a manga, and I'm not sure why I mention it but I often found myself humming the TETRIS theme while reading it. It takes its cue from Charley's War, being the story of a state-educated Ukranian peasant girl's contribution to the Soviet's defence - and later offence - against the invading Nazis, first as an unaffiliated partisan guerrilla and then as a crewman and commander of a T-34, with the book taking great pains to dispel the popularly-held notions that the Nazis were evil and that the Soviets were not. You can probably guess the main problem with the book already.
Before we get into that, though, I'd just like to say if you're big fan of UK war comics, you'll really like this, as it's very much in the sensibility of something like Battle Picture Weekly or Warlord, with lots of possibly-unnecessary detail about front lines, mechanical details about tanks and heavy artillery, commentary on the military strategies employed, and all told from the POV of a peasant so you have an everyman angle from the off. It might seem a bit pricey for a softcover - 22-30 quid depending where you buy it - but for that you get nearly 600 glossy full-colour pages and you will need several sittings to read the whole thing - that is one good chunk of reading right there.
Anyway, as I mentioned above, Wayne Vansant lays the anti-communist rhetoric on really thick to the point it often calls the Nazis "preferable" to the communists, which is at first presented as a viewpoint held by oppressed peasants (who resent the communists) which will reap a bitter harvest later, but then we're past that harvest and the book is still pushing this angle.
There's a pretty baffling relationship with ethno-nationalism, too, as the antisemitic Ukranian nationalist movement is portrayed pretty well, as is - for some reason - Israel, which did not exist until three years after the war ended. You'd think a book about fighting Nazis would have some pretty firm opinions about ethno-nationalism being bad, but uhhhhhh... not so much.
All told, though, I would still recommend it, especially to fans of UK comics - it often has dense pages, and the lettering isn't the greatest. I believe it started out as a webcomic before Vansant took it down to sell as a trade collection, so I don't think it's available to read online anymore - at least, not legitimately.
