The original was a one-off serial from 2000 AD's early days by Gerry Finley-Day and Carlos Ezquerra. It's lurid, it's scary and it's certainly not aiming for sequels, killing its big boss vampire (Constanta) at the end. Nazis meet vampires on the Eastern Front (i.e. Russia) in World War Two. What's complicated is that these vampires are on their side. They're killing Russians. They save our heroes' lives... but Constanta and his kin are still sinister as hell.

This is based in truth, by the way. Romania fought alongside the Axis powers from 1941-44 and did indeed send soldiers to the Eastern Front, but their pro-German government got booted out after a coup in August 1944 and Romania switched sides to join the Allies. This story's scripts are pretty simple, but the art turns it into reasonably effective wartime horror. Ezquerra finds an effective way to draw scary shadow-vampires and there's juicy vampire folklore. (I'm never wild about silver hurting vampires, which is mostly just a Hollywood invention, but in fairness these vampires also have shapeshifting werewolf powers and that's part of their lore too.)

Out of nowhere, 26 years later, David Bishop wrote this interquel. It's more of the same, but it's quite good and exploring a historical event that was horrible even by the standards of the Eastern Front. The siege of Stalingrad was the largest and deadliest urban battle in military history and the largest battle in World War II. Anyway, the premise is still "vampires fighting on your side". MacNeil creates some cool vampire imagery. I enjoyed it, but I couldn't work out how this later became a series. The only way to extend this story would appear to be to copy-paste it.

Bishop also turned this series into four novels, one varying it slightly with vampire samurai in the Pacific War. For 2000 AD, though, this series was over and done with. The vampires slept for another decade... and then Ian Edginton turned Constanta into an evil protagonist. He's still biting throats and killing innocents, but he gets an origin story, lots of supernatural adversaries and even a job with British Intelligence. They don't care that he's a vampire, since he's not the only bloodsucker on their books. They also employ Lord Ruthven (Polidori's The Vampyre), Count Magnus (M.R. James) and "that cretin Yorga" (two 1970s American horror movies).

Volume 1's other stories are:

Volume 2 is wall-to-wall Ian Edginton and Tiernen Trevallion:

Other stories not collected so far include:

...plus the odd cameo in Judge Dredd and Durham Red. To be honest, I prefer the original concept of this series. Constanta works better as a sinister villain who's currently your ally but bloody hell. Both the 1980 and 2006 versions of this story are pretty creepy. However, that take on Constanta has a limited shelf life. You can't just keep remaking the same story (and, in fairness, they didn't try). In contrast, Edginton's version of Constanta could run for years, having gory run-ins with Baba Yaga, sexy naked witches, seven-headed dragons, trolls, CIA agents, the Grampus, Grigori Rasputin, Queen Elizabeth I's John Dee and more. I think this series is returning, incidentally. I've seen a promotional image for Fiends of the Eastern Front: Dracula (Ian Edginton and Nick Percival), which for all I know might finish the story of Gerry Finley-Day's incomplete 1984 horror strip The Dracula File. That was about Dracula defecting from the Eastern Bloc to the UK, still killing victims but now on the run from ex-KGB officers.

Overall, this series is decent enough. I enjoyed it, although Constanta's fairly offhand demise at the end of the 1980 original is looking ever more jarring as his adventures get grander and grander. I'd buy a third volume. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone making vampire comics, given its broad, deep lore and all the cool things the artists do with the vampires visually.