Customer Reviews

The Complete Battlefields, Vol. 1

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Garth Ennis is a writer of two modes: on the one hand, there is the bitter grouse who resent the pre-eminence of the superhero genre in comics and takes every opportunity to make known his dislike of them (except Superman) whenever he writes their comics, or comics mocking them (ha ha, remember the time Kyle Rayner was drugged and molested by Bueno Excellente?); on the other hand, there is the Garth Ennis who writes things like the "Battlefields" series of miniseries for Dynamite (one of the numerous small publishing labels that largely subsists on creator-owned projects), where he shows his tremendous talent for writing interesting stories. This hardcover collection brings all three "Battlefields" miniseries together in a single package, a great value (and, indeed, it's rare enough for material published by indie companies to get such treatment). Some spoilers follow.

"Night Witches" (illustrated by Russ Braun), the first of the three "Battlefields" miniseries (the original run, anyway; a second set of three has been ordered, including a sequel to "Night Witches"), takes place on the Russian front (the lone of the original three with not a Brit in sight). This was, almost without question, the most brutal front of the war. Armies numbering in the millions clashed in a war of extermination, with civilians squarely in the line of fire and the weather frequently as big an enemy as any bomb. The title characters are the female Russian pilots recruited to fly semi-obsolete aircraft on dangerous night bombing runs. The main characters are Captain Anna Kharkova and Kurt Graf, a young German soldier whose units travels across Russia, ending up in Stalingrad in winter. Dramatic logic dictates that Anna and Kurt must cross paths at some point, which will put Kurt in the crucible. And there, Ennis being Ennis, he introduces a particularly brutal turn of events that avoids the easy of way of ending such a story.

"Dear Billy" (illustrated by Peter Snejbjerg) is the story of Carrie Sutton, an English girl whose longing to see the Orient led to her taking a job as a nurse in Singapore - this turns out to have been a spectacularly bad idea, as the year is 1942, and she finds herself smack dab in the middle of one of the greatest debacles in British imperial history. Fleeing Singapore following General Percival's surrender to the Japanese invasion force, she and her fellow nurses are intercepted, gang-raped, and then machine-gunned and left for dead in the waters. The sole survivor, Carrie is rescued by a passing RAF flying boat, and ends up working at a hospital in Calcutta, keeping the details of her rape a secret from everyone else. She enters into a romantic relationship with the titular Billy, a pilot who ends up in the hospital before rejoining the front. But when Japanese POWs begin arriving at the hospital for treatment, Carrie embarks on a bloody course of action.

For "The Tankies" (illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra), he has chosen to give us an in-depth look at the men of Britain's armoured regiments. The story begins with a text prologue establishing the setting in Normandy, a detail that the previous two series didn't bother with for whatever reason (odd, given that this would be the theatre most familiar to readers). As the Anglo-Canadian forces hammer through bocage country to reach Caen, Britain's fleets of Churchill and Sherman tanks grapple with the superior German armour and deadly anti-tank guns. After one tank commander is gorily decapitated, one Corporal Stiles is assigned to take over his command temporarily, and leads the lost tank in search of its fellows (who have, unbeknownst to them, had a bad encounter with a Tiger). All the while, various other dramas play out with the infantry the tanks are meant to be supporting, and at the command post.

Of these three stories, my favourite by far was "Dear Billy", one of the strongest things that Ennis has ever written. His main character, Carrie, is poignantly realized, communicating quite a bit about the difficult plight of women in a war zone, and how social mores prevent her from getting the kind of help that she needs. More broadly, he addresses the question of how anyone can really manage to put aside the kinds of things that are done in war in order to make the peace work. "Night Witches" rivals "Dear Billy" for bleakness, and gives us a similarly credible female protagonist, as well as a nicely-rendered German soldier in Kurt. Its somewhat choppier structure marks it a bit lower than "Dear Billy" - alone of the three, it feels like it could have been at least an issue longer. "The Tankies" is the least of the three; a competent rendition of the difficulties of the tank corps, but it is a lot ropier in its plot, and doesn't have a central character to match Carrie or Anna.

Overall, an excellent collection.

Battlefields is Garth Ennis' welcome return to World War II. His fabulous "War Stories" volume 1 and 2, published under DC's Vertigo imprint, revived a noble topic for graphic art: the Second World War. This is truly "superheroic" courage.

Battlefields offers three distinct vignettes, completely separate from each other. "Night Witches" depicts the savage combat on the Eastern Front. No other warfare in human history is as gruesome and intense as that waged in Russia by the Nazis. The first mass killings of Jews occurred there. Enslavement, starvation and genocide were outright aims of the Nazi invader.

The Russian resistance to the German-Nazi onslaught is truly mindboggling. 20-25 million dead soldiers and civilians. A colossal 25 million men and women mobilized for combat. By comparison, America fielded 14.9 million combatants over the course of the war.

Defending Leningrad during a nearly 3 year siege cost the Soviets 900,00 lives. Or more lives than ALL of America's wars combined; from the Revolutionary War to the War of 1812 to the Civil War, Spanish-American War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf Wars I & II. That statistic is for just ONE Russian city.

Ennis' other features, about a physically and mentally damaged nurse and of a British tank crew in the bocage country, are well written and excellently drawn.

I hope Garth Ennis recruits legendary combat artists Sam Glanzman (The Haunted Tank, A Sailor's Story) and Russ Heath (the greatest of ALL combat artists and a collaborator with Ennis on Enemy Ace: War In Heaven).

To truly convey the global nature of WWII, Ennis should feature stories of the other allies, especially Britain's colonial subjects.

Battlefields, a collection of three miniseries perhaps best described by other reviewers here and not by the editorial itself, is one of the most harrowing displays of graphic novel depictions showcasing WW2. The first one I had the luxury of reading was Dear Billy, which depicted the account of a nurse that had been raped, shot and left for dead by the advancing Japanese. This was followed by Night Witches, which tales the story of female pilots on the Russian front and what they encountered, and finally The Tankies. Each of these is a great story and something that deserves your time because of how well it was written. Honestly, I have loved a lot of World War 2 tales that ranged from ghosts leading tanks into battle to Sgt. Rock and his exploits. Still, I had never seen something that showcased the pain that existed in that hail of bullet and bodies like Battlefields has.

As far as the stories go, I really found myself drawn in by Dear Billy. It follows a woman by the name of Carrie, who finds herself considered "one of the lucky ones" because she didn't die on some foreign in a blaze of automatic gunfire. The pictures depicting this moment are heart wrenching, too, because you see everything that can cut a person in two: there is the blood rolling down trembling legs as they are marched into the ocean with the knowledge that they are going to their deaths, and you could see every led singularity as they tear into more than flesh. "Lucky" for Carrie is the fact that she is discovered by a scouting expedition that takes time to bring her in, however, and recovery leads to her finding someone to love amidst all that blood and chaos. Recovery is an odd word, however, and placed into the backdrop of warfare it can have outcomes that become blurred and muggy and, most of all, hard to truly define.

Out of all of the tales here, this was perhaps the most touching and the most heartbreaking for anyone reading along because you - the reader - really found yourself feeling for Carrie. You see the events that sculpt her and you see the events that threaten to destroy everything she is. You also see the spectrum of emotions that she has, the love and the loathing that exist in the same framework, and it all cries out distinctly. This makes her more than just a cardboard imitation of life but was instead someone you wanted to like and understood whenever she acted - even if her actions were a bit drastic here and there, it was all understandable. From angel with a halo to person haunted by the complexities of the human psyche, I honestly thought that breaking was the easiest part of the tale for her to live with.
And I normally have a heart of stone when it comes to characters, too, so this was a rarity for me.

Night Witches was a great tale as well, and mainly because it dealt with something I was not accustomed to. People hear tales about pilots and what they did, but female pilots taking on Nazis? That is rare to here - and rarer still when those pilots have something to say and things to give. I enjoyed this - it was not Dear Billy but comparing the two is not really fair. And The Tankies took a look at armor as it rolled across the battlefield and saw so many different things, and it was faced with the adversities that exist outside of the constructed box we like to think of as warfare. In a lot of ways I suppose that was the whole point to all of these tales, too, making us think of this generations in terms that dismissed the greatest generation and simply made them human in our eyes. We see the fear that existed there as one person tries to replace another person after something horrible happens, and we see a lot more of the human spectrum played out in this somewhat overlooked theatre of combat.

Closing, I say you should buy this and enjoy the well-constructed stories here. Dynamite has done a great job - is continuing to do a great job because there are new tales coming out as well (so pick them up!) - and you would do yourself a great service by picking up these gems. I love the fact that there are more words than explosions, that the things that happen make you think about just what you would do if placed in that situation, and because they defy convention. It is amazing work and will amaze you - you really need these if only to read them and say "I have seen the struggles on a personal level now." After Dear Billy, I will never look at the conventional war love story the same. You should read it and see just how much it impacts your way of thinking as well.

This is a really good collection. Night Witches, Dear Billy & The Tankies are really good WWII stories. Night Witches is interesting and quite brutal at times. Dear Billy is the best of the 3 stories with a strong poignant story at its heart. The Tankies is a good story but probably the weakest of the 3 simply because there's no main character and feels a bit like The Longest Day. There's a lot going on but not enough being shown. Possibly needed more issues to delve more into this area. Overall this book is well worth a read for any Ennis or WWII story fan.