4 out of 5

As I’m just tastetesting this series based on who joins Garth per issue, the rating is somewhat of a blend of my impression of the book, and then specific to these two issues.

I’ll spare my very usual prattle on the different eras of Garth’s writing career, but he’s nestled into a new, sprightly jag of output as of this writing, reminiscent of classic post-Preacher years when he was able to float between War Stories and scattered creator-owned titles. I had feared the writer was somewhat stuck on Old Man mode – fairly, there’s always been an element of that in his text: shaking his fist at kids on skateboards and then musing wistfully about humanity at the same time – but there’s been something about returning to the comforts of his UK comic youth via Battle-adjacent books and once more appearing in 2000 AD that has streamlined a lot of his storytelling, and made his works a bit more character focused, whereas before, I’d argue he’d push the characters along only far enough to make them work for his story – or sometimes not at all, and let the outrageousness of a concept swallow the whole thing. Is he still prone to walls of text? Will he take any opportunity to shove a World War reference into a story? Sure. But it feels a lot more sincere now, not always playing to his shock jock archetype.

For the third volume of the modern Battle Action, we’re following a similar suit as before: a lead story by Garth, and a backup of some revitalized classic. Our Johnny Red opener is a bit hard to parse when dropping in and out of the story as I have, but it has the general vibe of JR tales of gathering a motley crew of various nationalities, and being behind enemy lines, though there seems to be an appreciably emotional throughline of helping Johnny reconnect with Nina Petrova, of The Night Witches.

The fact that I can’t exactly parse things is a bit of plus and minus, and somewhat indicative of this era for Ennis – at least in the 2000 AD / Battle stuff – really leaning into slow-roll pacing that he can maximize for slightly lesser page counts, and multiple issues. It helps to break up the talking heads, but it also means that there’s often not a direct pitch for the story – it kind of feels like you’re just witnessing things happen. When it kicks off, it can be pretty magical, and the repartee is generally pretty sharp, but I think it requires some commitment to read it. Thankfully, Keith Burns’ art looks damn sharp, warmed up to the character fully now and figuring out how to shape his pages to keep them pretty dynamic looking. Colorist Jason Wordie’s palette is also perfect, even though it’s brightness initially seems like a mismatch – instead, it’s the right balance for Keith’s linework.

For the backups, John Wagner returns to his HMS Nightshade in issue 2, delivering a very solid tale of obfuscated seaborne scuffles. Dan Cornwell gives the large cast and potentially faceless setting (big ol’ grey ships; featureless water) a lot of personality, and, in general, the telling just feels important. Wags has been doing this forever and certainly could be said to have been an influence on Garth; it’s interesting being able to see echoes of some of Garth’s more sober War Stories echoed in the tone of this Nightshade tale.

Dan Abnett then quirkily cheats the formula a bit with his Death Game 1999 story with Tom Foster, pointing out (on a preceding text page) that Battle / Action comprised more than war stuff. And this story is awesome. Yeah, it’s just a Rollerball riff, and as Dan introduces the showdown between an old school player and a new one – the catch with Death Game is they’re all serving prison sentences, with a vague chance at freedom – you’ll likely be making some assumptions as to the direction things will take, and it’s not that it doesn’t do some of those things… but at the same time, Dan manages to turn this into a gut punch of a story, with dashes of influencer culture commentary. Man – this guy’s output, and how often he nails it, amazes. (True of a lot of 2000 AD inductees / graduates.)

The text page that intros Death Game would’ve been nice in issue 2 for Nightshade, even if that’s appeared in Battle Action before. But maybe that appears in other issues in the series.