3 out of 5

Covering Night Witches, Dear Billy, Tankies, Happy Valley, The Firefly and His Majesty (Tankies pt. 2), Motherland (Night Witches pt. 2)

As he did with his War Story books, here we have Ennis – mostly – in heroic tribute form, finding unique wartime tales to draw our attention to.  A large portion of Battlefields finds a new avenue of previously unexplored territory for Ennis – women during wartime.  Garth loves his strong women characters, and loves honor and misery on the battlefield, but hasn’t combined the two until now.  Night Witches and Motherland are very affecting tales of some particular women pilots and Dear Billy is an incredibly tragic story of wartime atrocities and the emotional burdens those cause the perpetrators or victims to carry.  If you’re going to choose one story out of all the Battlefields books – Dear Billy would be the one, with perfectly suited art by Peter Snejbjerg and a beautifully balanced story of revenge and loss that hearkens to the emotional balance from Garth’s Punisher MAX run.

Night Witches and it’s sequel are close but less successful – the characters are incredibly solid but it needs more room.  We could read a series about these people and so the narrative, when it forms, feels shaped around the characters instead of seamlessly combined, the denouncement fitting but only arriving in the third issue because that was the chosen length for the series.  And lastly comes Firefly and the Tankies series – and as of Dec. 2012 Garth has started more Battlefields with his Tankies characters because he loves them so much – which is sort of unfortunate because they seem to require the least amount of effort to write, coming, as they do, from the stockpile of Ennis wartime figures, part thick-headed, part wise, brave as they head into battle but as confused as anyone else when questioned on the point of it all.  Happy Valley is a more isolated version of this type of story but follows the same themes.  Unfortunately, it’s what starts to weigh Battlefields down.  The “War Story” issues were successful, I think, because, as one-shots, yes, they could only be 60-some pages in length, but it got Garth to picture a moment from each character’s experiences to detail, whether serious or stupid.  Maybe it’s his age, maybe it’s that Dynamite trusts Garth to no end, but Battlefields feels like it gives him a bit too much room to wander.

Anyhow, it’s still quality Ennis.  It’s not the word spew of The Boys and, as mentioned, there are some excellent story highlights in this “metaseries,” so while I’ll skip out on the Tankies stuff, I’m looking forward to see where else he might go with things, ’cause Garth is the only writer putting out war books like this as far as I know.  Uh, not that that’s a reason to buy it, just ’cause it’s the only one, but, uh, I mean.  He’s a good writer.  Sometimes.  Yaaaaay