4 out of 5

Ennis’ War Story comics were sobering at the time.  I can’t say if there had been something similar happening in the indie world around then (Early 2000s) but I really don’t think so, and certainly not in the majors.  There was something so stoically perfect about them – even the sillier ones – that seemed to capture the romantic and terrible and stupid mish-mash of brotherly, prideful emotions that are bottled in any conflict, regardless of the side.

Vertigo was badass at this time, doing a lot of throwback style things – a lot of 4 and 6 issue genre mini-series to counter their headline grabbing nature nowadays (although its an ugly necessity of the trade-paperback era, I suppose) – and for some reason it came across as more legitimate than, say, Dark Horse’s recent Eerie / Creepy thing, or even Ennis returning to the War Story bit with his Battlefields series.  We’ll save my rumblings on Eerie and Creepy for reviews that are more closely related (or, god damn, maybe even for the titles THEMSELVES BANANASSSS), but Battlefields vs. WS is mostly about presentation – a sequence of unrelated one-shots vs. the forced structure of 3-issue arcs.  There’s something very freeing about the War Story titles, and how the tone shifts from book to book based on which artist is in tow.  But perhaps moreso it’s that it was Garth’s first shot as a big name writer at doing a straight book like that.  War comes up in almost every god damn book he writes – even fucking Thor, for crap’s sake (and not wars of the gods) – and War Story helped to prove that people would be interested in this stuff.  It opened the doors for several future books / series in the same vein, and yes, I’m totally assuming all of this.  War Story feels original, heartfelt, and pure.

Nightingale – the last issue of the first 4-issue series but the first one I’m reviewing, hence the blabber up there – is about an escort ship for supply convoys to Russia during WWII.  Like a lot of these books, there’s a bit of a learning curve to ranks and the who’s who, since even the fine artists assigned to these titles have difficulty giving the reader cues for differentiating between dudes in uniforms – and David Lloyd’s thick lines make those discerning details a bit harder to see than in other books.  But he does bring an incredibly professional pacing to the action sequences, something else that’s easy to get confused on with these things, for those of us who aren’t war enthusiasts and know which model planes belonged to which fighty person.  Apparently, at some point, Ennis was most proud of this issue and it’s easy to tell why – he loves a sad story where doing your duty means going down with the ship.  Nightingale mixes in the horrible reality of following orders with the harsh fight-or-flight decisions that come up without warning in Garth’s fictionalized versions of events… events which seem real enough to me, though.  Sometimes he gets a bit too manly, sometimes he gets a bit too mean, but this story finds a good balance.  It is a crew of men, so the testosteroney nature is unavoidable, but the book isn’t without its acceptance of the toll the hard life takes on people.  And as was common for most of these War Story titles, Ennis sense just how many pages and how many panels it takes to make his point before fading out.  And Nightingales does, on a rather haunting note.

It doesn’t hit as hard as some of the other ones because it sorta tells you where it’s going from page one, but it’s an incredibly well-written and executed book and should be able to stand as evidence against any old fogey who still somehow believ