SCOOP: Garth Ennis Moves Back To The UK And More From Lawless’ ‘War! What Is It Good For? Comics’ Panel

War! What Is It Good For? Comics

Host: Simon Belmont

Panelists: Garth Ennis, Keith Burns, Mike Dorey,  PJ Holden

Having been stuck on a train for the best part of the first day of Lawless, Garth Ennis finally arrived just in time to sit on the War! What Is It Good For? Comics panel that kicked off just after lunch. And one that revealed not only that Garth Ennis was in the middle of packing up his New York apartment after 20 years to move back to Blighty but also that… well, for the second revelation of the panel, you’ll need to read on…

After reminiscing about how they all enjoyed war comics as children we got into the nitty gritty of the panel with PJ Holden opening up about Happy Valley, he did with Garth Ennis and how Ennis was held up as the main reason why war comics have had something of a renaissance in recent years. After Preacher, he was able to choose his next project which as war comics. With many of the artists he worked with in the past having previously illustrating war comics. 

Talking about his writing process on war comics, which involves a great deal of historical research, Ennis admitted he can be very precise about each strip, taking his lead from Battle Action, a popular weekly comic from the ‘70s here in the UK. For examples, in Stringbags Holden drew two pilots with moustaches. Something they would not have been allowed to have. Needless to say, he was corrected by Ennis. 

PJ Holden admitted to tracing 3D models aircrafts online, but not without adding their own spark of creativity to make it more dynamic. Burns actually build real model kits to draw inspiration from. Even if it only appears in one panel, he admits to getting excited while building the models. Mike Dorey also used to build models too. But not so much these days, as he takes up the pen again to work with Ennis currently on the new Hellman strip, which was originally illustrated by Dorey decades ago.

And while Battle Action is very much WWII based, there has been some talk of resurrecting Fighting Man, strip all about the Vietnam war. 

As for how the relaunch of Battle Action came about, it’s a rather long story, but was concisely recounted to us. First, Ennis spoke about sitting down with Titan Comics’ Nick Landau about a resurrection. But, then the license was lost to Rebellion and so the whole process started up again with Ennis realising that if they could resurrect Battle Action – a comic that got its name from the merging of two titles into one – it don’t all need to be war comics. And it worked well. Hence the launch of this new series with Brian K Vaughn onboard as a writer too. 

Burns has painted about 45 covers for Commando, another UK war comic with a long history. 

Pat Mills and John Wagner made Battle Action, bring with then a “certain energy” as Ennis stated. They made it a more successful war comic than others that were on the market at that time, including Commando.

Plugging the new Battle Action Ennis revealed the second scoop of the day, the last issue of this new ten-issue miniseries will be a complete Johnn Red takeover issue, who also appear in all issues. 

Ennis believes that as we move further and further away from WWII war films are becoming more and more inaccurate, using Guy Ritchie’s latest WWII based SAS origin story, The Ministry of Ungentlemenly Warfare being a good example of this. Even down to their speech patterns. Ennis likes to capture the language of the day, and goes to great strengths to acknowledge the subtle differences in language, mainly colloquialisms and slang. Times change, as does language.  

The panel started to slow down at this point as questions were fired form the audience at the panelists, including whether they preferred sci-fi or war comics. And, for all but Dorey, all the panelists like jumping around genres. Ennis used Hawkslayer – a sword and sorcery series based on the cult ‘80s film – as an example of this, finding that he enjoyed working with the tropes of fantasy genre. Hence, a new sword and sorcery title, Babs, coming out later this year. “Red Sonja, but with humour” as Ennis pitches it.

With everyone hyped for Battle Action there was some hope that it would become an ongoing. But, Ennis thought this was unlikely as it would then be competing with the talent used on other Rebellion and he just didn’t “think the resources are there for it.”

While Ennis has contributed to war stories fro DC Comics, he admits he much prefers to tell his own, real-life stories. But, also admits that DC and Marvel may well push they own WWII characters, but not yet it would seem. 

And with that our time was up. An informative panel and an entertaining one too as these four colleagues and friends swapped their own war stories fro the trenches of the comic book industry.