Preview: ‘Battle Action’ Returns For Volume 3 — 10 Issues Of All The Battle & All The Action

by Richard Bruton

More Garth Ennis-helmed war stories bringing back classic characters from classic Brit comics… but that’s not all – welcome to Battle Action Volume 3!

A return to two great names of Brit comics past Action and Battle, this time for 10 issues, two strips a month, led off with Garth Ennis and Keith Burns with the 10-part final tale of a Brit classic, Johnny Red, and the second strip giving us a rotating line-up of one-off revisitings of even more Brit characters from the venerated pages of either Action or Battle.

So, this time round, to open things not only do we get that first episode of Ennis and Burns promising the final tale of Johnny Red but we also get Brian K Vaughan doing his first Rebellion/2000 AD work with Chris Burnham on a tale of Kids Rule OK, the anarchistic explosion of a series so threatening to polite society back in 1976 that it led to a media backlash and the effective cancellation of Action for fear of the harm it was doing to the children.

So yes, Rebellion and The Treasury of British Comics are really going for it this time, continuing their reworking of the very best of a golden age of Brit comics.

Having just two strips per comic really does give all concerned the space to play well with the strips, with the Johnny Red story having all the import of the final adventure of the Brit airman who’s found himself fighting a personal war of three and a half years deep in Russian territory as part of the Russian Air Force. But it’s been a long, long campaign and Johnny’s getting to the end of the war and finding himself reflecting on his exile and the comrades he’s lost, and finding that his long, lonely war has taken its toll, and where his bravery is edging into recklessness.

It’s typical Ennis writing a character he obviously loves, doing the war stories he’s almost uniquely positioned to tell, Johnny Red has his working once more with Keith Burns on art, guaranteeing that it looks just as good as it reads.

But for all of the big finish promised by Johnny Red, the second strip is the one that’s likely to get the majority of the press. Like I say, Kids Rule OK has a hell of a reputation, really getting under the skin of Britain’s self-appointed moral guardians and contributing to the eventual end of Action.

It was a typically post-apocalyptic set-up, where all the adults of the world died of a mystery disease and letting the chaotic, rebellious kids take over. High on the violence and the action, Kids Rule OK didn’t pull its punches at all.

And getting Vaughan to make his Battle Action debut here is a real coup, telling a typically nasty and violent little story of one young American kid having to deal with the chaos on the streets in Septic. [For those who don’t know, it’s Cockney rhyming slang – Septic Tank – Yank.]

Poor kid, all alone on the streets of London, running for his life from the mob of xenophobic British Punks – but he’s the son of the US ambassador and they left him with his own secret weapon. What’s the old saying? Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Well, that’s just what this Septic’s about to do – not that it’s going to be much use to him.

In many ways this one’s BKV trying to outdo Ennis, giving us something that Ennis could easily have done in Preacher back in the day and culminating in a final page of absolute ridiculous carnage.

BKV talks, in his intro to Kids Rule OK of ‘creators like Garth Ennis were writing stories that felt sharper and more darkly hilarious than anything being published by my compatriots.’ And you can see all that in how he’s gone about telling this one, talking of, quite rightly, Chris Burnham’s ‘precisely unhinged artwork’ and thanking Ennis for inviting him along to tell ‘this mean-spirited little
tale set “between the panels” of the original comic,’ something that’s he absolutely nailed down just so.

.So there you go, the first issue of ten and dammit, they’re off to a damn fine start, a lot of Battle and a hell of a lot of unhinged, nasty, mean-spirited action to be getting on with.

Battle Action #1 (of 10) is out everywhere comics are sold from 28th August – Published by Rebellion

Johnny Red: A Couple of Heroes – by Garth Ennis and Keith Burns. Colours by Jason Wordie, letters by Rob Steen. Johnny Red created by Tom Tully and Joe Colquhoun

Kids Rule OK: The Septic – by Brian K Vaughan and Chris Burnham. Colours by Len O’Grady, letters by Rob Steen. Kids Rule OK created by Chris Lowder and Mike White