Preview: ‘Battle Action’ Vol. 3 #5 — Do You Want To Play The Death Game?

Time to get more Battle and more Action now, as the air ace’s adventures continue in Johnny Red and we get to experience future sport Spinball and discover just why it’s called the Death Game…

Halfway through this 10-issue series, so you should all know the deal by now. Two stories each month, the first the ongoing series of Johnny Red, with Garth Ennis and Keith Burns telling the last adventure of the Brit air ace spending his WWII fighting in Russia and becoming a legend of the motherland in the process. The other strip — bonus, back-up, call it what you want — is a one-off each issue, each time bringing back one of the iconic strips from the classic British comics, Battle and Action.

This month, that second strip is the ultra-violent sport of Spinball, commonly known as Death Game 1999, brought back to life by Dan Abnett and Tom Foster.

So, time to play the game and time to take to the skies once more… let’s have a look inside the new Battle Action…

It’s a great thing that this series of Battle Action leads with Ennis and Burns telling the 10-issue long tale, the final tale, of Johnny Red, as the extended run means we can really dive deep into things of a complicated character.

We’ve already had so much backstory, seen Johnny address his past, get the chance for redemption and the possibility to get back to the RAF as a flyer. He’s also been given the chance to reunite with his lover, Nina Petrova, the legendary Angel of Death, heroine of the Motherland. But to do all that, he’s going to have to do one last, seemingly impossible mission, getting into the secret Nazi installation weaponising cholera and planning on using it on Moscow very shortly.

Last episode we had the really tight and really emotive episode where we got to experience the horrors of the Russian war effort for anyone who didn’t exactly conform to just what the Motherland expected of them.

This time we’re back with Johnny, back to the action, back to seeing just how great Keith Burns is at doing aerial stuff — and oh, he so is.

The whole Johnny Red saga, if this really is the finale to it, has been an epic adventure, and we’re now en route to its finale — but I’ve no doubt there’s going to be plenty of twists and turns still to come.

After all that, we get to get back into the world of Spinball and it’s time to get back into Death Game 1999.

Now, back in the 1970s, when Action comic ran Death Game 1999, it was absolutely a shameless rip-off of the quite brilliant Rollerball, Norman Jewison’s dystopian ultra-violent sports movie, based on William Harrison’s short story. But then again, ripping tales from the movies was fair game back then — just look at Hookjaw and Jaws, exactly the same. And seriously, if you’ve never watched Rollerball, you really need to. Absolutely classic movie — make it one of your late Christmas pressies to yourself.

But Death Game 1999 took all that was shown in Rollerball and dialled it up to 11. The style of the movie was there, but there was a lot more of everything, particularly the brutality of the action, with the game a mix of Rollerball and pinball mixed with the classic sports strips of yore.

Now, we get Abnett and Foster’s take. As Abnett says in his intro, “not by re-inventing it, but by returning to it some time later to show that the seasons have ground on, the dystopia has endured and, while the technology might have improved, the crowd’s hunger for crunching violence has not.”

And that’s just what they’ve done. Not tried to do anything radical, just doing the smart thing of going with the simplicity (and brutality) that was in the concept and moving it forwards, concentrating on one of the old players, looking to stay alive long enough to get out, and getting screwed over by those running the game. It’s ever bit as nasty and action-packed as you could want, complete with a thoroughly downbeat ending where the system wins, as it always does.

Brilliant little short tale here that takes all that came before and builds on it, keeping true to the original yet giving us plenty more. Excellent work.

This series of Battle Action really has so much going for it, a perfect longform war story in the front and plenty of really strong one-off tales as back-up. You should all be picking this up.

Battle Action #5, Published by the Treasury of British Comics on 18 December

Johnny Red: A Couple of Heroes – by Garth Ennis, Keith Burns, with colours by Jason Wordie, letters by Rob Steen

Death Game 1999 – by Dan Abnett and Tom Foster, letters by Rob Steen

Now, how about a couple of previews to show you just how good this one looks and reads…