Preview: ‘Battle Action’ #8 — Nina Petrova Flies Into Battle & Into Action

by Richard Bruton

Another issue of the 10-issue series celebrating all that was and is good about Battle and Action, two classic Brit comics…

First of all, an appreciation of that fabulous cover by writer Torunn Gronbekk, a hugely talented portrait painter in her own right, and it shows with every perfect line of Nina Petrova, heroine of Russia, leader of the Angels of Death air squadron. It’s her first comic cover, oils on paper, and I can’t possibly see it being her last. Gorgeous stuff. (For more, take a look at her website)

By now, you should know the drill with this one. Hell, you should be buying this one! Inside every one of the 10 issues of the series, you’ll get one episode of the 10-part Johnny Red: A Couple of Heroes by Garth Ennis and Keith Burns, promised to be the final Johnny Red tale.

And then, every issue has a back-up done-in-one tale featuring classic characters from the pages of Battle and Action, those two giants of British comics. This month, it’s Torunn Gronbekk and Patrick Goddard giving us a tale of Nina Petrova, also featuring in Johnny Red, a truly iconic and important character in Brit war comics.

You can feel every twist and turn in Keith Burns’s art from Johnny Red

In Johnny Red, we’ve got Johnny signing up to what might be an off-the-books suicide mission, headed out to stop the Nazis making a biological weapon. He’s strapped into a Hurricat and ready to go.

And here’s one of those things about reading a Garth Ennis war comic, so many incredible things in there, historically accurate as well. Case in point, the Hurricat, essentially a Hawker Hurricane fighter jerry-rigged into a rocket-propelled catapult for launching from British merchant ships. They were use once and ditch in the sea things, used to defend the merchant ships crossing the Atlantic. It’s an insane thing, but here you go, absolutely real. And so magnificently brought to life on the comic page here by Keith Burns.

But the end of this one, everything’s coming together a treat – Johnny, Nina, and the German flyer Von Jurgen we met in episode 6, all on their way to the finale. But first, there’s Johnny getting ready for launch, whilst Relga, Rodomitz, Popovich, and an emaciated Nina Petrova they rescued from a Russia prison, are all on board a lumbering beast of a commandeered plane racing to destroy the German fighters on the ground before they can get into the air on a mission connected with Johnny.

It’s a thriller of an episode, breathless aerial action as you’d expect, with Burns really pulling out the stops to make every page just flow perfectly, the speed of the battle, the risks, they’re all there on the pages.

And then there’s this, Nina taking all her anger out on the Nazis in one incredible double-pager. Wow.

Again, more wow moments in Johnny Red, with art by Keith Burns

But that’s not the last we see of Nina Petrova this issue, as Torunn Gronbekk and Patrick Goddard get to tell a one-off tale of her and her Angels of Death in 1942.

Grunbekk obviously loves the character, created by Tom Tully and Joe Calquhoun in the pages of Johnny Red, but firmly based in reality. The Angels of Death are based on the incredibly brave group of Russian women flying as the 588th Bomber Regiment, also known as the Night Witches thanks to their audacious reconnaissance and bombing technique of gliding their obsolete and far too noisy 1920’s trainer biplanes over German positions before unleashing their bombs.

Nina Petrova, flying her little sewing machine into and out of battle – art by Patrick Goddard

But the reason Grunbekk loves the characters most is down to what you can see here in this tale of Nina refusing to give up on her navigator, trapped in a hospital about to fall to the Germans. It’s all about being more than a soldier, it’s about being part of a team, an equal with all, men, women, regardless of rank, all fighting for their country.

And in this very simple little tale, with typically excellent artwork from Goddard, that’s just what comes over. Another excellent backup strip in a series that’s really setting a high bar for them.