Garth Ennis has been doing a lot of 2000 AD work recently. There’s the comics version of 1980s fantasy film Hawk the Slayer (reviewed here), the revival of veteran war anthology Battle Action (reviewed here) and the oddest of them all – a second go at forgotten comedy strip Banjo from Beyond the Stars (reviewed nowhere on The Comics Journal, much to my consternation). Ennis’ return to 2000 AD is doubly strange. First, most British creators who make it big in the United States don’t really go back (you certainly won’t see Alan Moore or Grant Morrison anytime soon); second, and this is the important part, most of Garth Ennis’ early 2000 AD work was quite bad1. This isn’t just me saying that, this is the man himself: “A lot of it is crap, to be quite honest.”2 Just about any interview with Ennis about his work for UK publications in the late is filled with more self-loathing you could find at a 1990’s indie comics series.
And it’s not like he was working through the bad stuff before he reached the promised land. While bombing on Chopper he was doing classic work on Hellblazer; while shitting the bed on Judge Dredd he was writing Hitman for DC3. It’s like there were two Garth Ennises during that period, and Americans got the good one.
There are myriad reasons for the divide: Ennis’ works a lot better on the relaxed pacing of American comics compared to the compressed crunch of British anthologies4; young Ennis obviously had an issue with writing characters he loved as child, professional distancing from The Punisher led to much better results than fannish appreciation for Judge Dredd; also, long stretches of that period were bad for the magazine overall, so Ennis was fitting right in.
But here he is, decades later, back at the scene of the crime. It works a lot better now. Not that any of his British work had reached the highs of his American output. Nothing he made for Rebellion so far comes close to Fury: My War Gone By or War Stories, but the bar has been raised pretty high. Rogue Trooper: Blighty Valley is not a great comics, but it’s pretty damn good one5. This story is yet another revival of the long running science fiction war serial created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons, which chronicles the adventures a blue-skinned, genetically engineered soldier, one of a small group of Genetic Infantrymen created to survive on the hellish war world of Nu Earth (while most regular soldiers are forced to constantly face concealing environmental gear).
The setting was a civil war between the ‘Southers’ (to which our protagonist belongs) and the ‘Norts’ (who are the bad guys); but Rogue Trooper was mostly an independent agent, spending the better part of the strip chasing a general from his own side who betrayed all of Rogue’s company to the enemy. Other than setting the main gimmick was the existence of the bio-chips – G.I.s killed in action had their knowledge and personalities uploaded into special computer cards that allowed them to fight on after their body had been destroyed (and also to give the protagonist someone to talk to while keeping the appeal of a lonely protagonist).
I wasn’t much of a fan of the original series. Great art aside, it felt decidedly old-fashioned and Rogue himself just wasn’t a very interesting protagonist6. But it had a strong hook, and was definitely popular enough, that it kept coming back. There have been several revivals/reboots (the Dave Gibbons/Will Simpson War Machine) and spin-offs, like one these superhero comics that keep coming because it was popular once upon a time. What there isn’t is a sense of purpose, at least beyond keeping the I.P. going7.
So between a middling series and a writer whose best work is elsewhere, how can Blighty Valley come out well? Answer: take the focus away from the science fiction war and make it into one of the wars Garth Ennis actually cares about. In this case, World War I, with our far-future warrior flung by some technobabble nonsense to the days of the trench warfare, joining a British crew making their way back to base through enemy territory.
I don’t have to tell you that this particular crew contains exactly who you expect to find –a rough sergeant (look at his moustache!), a newbie officer (glasses means intellectual), a righteous socialist (he fights for his fellows, not for king and country) and the other one (he fights for king and country, not for his fellows). Having read the story I can’t quite tell you their names; these characters exist first as representations of various factions within British society, then as vehicles for expressing ideas8 and only then as people with their own personality. This is how Ennis war stories work though; War Story: Condors, one of his best works, is just people sitting and talking their history and politics. While the characters are far from unique they are still defined just enough. It’s an old game, and Ennis is the master.
The other master involved is Patrick Goddard. Goddard has been drawing 2000 AD stuff for two decades, basically doing his bit in any serial that isn’t defined by a singular artist – Sinister Dexter, Chopper, Judge Dredd, Anderson … I don’t recall him doing anything truly bad, nor do I recall getting particularly excited by seeing his name in the credits.
This might change after Blighty Valley. Maybe it’s the black and white9, maybe it’s the historical setting that demands more fidelity to realistic details, maybe I’ve missed something all these years … Blighty Valley is a good-looking story. It draws obvious inspiration from Joe Colquhoun’s work on Charley’s War, though not quite as detail-heavy, and with a dash of modern brutalism. I particularly enjoy the use of scale, a scene with a tank emerging for the first time really sells how massive this thing feels from the point of the view of these soldiers – who know they stand absolutely no chance against this behemoth.
The choice to make it in black and white is probably due to nostalgia, that is certainly how Ennis encountered it in his teens, but it adds something to the story. Not just in terms of making Goddard’s pencils feel sharper, this is a story about a man finding himself in the past. Just like the reader, flung into the backlot of Rogue Trooper continuity10.
Throughout the first half of Blighty Valley it seems Ennis and Goddard aren’t very interested in actually doing Rogue Trooper, that the title character of the strip is just an excuse to do a story about a "proper" war; maybe this whole thing should have been done in Battle-Action instead. But as the serial progresses the choice becomes clearer, along with the characters’ tendency to philosophize about the nature of war like Ernst Junger cast-offs. The meeting between the soldier of the future to the soldiers of the first truly mechanized war is about is about humanity’s (lack of) progress. Rogue Trooper is centuries away, from the point of view of both readers and other characters, but other than developing better ways to kill each other not much has changed. If anything, things have gotten worse – with Rogue himself being a human tool of war, a weapon in the flesh11. The reader, unlike the world War I characters, know what is to come. We know what they will learn throughout the story, this is not the "war to end all wars," there is no such thing.
History, according to Rogue Trooper, has no arc. Just a straight red line. Many future war stories, from Starship Troopers to All You Need is Kill take this notion for granted. They take war for granted. Blighty Valley, for all its faults – it lacks the odd pleasure that original run had throwing mad concepts against the wall – does not take its subject for granted. It looks the abyss deep in the eyes. This is the price we pay for the lack of our imagination, this is the future we built for failing to think about the past. Those who accept the eternal present of forever war forget the lessons of World War I and bring us, step by bloody step, closer to the future of Rogue Trooper.
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