Johnny Red: A Couple of Heroes

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed a couple of things about the third volume of “Battle Action” from Garth Ennis and company after it was released last year.  Despite being initially serialized as a ten-issue miniseries, it only collected nine of them (and was thinner than the previous five-issue volume).  It also featured only two contributions from Ennis, his fewest after writing the entirety of the first volume that got this revival going.  There were also no stories about “Johnny Red” in there either even if his comrade in arms/significant other Nina Petrova got another solo spotlight.

That’s because Ennis and artist Keith Burns serialized their longest “Johnny Red” story in the pages of this latest miniseries and it’s collected here along with a brief epilogue.  It’s not just any story about the title character, but the writer’s effort to give him the ending he never got after his original stories gave way to reprints back in the day.  What results is clearly the work of a devoted fan, but one who shows that his storytelling instincts are still sharp.

“A Couple of Heroes” starts in January 1945 at the lonely Russian base that Johnny has called home for the past four years.  Nearly all of his friends and comrades have been lost to the war, but he carries on flying treacherous missions in dodgy aircraft to try and do some good in this awful situation.  It’s after one such mission that he receives an unexpected guest:  Mike Pryce-Fanshaw, a former friend who was the reason Johnny got kicked out of the Royal Air Force.

Mike has come to Johnny not just to make amends, but because he needs his help with a clandestine mission.  The Germans are cooking up something awful to be dropped on Moscow and the people who could stop it would rather see how effective it is and if they can make their own version.  Mike wants nobody to have it and he’s prepared to use every connection he has to wipe Johnny’s record clean and get him reinstated with the RAF as a Flight Commander.  That’s not all he’s offering, as he also knows where the Russians are keeping Nina.

You don’t have to have read Ennis and Burns’ other “Johnny Red” stories to enjoy this, but it’ll certainly help.  “The Hurricane” is certainly a better way to familiarize yourself with the character, the setting, and the premise of the series.  Yet Ennis still does a good job of laying things out at the start that I don’t think newcomers won’t find themselves too lost if they decide to begin their adventures with Johnny here.

If there’s anything that people not familiar with “Johnny Red,” or who are just familiar with him through Ennis’ work on the character, are likely to miss out on, it’s the feeling that this is meant to be the proper ending for the character.  The writer lays it all out in his much-appreciated afterword where he lays out the disappointments of the series’ latter days as well as his own efforts to try and tie things together as best he could here.  While the story doesn’t sag under Ennis’ attention to continuity, it never quite gets the momentum that a proper “final” story should have.  Sure, Johnny is promised a way out of his situation at the start of things, but you get the feeling this isn’t the first time this has happened.  There’s also the fact that the mission, while it’s meant to stop something horrible, feels like your average high-stakes affair.  We do get the return of a particular character towards the end that even I knew was a big deal, and it’s only around then that the story starts feeling like a proper climax.

Even so, the story is still executed with the attention to detail and craft that you’d expect from Ennis when he’s on his game.  Run-of-the-mill they may be, the stakes are clearly communicated and the difficulties behind them are well-conveyed.  The characters are also written with enough personality that you do care what happens with them and hope that they make it through to the end.  Something which is not guaranteed after most of the supporting cast was revealed to have died in combat prior to the start of this volume.

That also extends to its title character.  Not to give anything away, but by the time the story reaches its climax it appears that there are only two ways it can end.  Both of which are thematically appropriate, even though neither come off as more or less obvious than the other.  That does give the story some juice in its final moments, and makes the subsequent epilogue all  the more satisfying.

Also satisfying is the artwork from Burns.  Both a veteran of Ennis’ war comics and the illustrator of the writer’s previous “Johnny Red” stories, the man’s familiar style is still eminently suited to the material.  Not only is he great at drawing fighter planes and showcasing the dramatic combat between them in the sky, but the jagged and rough-hewn appearance of his art vividly realizes a world that has been ground down by war.  In short, Burns delivered great stuff before with these characters and he does so again here.

While this will likely be of most interest to people who, like its writer, felt that “Johnny Red” never got a proper finale, it still works as a proper story for anyone less familiar with the character and his world.  I won’t lie, the lack of context from the stories leading up to this does lessen its impact, yet it’s still impressive that Ennis made this as accessible as he did without bludgeoning the reader over the head with exposition.  Add in Burns’ stellar artwork and the end result is not only enjoyable, but maybe the best reason yet for the uninitiated to get into Johnny’s original adventures.