Comics - Enemy Ace: War in Heaven (2001)

 I needed the top of my sideboard back so I decided that I'd better file away the stack of comics that had built up there.
 Which meant I had to reshuffle the ones I already had in that particular box...
Which resulted in me sitting on the floor of my front room, surrounded by comics I'd forgotten about, having a good, ole reading session.
 I got my sideboard back eventually but I now have a pile of comics to reread sitting on my kitchen bookshelf.
 Anyway, I found a couple of things that seemed worth a blog post, one of them being "Amazon Gazonga" and the other being...

 1942. Great War fighter ace Hans Von Hammer reluctantly takes up arms again. Although he has lost none of his old skill, as the war grinds on Von Hammer begins to believe that he is fighting for the wrong side...

  Garth Ennis has been on a one-man mission to revive the classic War Comic and this 2 issue revival of the 1960s/70s character may well be his earliest foray into the genre.  As with his later series' (War Stories and Battlefields) "War in Heaven" mixes bloody mayhem with thoughtful musings about the stupidity of it all. There's maybe less dark humour than sometimes pops up elsewhere but it is there.

  Von Hammer  is, I think, typical of a lot of WW2 German officers - loathing the Nazi regime but serving because it was their duty and otherwise Germany would fall before the wrath of her enemies.
  And he's that classic war hero - the man who's good at killing but isn't actually happy about it.

       So the writing is intelligent and powerful. I also like the art. The action sequences especially:

  Possibly a bit too graphic for some tastes though.

  Although if you read this series and get the idea that war is something a sane human would enjoy then you really didn't get the point.
  So I like this series a lot. I personally think that Garth Ennis always does a good job in depicting the brutality of war but making his characters people I can care about. And so it is here.
  If you fancy a war comic that isn't afraid to show the blood and guts, or you wanted to see what "Das Boot" might look like if it were about the Luftwaffe, give War In Heaven a try.

 That's all folks.