War Stories
Garth Ennis's war-comics anthology for Avatar Press — unflinching, historically historically grounded tales of soldiers in combat, drawn by comics' finest. The writer's first and deepest love.
📖 Avatar Press • Started 2001
The first casualty of every war is the truth — and no one in comics has spent more pages trying to get it back than Garth Ennis.
War Stories is Ennis’s ongoing anthology of war comics, the series he calls his first and deepest love, published through Avatar Press. What began in 2001 as a Vertigo project has grown into a decades-spanning brand that treats the soldier’s experience with a reverence the rest of his career only pretends to abandon. Each self-contained tale drops into a different corner of the Second World War and beyond — the steel-clad terror of tank warfare, the withering fire of the Normandy beaches, the claustrophobia of a convoy escort in the North Sea, fighter pilots over Japan, Irish soldiers advancing into Germany — all rendered with the research, precision, and honesty of a man who grew up on British war comics and wanted to do them proud.
The Cream of British Comics
War Stories reads like a who’s-who of 2000 AD and British comics royalty, with art by Dave Gibbons, John Higgins, David Lloyd, Chris Weston, Carlos Ezquerra, and Cam Kennedy, among others. The Slings & Arrows Graphic Novel Guide — reviewing the opening collection, which gathers four stories with art by Gibbons, Higgins, Lloyd, and Weston inked by Gary Erskine — praised Ennis’s ability to shift tone from a “largely genial tale” to “a horror story,” noting that “unlike most other war stories in comics, the language is unsanitised. Ennis presents squaddies talking as they did, not in the clipped old Etonian style of British war films. Only brutal language explains brutal times.”
An Anthology That Keeps Marching
The series has continued in fits and starts for over two decades — the original two Vertigo volumes were re-mastered and republished by Avatar, new volumes followed into the 2010s, and Paste Magazine consistently ranks the War Stories and Battlefields books among the best work of Ennis’s career. It remains, in the writer’s own admission, the kind of comics he would write forever if the market would let him — grim, reverent, brutally authentic war fiction that treats its subjects with more dignity than any superhero epic ever could.
For fans of Preacher and The Boys looking for a different side of Garth Ennis, War Stories is where he drops the satire and gets serious. It’s also a perfect companion to Sara (with Steve Epting) and Dreaming Eagles. The collected volumes are available from Avatar Press via major retailers.
