Garth Ennis' Complete Battlefields Volume 3 Hardcover (GARTH ENNIS BATTLEFIELDS HC)

If you own any of the Battlefield series, add this one and make it completely. Definitely a fine conclusion to that remarkable series. Now I can only hope Garth Ennis will do a Vietnam or Korean war series.

very good

This was a new experience with reviewing comics, I could not find out which comics this actually was! Some of the copies I am sent come without covers or in fact any of the introductory pages, but this one was especially tricky. It has been reprinted in so many different ways and with so many different combinations of the stories that I thought part of it was missing.If you are interested in this book, unless you are a fanatic for the bookshelf porn that is hardbound trades, then there is a much better option of Complete Battlefields Volume 1 which contains all of this, plus the next story as well, and considerably cheaper. I have never understood the obsession with hardbacks, I own one novel like that because I was desperate for something to read one holiday and the paperback did not come out for another 3 months. I ended up throwing it in the loft and buying the paperback anyway because it looked ridiculous on my shelf at home, stuck there 3 inches higher than the rest of them. Me, OCD? never.Anyway, enough about my dislike of printing idiosyncrasies, what is this book like? To start with it is not really a single book, rather it is two distinct stories about two completely separate sets of people. In the future there may be a tie together, but I would be surprised as they both feel like discrete completed stories, one more finally than the other. They would also get completely different opinions from me if they were given to me as separate books to read, one I really liked, the other I hated because of how much effort it took to read it, even if the end product was not too bad.Book 1 is The Green Fields Beyond, but is also known as 'Tankies' in its own collected mini trade. This book is nearly unreadable for me. I am English and a Londoner, but I have family who live in Birmingham and for that matter, Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh. If I had some Geordie relatives as well then I could have the full set of strong accents this country has to offer. The thing is, despite having strong accents, we all read the same written words on a page, they just get pronounced differently, but what happens in this book is they are written to be how a Brummie sounds.The second story is about two female Russian pilots during the end of WW2 and their later careers. On every level this is a better story and it has the best concluding ending of any comic I have read this month or perhaps even this year (as opposed to a cliffhanger ending which works in a very different way). I had no idea that the Russians had any female pilots, and this could have been completely made up, but a quick google search tells me that even down the name 'Night Witches' this is all real, it is just these particular people that are made up.Overall if you like military 'history' comics then this is probably a really good book to pick up. I am not convinced personally because I feel that this sort of action is best shown in films or read in descriptive prose as I have never seen vehicles drawn in a dynamic way in comics and this is no exception. It is definitely not bad it just feels rather static from time to time. There are bits where a platoon are hanging on to a tank to make a daring escape, it should feel tense and every bump in the road should risk flinging them off, but it looks like they are out for a nice drive in the park. That being said, the human side to these books is what makes them worth reading, especially the Fall and Rise of Anna Kharkova and I would recommend that to anyone.

This is Garth Ennis doing what Garth Ennis does best – war stories. Battlefields V. 3 is two separate stories, each a final chapter and a good-bye to characters we were introduced to some years ago.Anna Kharkova is one of the Night Witches, a member of the all-female Russian pilot squadron. From the moment Nazis shot her plane down, to her life as a prisoner of war, and finally ending with accusations of treachery by her own government and life in a gulag – her story is a tragic one. A single image that is still haunting me is of Anna with her hands on a chain link fence, looking upon the decaying body of her lifelong best friend on the other side. Also in that scene is a masterful trick only someone as experienced as Ennis could pull off. In that panel he uses dialogue from the next page to transition to the next scene, set in the present tense of the story. The image with the fence was a flashback, see?The ending is the only ending that could ever make sense. It’s Anna’s final flight. If this book was adapted into a movie, there would be puddles of tears under every seat. Incredibly touching and human, this story is a heartbreak from start to finish.The final Chapter of Tankies is set in Korea. It’s a tale of camaraderie, courage and sacrifice. That ending is all in the things (Ennis via) characters didn’t say. “Unfinished business.” I don’t like being cryptic but you’re going to have to find out what that means and implies for yourself.Author’s essays at the end are a nice touch. It’s a few pages worth of story notes, detailing which parts were historically accurate and which were fantasy. Written with passion and dedication and each line crafted with care. A+.

'Garth Ennis Complete Battlefields Volume 3' is a showcase of the great writing that Garth Ennis is known for. There are 2 complete, and completely different, stories featured in this volume. Both are based on true events and very memorable.'The Fall and Rise of Anna Kharkova' follows a female Russian pilot starting at the end of World War II. The female pilots were known as Night Witches. She goes on an unauthorized raid over Germany and ends up crashing. She spends the rest of the war injured and being tended to by a British soldier. Upon her release, she is branded a traitor by her country because they demanded that soldiers fight to the death, not capture. The story follows her journey as an outcast, when all she really wants to do is fly again.In 'The Green Fields Beyond' it's the Korean War and we follow the Hussars into tank battle during the Chinese Spring offensive of 1951. During the adventure, we visit the Glosters during their defense of Hill 235. It's one of those do or die defenses where courage is born out of hopelessness.The volume ends with a nice essay detailing the true events that inspired these two stories. The stories are not that far fetched. The writing is top notch and the art is very good. I really enjoyed this one.I was given a review copy of this graphic novel by Diamond Book Distributors and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.