Fantastic cover (the orange and yellow subscriber one) and a nice nod to the humor strips of the IPC Fleetway era breaking up what is otherwise just two pages listing the contents, AKA filler.
Rat Pack was an entertaining diversion, but not Ennis on top form. Tonally, it's much more crude and slapstick than the Rat pack I remember, but it looks nice even if there's no replacing Ezquerra or Bradbury.
Lofty was borderline incomprehensible in places. I am going to be charitable and assume the intent was to recreate the often-arbitrary storytelling of a 3-page weekly comic, but I don't feel it comes off well if that's the intent. There are some scene transitions and story moments that just don't work. Looks nice, though I'm not fond of some of the aesthetics of the lettering.
The Face Of The Enemy was a slight read, but clearly well-intentioned, despite Alan Grant making no secret of the fact that he - along with John Wagner and others - used their space in these comics to tell blackly comic tales that amused themselves first and foremost - weirdly enough, if you ever watch interviews with the publishers of VIZ, they approach their comic with much the same sensibility. Anyway, this looks nice, though the colours are very shiny.
Worthy as it is, the
War Child story was pretty weak, as there are two pages early on that are just a wall of text, comprising two narratives going on at the same time: one in the narrative captions, and the other in the visuals and spoken dialogue. It comes off as really amateurish and not at all what I'd expect of a reliable writer of Abnett's experience. Perhaps the hard left left SJW liberal feminist human rights wokeness is somewhat undermined by appearing alongside a comic (Sniper Elite) which rather graphically revels in violence in a wartime setting? Although the comic itself is also profiting off war, sooooo... next time they should put a white poppy on the cover? It looks nice, though.
Destroyer makes a great fist at evoking the look and feel of the old Battle one-offs, complete with unexpected emotional sea changes one should have seen coming in a story about the last war that could deliver the British genuine martyrs. Effortlessly swings between farce and melancholy. No complaints.
Sniper Elite: In All Good Videogame Stores Now is a perfectly competent house advertisement for one of The Parent Company's far more profitable ventures, and even though I'm a big commie myself, if I have a complaint about this it's that it doesn't take the opportunity to reinforce ideological opposition to the Russians like the stories in Battle often would, but that's more a complaint about being tonally and/or thematically inconsistent with BPW.
The Vultures is a good callback to when I mentioned "blackly comic tales" up above, and it's great that they managed to include Carlos in the special somehow. Short and sweet.
Bravo Black Lion is... meh. Feels like something the writer and/or artist had in a drawer after their shot at a Dark Horse anthology didn't pan out. It's perfectly fine, if unremarkable, but I would have thought tapping Nick Dwyer to draw a Fighting Mann strip would have been a better bet to fill the Vietnam War-shaped hole that was apparently gaping wide in the middle of a "Battle Of Britain Special".
Double Hero seems like an excuse to get Ian Kennedy in the special - as if one was needed. Looks fantastic, of course, but also has decent pacing for a historical infodump.
Young Cockney Commandos is a fun humor strip, and doesn't outstay its welcome. Quirky and very British in a way that you probably don't even notice if you grew up with it.
El Mestizo is a weird choice for inclusion in a special with a specific theme into which the character and strip just don't fit, but it's diverting enough.
The pun "
Bearmacht" is not a sound basis for an entire story, and arguably takes away from the wartime service of Corporal Wojtek, the brown bear who served with distinction in the Polish army as a munitions engineer - no,
REALLY - but god damn it I am only human and if there is any better way to utilise pages in a comic other than filling them full of images of a bear mauling gestapo scumbags, I remain unaware of it.
Lots of house ads and one-page fact-files pad out the rest of the pages. Good for verisimilitude, if nothing else.
I can take a guess why there's no Charley's War, and Ennis/Burns on Rat Pack gives me a notion why there's no Johnny Red, either, which is a shame as these were probably the standout Battle strips (apart from X-Changers: Cosmic Cowboys, of course), but overall it's pretty good. 8 quid's worth of good? Well, I got it as part of the subscriber bundle deal thing they did and I'm happy enough, but belts are tightening at the moment so others will have to judge for themselves.
3 out of 5.
