Interview: Garth Ennis Brings Childhood Favorite Johnny Red to New Generation

The opportunity to tell the tale of a favourite character from his childhood was too good for Garth Ennis to pass up.

The superstar writer and artist Keith Burns are teaming to bring the adventures of World War II flying ace Johnny Red to a new generation with their new series from Titan Books. Ennis said “Keith is pretty much the artist I’ve been waiting for all these years; he’s just as nuts about war comics as I am.

“It’s funny to think of the two of us growing up in Ireland addicted to British war comics, and now getting a chance to do our own spin on them,” Ennis said. “Keith is simply superb at drawing military hardware; not just in terms of accuracy but in making the aircraft and so on come alive on the page.”

Ennis offered a brief history lesson about his beloved childhood favourite to help bring newcomers to the character up to speed.

“In 1941, trainee pilot Johnny Redburn gets busted out of Britain’s Royal Air Force for punching an officer. He makes his way to Russia during that nation’s hellish war with Nazi Germany, and ends up flying with and then leading Falcon Squadron – a fighter-bomber unit of the Soviet Air Force.”

This new series will take place in late 1942, Ennis said, at the height of the dreadful battle for Stalingrad.

“Falcon Squadron are given a new mission by the Soviet secret police,” he added. “Johnny Redburn and Captain Nina Petrova – commander of the all-female Angels of Death squadron- do a little digging around and discover that someone very senior has essentially panicked and that they plan they’ve initiated will mean disaster for Mother Russia – and outright doom for the men of Falcon Squadron.”

Ennis became a fan of the character at the age of eight, when he first read the strip in the weekly comic Battle. The strip ran from 1977-1987.

“It stuck with me for several years after that,” he said. “The characters and stories kept their grip on my imagination right up to the present day.” Titan is reprinting the original strips, and Ennis is providing the foreword for each volume.

The idea of bringing Johnny back, according to Ennis, was a chance to do justice to a beloved character.

“You might call it unfinished business,” he said. The strip lasted 10 years, but the latter half of that saw a steady decline leading to a rather feeble ending – I always thought it deserved something better.

“Beyond that, there’s just the sheer joy of writing one of my childhood favourites,” Ennis added.

This won’t be the first time Ennis has penned the tale of a World War II pilot. He wrote an Enemy Ace miniseries for DC Comics in the 1990s.

Reading war comics as a child fostered an interest in military history for Ennis, and he sees writing this series as an extension of that interest.

“It’s only natural to do my own take on some of the events and stories that my childhood reading inspired,” he said. “I find real life and the sometimes grotesque situations it throws up vastly more interesting than fantasy anyway; I think there are things that happen during wartime in particular that utterly dwarf fiction.”

To read our preview of issue one, click here.