I think about endings a lot. I lost my home about six years ago, shortly before a whole hell of a lot of people were killed by a pandemic. The last few years have taught me a lot about how quickly we can lose everything, and the world has only gotten uglier in the interim. Now that I’m a father, even more fears have been introduced to me. I don’t wanna lose any of it. So, yeah, I think about endings a lot, and the fact that there is something beautiful and terrifying about the impermanence of things. It’s why W. Maxwell Prince’s Swan Songs was one of my favorite comics of 2024, why I get strangely activated when someone attempts to tell a “final” story for a beloved superhero, and why The War is the scariest damn thing I think I’ve ever read.
From the creative team of Garth Ennis and Becky Cloonan, The War was originally published in the pages of BOOM! Studios’ spectacular anthology series Hello Darkness. This first issue collects the first three chapters of the story, which follows a group of friends navigating a very familiar political climate and explores the quick and slippery slope that leads to nuclear annihilation, all from the point-of-view of the regular people who would not be equipped to withstand it. These are the folks who would try their best to survive in their own scared way, but inevitably be utterly unprepared for the ugliness a final world war would yield. This is a story about people who don’t know as much as they thought they did, who are constantly just trying to figure out what’s next, and who cannot do a single damn thing to change the outcome.
Garth Ennis is known for his nihilistic works, but this may indeed be the feel-bad comic of the decade. The War made me feel like shit. It might also be the best comic book I’ve read this year.
The dialogue feels natural and real, with characters debating the inevitability of war and trying to guess what their next moves should be. Cloonan’s character acting throughout is top notch, making these conversations feel engaging and realistic. Body language elegantly communicates so many emotions for us, even when some of the characters start shutting down and refusing to speak to one another. And without spoiling anything, the final pages are absolutely haunting, as Cloonan shows us a terrifying new take on a scene we think we’ve seen before in speculative fiction.
From what I understand, the plan for this new series is to reissue the chapters published in the pages of Hello Darkness and then continue the story from there. I will be curious to see if any of the future issues deviate from what was published before. Without spoiling too much, the original conclusion as published in Hello Darkness wasn’t quite to my liking, pushing things more into the realm of shock value in its final page and straying a bit too far from the gut-punching realism of the first several installments. But then again, maybe that’s the glimmering optimism still in me, hoping that this isn’t how horrible it would get. I think about endings a lot, and I hope there is still time to change this one, both on the page and off of it.
As it stands, fans of Ennis and Cloonan’s prior work owe it to themselves to check out The War, if they haven’t already. Just be ready to set the book down with a pit in your stomach. That ending, man.
