30 days of comics I love #15: Gentlemen, I hate you all.

War Story: Condors

By Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra

When Garth Ennis is interviewed about a new comics project, he often gets asked why he keeps going back to the war stories, and you can almost hear the writer roll his eyes. He'll usually just ignore the fact that nobody asks why there has to be so many superhero titles, and patiently explain that while the comics are set in times of conflict, you can never run out of storytelling possibilities in the stresses and emotions of the characters living through such times.

Because these stories are never about the great leaders, the generals and political leaders who decide the fate of the world, they're about the people that are trapped in these places at the sharp end of the bombs, and just trying to stay alive, and maybe hold onto some scrap of their humanity while they do it.

Condors is entirely set in a foxhole during the Spanish Civil War, where four men from different backgrounds are trapped together, and have nothing else to do but tell their stories until the shelling lifts. They're all fighting for different reasons, some for ideology, some for the love of their country, some because they have no choice, but they're all circling the carnage of industrial 20th century conflict.

Most of Carlos Ezquerra's long and distinguished career was spent telling comics in the far future, or on another worlds. Even the real-life setting of his war comics were usually in some unnamed battlefield, but this is his home, the land of his forefathers, and the disgust at the nations using his own as their testing grounds for mass slaughter given their horrible clarity

And it is horrible, with a graphic depiction of the bombing of Guernica, one of of the most terrible events of that time in history, unflinchingly portrayed in all its gore and pointlessness. This is the price of war, as babies are burned alive in their mother's arms, and makes a cruel mockery of any justification for any kind of war.

There is no justification for this, of course, and the same old arguments in the foxhole may be given more weight with the experiences of each of the men that ended up in it, but they're still horrible and stupid. And there is always room for more of these kinds of stories on the comic book shelves, alongside all the spandex and crises.