The War

Reviews Tom Shapira | October 6, 2026 At first, it almost feels like a joke. A Garth Ennis-written comic called The War. Just The War with no further explanation or elaboration. Ennis, who almost single-handedly holds the genre of war comics in the anglosphere on his mighty shoulders, has been doing comics about wars (historical, modern and even some futuristic) for over three decades now. It’s about 90% of his bibliography, with the rest being shared equally between gross-out horror and gross-out comedy. It’s like Mark Waid writing a series named Superhero, Grant Morrison producing something called Metafiction or Ed Brubaker doing a run titled Crimin …. you get my point. And yet The War is no joke. The War is deadly earnest. In fact, it just might be the most earnest thing Garth Ennis has even written. Punisher: The End, for all its vaunted nihilism, still had a certain amount of emotional distancing to it. As much as it was a story about the end of the world it was also a story about the Punisher, a known fictional character — however depressing things were, they happened to someone who doesn’t exist, wouldn’t exist, can’t exist. It was also a story built on some satisfying emoti...