Wold of Tanks: Roll Out! promotional cover. Art by Isaac Hannaford.
Dark Horse Comics will team with Wargaming to produce a five-issue limited series scripted by Garth Ennis (Preacher, War Stories, Johnny Red) with art by Carlos Ezquerra (Judge Dredd, War Stories, Strontium Dog) based upon Wargaming’s World of Tanks free-to-play MMO game. The series will feature cover art by Isaac Hannaford (HALO:Reach, The Punisher), and according to Dark Horse’s press release:
World of Tanks: Roll Out! is set during the tank battles of the summer 1944, featuring British versus German armored units in post D-Day Normandy. It’s the German Panthers vs. British Cromwells, as the British tankers push deeper into France and toward the might of the Germans.
While your war comics correspondent is generally tickled to hear about any new war book with Ennis at the writer’s desk, the setting sounds very similar to a tale he and Ezquerra have already told, and told well, in Dynamite Entertainment’s Battlefields’ stories “The Tankies,” and “The Firefly and His Majesty.” That being said, they did do hell of a job with the stories in Battlefields, so I have high expectations for World of Tanks: Roll Out! A part of me was just hoping to see Ennis take on a different theater of tank combat – I’d love to see his take on the Russian Front, for instance. Nonetheless, it’s good to see Ennis and Ezquerra working together again on another tank story, and I look forward to Ezquerra’s wonderfully earthy faces and accurate-to-the-welds tanks.
Promotional page from World of Tanks: Roll Out! Art by Carlos Ezquerra, script by Garth Ennis.
I’m also glad to see Dark Horse putting out a new war comic. Ennis’s recent war books have been with smaller independents like Dynamite, Avatar Press, and Titan Comics, and it’s high time some of the larger kids on the indy playground started to take more notice of the revived interest in the genre. Also welcome is Image Comics’ reissue trade of Ennis and Ezquerra’s madcap, irreverent, crude, and hilarious Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, solicited in April’s Previews Magazine.
Solicited cover for trade reissue of Adventures in the Rifle Brigade. Art by Carlos Ezquerra.
Additionally, in the back matter for Johnny Red #6, artist Keith Burns teased a possible future collaboration with Ennis which may have something to do with his RAF Guild of Aviation Artists’ exhibition of paintings dealing with the RAF’s World War II anti-shipping strike wings, and this correspondent sincerely hopes that comes off – and soon.
Keith Burns’ First of the Morning (2015).
Adventures in the Rifle Brigade will be available in June, while World of Tanks: Roll Out! will hit both brick-and-mortar and digital stores in the fall of this year.