Garth Ennis does it again.

Some of you may have read my review of Crossed #03 in which I admitted that although I was a huge Ennis fan, that title wasn't really hitting the mark for me.

This book, ironically released on the same week, is the exact opposite.

I'll be honest, I skipped the first installment of Battlefields, entitled The Night Witches after realizing I was already reading too many books, and not having too much of a love for war comics, despite being a huge Ennis fan. Boy am I sorry I missed out! I'm in the process of reading them now, but if that book is anything like Dear Billy I'm sure I'll be kicking myself when I'm finished.

Onto this book, though. Everything about it was absolutely superb. I'm typically not a fan of script/cursive lettering, as I often find it difficult to read and I think it's a way to create fake emotions, but this book pulls it off flawlessly. None of the emotion is faked, all of the dialogue is absolutely fantastic, and the letter written to Billy is perfectly executed. Unlike in the aforementioned Crossed, I immediately felt a reason to care for these characters, and felt like the things they were doing and saying made sense. It's rare that I get completely lost in a comic book as I did with this one.

That of course, is due in large part to the art. It's beautiful and, in my opinion, really captures the feelings that it's supposed to get across. I'm usually not a huge art critic, but one thing that always stands out is when people say that 'the art captured the storytelling', I understand what they mean, but I've always felt like truly great art doesn't allow you to notice that. Truly great art, in my mind, illustrates the story so beautifully that you don't even notice that it's a story, you just think of it as an adventure. That's exactly what the art in Battlefields: Dear Billy did for me.

Highly recommended to anyone who is a fan of Garth Ennis, or just good comics.