‘If any question why we died.
Tell them because our fathers lied.’
Kipling wrote this in 1915 when he heard that his son, who fought on the western front, was missing. In these two sentences Kipling captures the essence of the cause of not only the First World War, but of all wars. Each chapter in "Enemy Ace" starts with a quote about this terrible first world war.
When I first opened this album, I was so impressed with the illustrations that it just took my breath away. And 20 years after I first read ‘Enemy Ace’, the drawings still move me. George Pratt, who also wrote the story in addition to the illustrations, puts so much emotion into each drawing that it almost seems as if they were made by a soldier at the front in the heat of battle. The action splashes off the pages without the glorification of violence or any sensationalism being involved. They are almost no longer illustrations, but true paintings. I find it amassing that Pratt knows how to put so much spontaneity in the drawings and that they never get messy or unclear.
The story is about a journalist who interviews a German First World War veteran for a report on the very first fighter pilots. Slowly the journalist, who himself is a Vietnam veteran, discovers that basically every war is the same. Every war begins as Kipling described so beautifully and the result is the same every time, apart from the redistribution of land. We all know it, but it is always different and more though for the soldiers who have had to go through the horrors of war. Yet "Enemy Ace" does not have the cynicism of the graphic novels of Tardi, the French authority in the First World War area in comic and graphic novelland.
"Enemy Ace" is without a doubt the best American comic, or actually it is a graphic novel in comic format, that I have read so far.
