Garth Ennis has made me cry before, I’m sure of it. Definitely wet eyes at some tragic war story. Not what I was expecting from Johnny Red, especially the way he brings in the present day stuff, which I’ve never liked in the book. But Ennis has this licensed property and he goes very big with it for the final issue. He gets schmaltzy, he gets as close to saccharine as he probably gets. But then he pulls back a little and starts talking about the idea of the comic–the idea of Ennis doing a Johnny Red comic in 2016, being the Garth Ennis who puts so much work into his war stories.

And he goes somewhere else. He and artist Keith Burns have already softened the reader. Burns’s art isn’t strong on the open, either. He rushes through the cliffhanger resolution and just throws the schmaltz at it. It’s not artful schmaltz. It’s pulpy and Johnny Red is supposed to be pulpy, right?

No. It’s supposed to be serious and Ennis spends the last three-quarters of the book being very serious. He talks to the reader about the war story, asks the reader to look at it in a certain way, not another. To question the whole idea of the comic. It’s really deft, really great stuff from Ennis. It puts Johnny Red high up on his post-Punisher work. It gets to be the longer form war comic Ennis does right.

And out of nowhere, right? Titan Comics! Who knew.

It’s an action issue and not much of one. Lots of exposition, lots of scenes, lots of flying and getting nowhere. Ennis doesn’t lose the series’s momentum, but it’s the first Johnny Red in a while to not leave me stunned. The achievement is probably not losing their momentum.

Because there’s nothing to this comic. It’s a bunch of plot stirring, a bunch of poking the bear. Ennis teases the reader over and over again. It’s gently manipulative but in obvious enough ways one can just look past it. Ennis has to get through the issue, he has to move the characters to certain places, position the story a certain way. He drags it out.

The worse part is how much Burns’s art suffers with the pacing problems. He’s got a lot of pages to fill with action and the occasional air battle suspense, but he doesn’t have much in the way of a story.

I’m hoping Ennis lands this one all right. I’m sure it’ll be at least “all right.” I’m not sure it’s going to go down as his essential World War II story though, something I was previously hopeful about.

How long is Ennis going to keep Johnny Red going? I assumed it was six issues, but it seems much more like eight at this point.

There’s no moss on this one, no wasted panels. Ennis and Burns have a lot to do. They have a sensational cliffhanger to resolve and then explain. The explanation sequence–the secret policeman laying it all out for Johnny Red and his squadron–is excellent. It’s a lot of history (is it?) and Ennis keeps it lively with some reaction moments for the supporting cast, but, really, he’s giving Burns a lecture to illustrate engagingly.

And Burns succeeds. Just like Burns succeeds later on with the big action sequence. The squadron, reunited with Johnny, trapped behind enemy lines, feels removed from everything around them. They’re in a bubble, which occasionally makes the issue seems a little disconnected, but Ennis has to get through this material. It’s one part of the series’s pay-off (and coming before the final issue is a nice surprise).

I’m hopeful Ennis will land Johnny Red successfully, whenever he gets around to it, issue seven, eight, or twelve. But I’m not worried at all about Burns. Again, on the ground, he manages to impress more than he ever did in the air.

Burns might have just done one of the best comic book action sequences. The way he and Ennis pace out the issue’s second half, with Johnny infiltrating a German compound to rescue his men, is unbelievable. They get so much done. They identify the compound, they land a plane, they get Johnny to the compound, to his men, to the cliffhanger. Burns is good at the plane stuff, but he’s peerless pacing out that ground stuff. Johnny Red moves beautifully.

It also has time to resolve the previous issue’s cliffhanger, establish what Johnny’s sidekicks are doing, and how Johnny knows a Red Baron-type German flier. It’s a brilliantly paced comic. Ennis even gets in a reference to the flashback framing device, which doesn’t even get half a page this issue.

Johnny Red is great Ennis World War II stuff with an artist who is able to take it beyond what Ennis is usually able to achieve. And it’s a relaunch of an existing brand no less. Excellent stuff.

It’s a bridging issue of Johnny Red, which is sort of fine, sort of not. Ennis concentrates on writing really good scenes–he has them for his leads, he even has one leading up to the cliffhanger (so a good setup scene with some German pilots)–but he lets the plot get very, very loose.

Ennis doesn’t even spend any time on his framing narrative. There’s a page with the modern-day storyteller explaining the found plane isn’t interesting, but what Johnny does next in the flashback. Presumably next issue because nothing’s interesting here. It’s engaging because Ennis knows how to write the comic, but it’s not interesting. It’s a distracting transition, actually, with Ennis apparently using the present-day frame to setup whatever’s next in the flashback. Then he doesn’t deliver anything major.

Instead, good scenes, nice character moments, not much excitement. It’s texture, but it’s also just a bridging issue. Johnny Red, which I think runs six issues, could have run five.

Some nice art from Burns, who has a great sense of movement for the planes in the air, though he gets bored drawing the talking heads parts.

It’s a perfectly solid bridging issue.