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Tripwire Reviews Rebellion’s Rogue Trooper: Blighty Valley
War Is Still Hell
Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes reviews Rebellion’s Rogue Trooper: Blighty Valley out in collection now…
Rogue Trooper: Blighty Valley
Writer: Garth Ennis
Artist: Patrick Goddard
Rebellion
After a few years of appearing only sporadically in 2000 AD, the comic’s Rogue Trooper character is about to get what could appropriately be called the big push. There’s an animated film directed by Duncan Jones in production for 2025 so publisher Rebellion has started to prime the pumps, raising Rogue’s profile and making him a more regular fixture for readers and potential future viewers alike. Blighty Valley, which ran in the comic in 2023 and gets collected here in one volume, is the first stage of this campaign. And also a statement of intent: a lengthy 13-part story from serious creators that downplays the strip’s outright sci-fi elements and original hunter/prey hook in favour of deeper British war-comic roots. It’s an appeal to traditionalists in the audience and a showcase for Patrick Goddard’s detailed graceful figure drawing, as well as the vehicle for writer Garth Ennis to return to the 2000 AD weekly comic and look at human nature through one of his favourite lenses, armed geopolitical conflict; in this case the First World War.
Getting Rogue Trooper – a Genetic Infantryman usually found on the poisoned planet of Nu Earth fighting for the Southers against the distinctly Nazi-coded Norts – into the trenches of World War I does take a bit of sci-fi sleight of hand. In this story Nu Earth’s temporary proximity to a black hole twists time and space into a knot, and Rogue emerges from the toxic fog to find himself somewhere adjacent to the Somme in 1918, where fresh but similar horrors to his usual ones await. He encounters a group of British Tommies, a recognisable set of characters: the intellectual, the gruff sergeant, the new recruit and others; plus later a captured enemy soldier who turns out to be humane and compassionate, a Quaker like one of the Tommies, the actual Good German. Accepting Rogue with relative ease, partly since they think he might be American but mainly on the basis that war is insane enough already so why not a blue-skinned soldier who converses with sentient talking bio-chips holding the minds of dead comrades, the soldiers embrace the alien as an ally in their trench warfare. Eventually the transference gets reversed, with the entire group getting sucked back to Nu Earth and Rogue’s home turf for an encounter with a parallel slaughterhouse.
The set-up has intentional echoes of other weird war stories, and Ennis is tapping straight into the liberal war comics philosophies of old comics on both sides of the Atlantic. “They got lads with red skin and black skin, so why not blue into the bargain?” says one of the group, summing up a thread of the story. Patrick Goddard’s black and white artwork will be no surprise to anyone who read his decade of work on the ballistic urban action strip Savage with Pat Mills, but in a WWI setting this art looks like an evolution from the venerable tradition of Charley’s War and artist Joe Colquhoun’s expert draftsmanship, energised here by Goddard’s action choreography and an acute sense of gathering dread. It’s suitably poignant and worthily humane, and if Ennis tones down the unnerving extremes of some of his more transgressive battlefield parables elsewhere to suit the 2000 AD audience, then the direct mixing of future war and past war on the same page is close to the comic’s original roots in 1977 too. As 2000 AD used to say often, all wars are hell for the meat in the grinder.
Rogue Trooper: Blighty Valley can be ordered from Rebellion now
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