Posted in: Boom, Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News | Tagged: becky cloonan, garth ennis

Garth Ennis & Becky Cloonan's The War, Out Of Hello Darkness

Garth Ennis and Becky Cloonan's The War spins out of Hello Darkness from Boom Studios in July 2025. Are you ready?

Published Mon, 14 Apr 2025 06:57:07 -0500

Article Summary

Explore Garth Ennis's The War from Hello Darkness, diving into human survival amid nuclear fallout.
Illustrated by Becky Cloonan, The War captivates with brutal, escalating horror, testing characters.
Boom Studios’ The War expands into a one-shot, bringing Ennis and Cloonan's vision to a wider audience.
Stunning covers by Cloonan, Geoff Shaw, Tulay Lotay, and Trevor Hairsine elevate the collection.

Once upon a time, the comic book creator of The Snowman, Raymond Briggs, wrote and drew a horror story. Where The Wind Blows is the account of figures based on his elderly parents, living in the English countryside, and how they tried to survive the fallout of a nuclear war and an attack on London. They made an animated film of it, which was pretty much as upsetting as the original and probably scarred the minds of adults and kids alike. It contrasted the tweeness and stiff upper lip of the English countryside with the relentless unstoppable impact of nuclear winter.

Well, it seems that Garth Ennis may have found it a little too twee. In the Boom Studios' horror anthology Hello Darkness running for the last year, he wrote The War, drawn by Becky Cloonan, which ran in issues 1-6 and then a final chapter in 8, about a bunch of millennials living in New York arguing back and forth about the possibility of nuclear war. Only for it then to happen. And we follow a number of characters as they do whatever they have to do to survive – or not. It gets more and more horrific with every chapter, every page, and every panel as events get closer and closer to Crossed territory. That comic was an exercise in the extremes of what humans are capable of. The War shows the path that gets people there. It starts with wankers talking, and then it turns into the very worst we are capable of. And yes, that includes you.

And now July, Boom Studios will be collecting The War into a one-shot, with covers from Becky Cloonan, Geoff Shaw, Tulay Lotay, and Trevor Hairsine. It was hard enough reading this month after month, I am not entirely sure what it is going to do to people when they just read it all at once…