Writer/artist George Pratt’s Enemy Ace: War Idyll was released by DC Comics in 1990 to great critical acclaim. While the book’s painted artwork set new standards for graphic novels, it is the story’s connection made between Hans von Hammer, Germany’s “Enemy Ace” of World War I, and an American reporter who has recently done a tour in Vietnam that make this book a powerful read. In the course of the story, the two find they aren’t as different as they might think. Both know what it is like to fight in a war and about the horrors a solider encounters in conflict. More importantly, both men know the greatest challenge a man faces because of war: making it out alive when so many others do not, and learning to live with being a survivor. – Dan Johnson DAN JOHNSON: George, please tell the readers how Enemy Ace: War Idyll came about. GEORGE PRATT: As a kid, I was a huge war comics fan. The reason I was a DC guy was because, for one, they had Batman, but second, they had Sgt. Rock and all the war comics. [I liked the] Joe Kubert and Russ Heath material and I was into their interpretation of Sgt. Rock, and I was a big fan of [Robert] Kanigher’s writing as well. After graduation, I was casting about trying to find illustration work and at that time I was helping Jon J Muth on Moonshadow. He would call when he was behind the eight ball and say, “Hey, I’m really late. You want to try to help me finish this issue?” He would give me a train ticket to upstate New York and I would go up to his place and over the weekend we would just crank out one of those issues of Moonshadow in watercolor. JOHNSON: So you got some hands-on training there… PRATT: That really convinced me that I could do the amount of work needed to actually put out a graphic novel. One of the first jobs that I got out of school was working for Eagle, which was Harris Publications’ kind of Solider of Fortune-type magazine. I had gone in trying to get work at Creepy and Eerie, which they had just brought back. Tony Dispoto was heading that up at the time. He wasn’t interested in my comics work, but I had done a painting of an American solider in Vietnam and he liked that a lot. The reason I had done that painting was because I wanted to understand for myself why that war had happened. From 1960 until I was 14 or 15 years old, that war was going on and I never really understood the cause or the whys or the wherefores [of it]. I started reading a lot of books about the war and I got into the visual aspects of it. Tony said, “We don’t have any comics work, but if you like, I can show this to the editor over at Eagle and maybe you can do some war stuff.” So, he showed it to the editor of Eagle, Jim Morris, [who hired me]. The magazine only came out every other month, but he gave me enough work for each month. I kind of became his pet artist. He would give me a painting to do, plus three or four panels that would go with an article. The more I did of that, the more I wanted to try and say something of my own. One day, Morris said, “You should really talk to some of these guys and get their perspectives.” Jim himself was a three-tour Green Beret and wrote a book about it called War Diary, as well as some
Bringing Enemy Ace to Life George Pratt used an aged man named Vincent as the model for his interpretation of WWI flying ace Hans von Hammer. Enemy Ace TM & © DC Comics.
50 • BACK ISSUE • Comics Go to War Issue
by
Dan Johnson
conducted April 23, 2009