Enemy Ace: War in Heaven 1, page 8, May 2001 by Christian Alamy and Chris Weston

I was concerned when this page arrived that it was not the original art but a copy taped to DC stock. Other pages on CAF from this story also looked like mine.

Fortunately, I was able to contact the artists who confirmed that the art was authentic. They kindly described how the pages came into existence.

Christian Alamy did the initial pencils. Chris Weston finished or refined and inked the pencils using a light box. He then taped the inked pages to DC stock for lettering and editing. This process was used for the first half of the story. Russ Heath, a veteran of the heyday of DC war comics, drew the second half.

The writer, Garth Ennis, grew up reading British war comics and has a keen interest in telling sequential art stories about World War II. His numerous works include Battlefields, Battler Briton, Dreaming Eagles, Johnny Red, Out of the Blue, Sara, The Lion and the Eagle, The String Bags, and War Stories.

He might well have recalled the Soviet apparatchiks in British pilot Johnny Red stories in choosing, to quote Enemy Ace’s compatriot, a “sniveling little Nazi bootlicker” as the protagonist.

I wonder where Ennis would have taken the story if von Hammer’s contempt for Hitler and the Nazi Party drove him into the plot to assassinate Hitler. Perhaps that is a story that fits between the first and second volumes of this comic.

Story summary from the DC Database website:

"In Bavaria, 1942, Hauptmann Peter Stalschmidt arrives at Castle von Hammer and tries to convince its owner and his compatriot, Hans von Hammer to join him as a pilot, flying against Russia as Germany is starting to take serious losses. Reluctantly, Von Hammer agrees even though he has no sympathies for the Nazis.

On his first day as flight leader, Von Hammer buzzes the gathered pilots in his bright red plane. An hour later he takes the first flight up. They encounter a group of MiG-3s and run them off, destroying twelve in the process."