1942, the Eastern Front and the wolf is in the door and advancing further into the Motherland. Sara is the best sniper in a team of female Russian snipers doing what they can to push the Nazis back - and it turns out she’s so effective that the Nazis have dispatched their best marksmen to take her out specially. Who will win the duel - Russian or German snipers?
Garth Ennis is a big name in the comics world for a reason: because of books like Sara. This is another astonishingly high quality comic from a master of the medium on his favourite subject - war - alongside two other top tier creators, artist Steve Epting and colourist Elizabeth Breitweiser, the art team behind the excellent espionage series, Velvet.
Every part of this story was amazing. From Sara’s training, where she learns the trick of booby-trapping corpses to lay on live grenades so when their comrades turn the bodies over the grenades are activated, to the battle scenes, and the bloody finale in the tundra. The action sequences are mesmerising as we find out the order in which a sniper is meant to take out a German squad, to seeing Sara’s team being targeted by German tanks and having to figure out an exit.
Ennis provides no less a realistic portrait of war than he does in all of his war comics. We see not just the brutality of war and the Nazis, but just how horrendous the Russians - Sara’s own people - were to their countrymen. Stalin is rightly mentioned in the same breath as Hitler (though not at the time) for his insanely savage tactics that began even pre-war but went on, bafflingly, even as the Nazis were invading.
The details are compelling: the ever-present party adjutant hovering at the edges of Sara’s team, always listening for a stray word of dissension to report back on, the dogs with mines strapped on them, trained to charge under the enemy tanks. I know, this isn’t a cheerer-upper by any means but this was WW2 and this particular episode is set in one of the darkest times of the darkest war so buckle up: it’s a grim read, to say the least!
And, while the subject matter couldn’t be bleaker, Steve Epting’s there drawing it all so incredibly beautifully. If you’ve encountered his work before on the aforementioned Velvet or Captain America over at Marvel (he drew The Winter Soldier book the film was based upon), you’ll know just how talented the man is. He can do it all: peaceful danger, as Sara sits in snow-covered trees, waiting for her targets, to the heat of battle with Panzers firing and soldiers exploding, to tense evening dinners after bitter battles, and everything in between - his range and talent knows no limit.
Breitweiser’s colours deserve no less praise. Snow has never looked quite so good on the page before and the shading and colour choices always tell you subconsciously what time of day a scene is taking place. The bursts of red are unnerving and the explosions look photo-realistic. She’s one of the best colourists in the business and she brought her A-game to this one - I couldn’t have been more impressed.
“Page-turner” is a cliche but that’s exactly what Sara was for me - and that ending. Jaysis. Rarely do endings resonate with me but this one is still stuck in my head. Absolutely first-rate storytelling and art all the way through - if only more comics could be this damn good! The only blurb on this book is from Alan Moore who says - “One of the finest works of [Garth Ennis’] career” - and I totally agree. Sara is a stone-cold masterpiece.
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