Often when you pick up a piece of historical fiction set in another time, there is an escapable educational quality to it, after all the author has done his research, leafed through encyclopedias, studied sketches of medieval armor and saddles, learned the terminology and is triply eager to disgorge his entire story of knowledge onto his readers. His readers though may not be nearly as eager to receive it as he is to give it.

Warren Ellis' Crecy is unambiguously in the educational category without making any real pretense to be otherwise. An Avatar book, Crecy is a real change of pace for Warren Ellis, set not in the future but the past, inked with intricate black and white art by Raulo Caceres that often deliberately verges on medieval woodcuts. Crecy preserves Warren Ellis' anarchic sense of humor as the soldier William of Stonham delivers obscenity laced tirades and lectures to the reader on the weapons and tactics and players in the war in between obscene exchanges with other soldiers.

But stripped of all the cursing, Crecy becomes what it really is, which is an educational walkthrough through a pivotal portion of English history. Subtract the language and the violence and you could easily have a useful text for schoolchildren and that is what keeps Crecy a long way from being Frank Miller's 300. 300 was in the end about something more than a particular battle in a particular place and that is why it carried a greater resonance. Warren Ellis' Crecy by contrast is a painstakingly explained and easily digestible blueprint for a particular battle demonstrating how it was won and why it was fought in terms easily relatable to the modern reader.

William of Stonham directly addresses the reader, providing him with maps and explaining things to someone he is aware comes from a more advanced time. There really is no pretense of a fourth wall even. The style reminds you of some children's history cartoons. If you wanted to know the tactics the English used to defeat the French, or at least a simplistic version of them, Warren Ellis offers you that in Crecy. Indeed the actual title battle is abrupt and quickly over. The real focus is on the lead in to the fighting and the preparations for it. Of course William of Stonham knowing ahead of time everything that will happen and interacting with you eliminates any suspense. And Crecy does not offer an actual story so much as a technical summation of events embroidered with lots of cursing and ethnic stereotyping humor about the French, the Welsh, the Scottish and so on and so forth.

The question arises of why the reader should care about any of this. Granted at the end William Stonham informs us that this was a pivotal battle in history but historical events don't make us necessarily care about characters. William of Stonham's narrative is filled with gloating and justifications for what he and the army is doing and it is hard to distinguish to what extent Warren Ellis is speaking and to what extent William of Stonham. William of Stonham insists that this is another time and so the moral issues are different but again there is no real basis for saying that.

The back cover of Crecy attempts to fill things in with a rather strange modernistic formulation about shock and awe and invasions due to perceived threats to home security, in which it seems some attempt is made at an analogy with modern politics but this is never followed up.

Warren Ellis has William of Stonham insist that he and his men are ordinary farmers while the enemy's ranks are filled with aristocrats. But in the end he and his men fight for an English King while the French fight for a French King. And the French villages that William of Stonham and his friends sack and burn are just as filled with French peasants, the aftermath of which one panel shows as burning houses, a murdered man and a half-naked and probably raped woman covering herself with her hair and cowering against the flames.

Warren Ellis means us to pick up on this as on the constant national slurs William of Stonham aims to all sides but in the comic book genre reveled in all the more by many British writers, characters who are "right bastards" are supposed to be appreciated for this. Yet even in that genre, the bastards win because of their determination and ruthless drive. William of Stonham can't even claim that since as Crecy paints the picture, they won not because the English army was superior in courage or qualities of character but because of the incompetence of the French which they were successfully able to exploit. That sort of outcome is common enough in modern and not so modern warfare but it does not make for much of a history. If the Spartan warriors of 300 held fast because of their personal virtues, the English army had the longbow and a confused enemy. The results were devastating in the same way that a company of Redcoats firing on a Native-American village was devastating but not any kind of personal triumph, only the success of the mechanisms of warmaking tools.

By the end of Crecy, we have been successfully convinced that everyone on both sides was rather vicious and ugly and we have an understanding of how the English victory was achieved but what we don't have is any meaning from any of it, only information and some entertainment as William of Stonham finds nasty names and stories for the Welsh, the French, the Normans, the Norse, the Scottish, kills wounded French soldiers on the field while his friends laugh, burns French villages to the ground in order to seize a part of France and finally brandishes those same two fingers proclaiming that he can kill us from 300 yards. Is Crecy meant to be ironic or some strange borderland between nationalistic chest pounding and a warning about the callousness of war. It is all but impossible to decide and in the probably not worth the effort. Crecy is briefly interesting, even more briefly entertaining but in the end not so much a story as a vicious outing attached to an encyclopedia.