Meeting #22: War is Hell, and a Hard Place

[JohnLees]

Welcome back, Clubbers! I'm really sorry for the RIDICULOUS delay on this meeting going up. I have been working on it all week, but due to a whole catalogue of reasons it just wasn't happening. I really hate that I'm slipping with this, and I'll try and be better in future. Anyway, in this meeting we will continue our exploration of other comic book genres beyond the superheroes we spent so long focusing on. Last meeting the topic was crime, and it’s a shame we didn’t get more responses. But if crime didn’t spark much interest, I fear this next genre will leave the thread in (appropriately enough) no man’s land! For today we talk about a genre that once dominated all mediums of popular entertainment, but which now has fallen in popularity. However, as the reading list we’ll be looking at hopefully demonstrates, despite not necessarily being in vogue, the genre has given us some fascinating work within the comics medium in recent years. In this meeting, Comic Book Club goes to war.

We should start by taking a little look at the history of the war genre in comics. I’m sure images such as these will be familiar to many of you:









And probably most famous of all:



As can be seen here, the Nazis and their allies were among the earliest staple villains of the superhero genre. Let us not forget that comic books as we know them truly began in the late 1930s, and though World War II had yet to break out, by this time the Nazis influence had grown and spread to the point that they were already viewed as a major threat to freedom and democracy around the world. As such, one of the earliest functions of American comics was as patriotic propaganda, superheroes proudly flying the flag of their country and defending American values against foreign enemies. When war finally did break out and America eventually got involved, sales of comic books soared, their simple patriotism and pro-war sentiment proving to be exactly what the country was looking for at that time, with superhero adventures reflecting the real-life battle of good versus evil many Americans felt they were stepping into. It also helped that such comics were but one branch in a cross-medium propaganda onslaught. War movies were at the time hugely popular, and served to emphasize the heroism of Allied forces.

Post-war, though the superhero genre began to decline, war comics grew in popularity. The early 1950s saw the release of several war-based anthology comics, such as EC’s Frontline Combat and Charlton’s Battlefield Action, and by the late 1950s recurring heroes such as Sgt. Rock, The Haunted Tank and Sgt. Fury had begun to emerge from these anthologies, going on to get their own titles. By the time we got to this point, with a larger-than-life hero soldier going off on various wartime adventures and defeating the bad guys, these comic book soldiers were beginning to take on a superhero quality. Though adapting the most basic atmosphere of the Second World War (the kind to be gleaned from newsreels), these early war comics pretty much followed a classic superhero formula. Pure, honest, brave and nigh-invulnerable heroes fighting for what was right, battling against evil, monstrous villains who were being bad out of sheer wickedness, with the good guys soundly winning and having a happy ending by issue’s end. Going to war offered as much exuberant wish-fulfillment and escapism as gaining powers and becoming a superhero….only with a gun and without the silly costume!

That was how American comics responded to war back then. But we’re at war now. Where is the propaganda machine, where are the comic book covers with Wolverine skewering Osama Bin Laden with his claws? We’re in a different time, and it’s a different war. There is no huge wave of public support for the War on Terror to ride, with the campaigns in both Afghanistan and Iraq proving to be widely popular. The lines of good versus evil are no longer so clearly defined, for while few would deny that terrorism is evil, there are plenty who feel the motives behind military operations in Iraq are shady, and the reasons given to justify them dubious. There is not so big a demand among the public, therefore, for war-based entertainment. Movies set in war-torn Iraq have largely failed to perform at the box office, and though The Hurt Locker was excellent, the vast majority of these movies have been met with a lukewarm critical response as well. Furthermore, nowadays the foundations of the genre have changed. People don’t really see soldiers as superheroes like they once did. And while last year’s Inglourious Basterds did an admirable job of portraying a larger-than-life band of patriotic Americans foiling the plans of evil Nazis in a distinctly retro yet slyly subversive manner, now the overriding message expected from the genre is “war is hell”.

Patriotic newsreels have given way to detailed documentaries and embedded journalism highlighting the brutal realities of war, changing the distant battleground from an exotic adventure landscape to something visible and immediate, uncomfortably so for many. So war fiction has acquired a burden of responsibility, an obligation to not only be truthful in portraying the harsh realities and moral quandaries of war, but to also be “important” and make some kind of significant statement about the conflict we are currently embroiled in. How has this affected the war genre in the comics medium? How can war comics rise to this challenge?

With the shifting identity of the genre as a whole, it was easy to predict that the days of the superhero soldier were numbered. The 1980s saw many long-running war titles die out, with the likes of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, The Unknown Soldier and Fightin’ Army all coming to a close at the start of the decade. The last of the old war comics to retire was Sgt. Rock. Including the previous run of Our Army at War (which was later retitled to Sgt. Rock as the character’s overwhelming popularity led to him taking over what had previously been an anthology book), the book clocked up over 400 issues before finally ending in 1988, well into the post-Watchmen era of comics. What is it that made Sgt. Rock just a little bit more popular and enduring than his wartime counterparts? Perhaps because he was arguably the first of the superhero soldiers, he carried an extra resonance, becoming an emblem of a by-this-time bygone age in comic book storytelling. Here, a decade after the humiliation of Vietnam, was still a heroic, invulnerable soldier and his brave compatriots in Easy Company going off on adventures and killing Nazis, eternally enjoying glorious victory in World War II. But the inevitable could only be delayed for so long, and the clock was clearly ticking on what relevance Sgt. Rock had left. Tentative attempts were made by DC to introduce the hard-bitten war veteran Frank Rock into present day stories in their main superhero line as a senior military figure in a manner similar to how Marvel reinvented Nick Fury as the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., but ultimately the character’s creator, editor Robert Kanigher, concluded that Sgt. Rock and Easy Company were characters that were meant to remain forever in the past, as shown by his comments in the letters page of Sgt. Rock #374:


As far as I'm concerned ROCK is the only authentic World War II Soldier. For obvious reasons. He and Easy Company live only, and will eventually die, to the last man, in World War II.


And so Sgt. Rock faded into comic book history. But in the beginning of the 21st Century, Vertigo had the idea of reviving Sgt. Rock for one last adventure, one that would pay respect to a classic figure in comic book history while also telling a war story that felt contemporary and spoke to modern readers and their response to war. By this point Kanigher had died, so Vertigo editor Karen Berger turned to the other crucial figure in the character’s history, someone who’s association with the character stretched back over 50 years to his first appearance: legendary artist Joe Kubert. More than any other artist, Kubert defined the visuals of Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, and was later involved (at different times) in both writing and editing for the title. Kubert knows Sgt. Rock, better than anyone else alive today. By bringing him onboard as artist for their story – which, under his recommendation, was changed from a 12 issue maxi-series into a single graphic novel entitled Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place – Vertigo were paying respect to the character’s past. And by pairing Kubert with writer Brian Azzarello – at this point a rising star and Vertigo’s MVP thanks to his work on 100 Bullets – they evidently hoped they could reinvent the character for the present. An admirable goal, to be sure, but I don’t believe the end product was entirely successful in achieving it.

This is, first and foremost, Joe Kubert’s book. His name comes first on the cover and title page (before the writer, which is very rare) and the extended passages with sparse dialogue or no dialogue at all are catered to provide him with a showcase, allowing his art to do much of the story’s heavy lifting. And with his contribution to Between Hell and a Hard Place, Kubert excels. Rather than simply going retro and rehashing his classic, iconic style for the story, Kubert has evolved as an artist, even at his grand old age trying new things and being inventive on the page. His more expressionistic approach to the visuals here gives the book a haunting, almost ghostly feel, with the washed-out color scheme making this very familiar setting of Nazi Germany feel alien and barren, as if Easy Company had taken a wrong turn into the end of the world.

The shortcomings stem from Brian Azzarello’s writing. Undoubtedly, there is some strong material in here. But overall the book suffers from a stilted mixed message. Azzarello struggles under the aforementioned burden of responsibility now assigned to war fiction, trying his best to depict a World War II environment that displays the horrors of that conflict in a manner that’s become the standard thanks to films like Saving Private Ryan, while having his characters regularly talk about how hopeless and nightmarish their situation is. But then we get to Chapter Five, and it’s as if Azzarello comes to a grudging acceptance that this is still a Sgt. Rock comic, and so the climax must involve Easy Company triumphing against overwhelming odds, beating the Nazi bad guy and saving the girl.

It’s hard giving an authentic portrayal of the horrors of war when you have a cast of characters that seem invulnerable, practically bulletproof (though Little Big Shot is wounded by gunfire, but we never return to the character to find out whether he survived or not, which I thought was a sloppy oversight), and so in order to effectively portray any sense of real peril at all, Azzarello is forced to introduce a group of thinly-sketched rookie ciphers to join the established ranks of Easy Company, essentially a group of redshirts who we can immediately tell have been brought in only to be killed off, so Azzarello can have a body count without upsetting the established Easy Company ensemble. But war comics cannot work like superhero comics, where characters miraculously cheat death over and over in order to maintain status quo. Or at least, they cannot work that way anymore.

And so, for all the work Kubert puts in to advance and evolve his art, Sgt Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place still feels like a throwback, a fleeting visit to a past era of war fiction. If anything, I feel that this graphic novel made for a compelling argument for why the era of the superhero soldier is well and truly over. Sgt. Rock and the rest of Easy Company never seem quite at ease in this modern depiction of warfare, their version of that period of history a different one from that which we are more familiar with now. Enjoyable a read as it may be, the book demonstrated that comic books cannot rely on past tricks to recapture past glory. If the war genre was to become relevant again in comics, the medium would have to play to its strengths and innovate. As a final aside, this is perhaps why when Vertigo, several years later, decided to revive another old war hero, the Unknown Soldier, they made a much more radical departure from the original comics.

I found a more recent Vertigo effort – The Other Side, by writer Jason Aaron and artist Cameron Stewart – to be a much more successful example of how war comics can work in the 21st Century. While Sgt. Rock was forever stationed in World War II, for The Other Side we move forward in history to a much more problematic war, one where America’s involvement was and is far less lionized: The Vietnam War. At the time of the conflict, comics were once again mobilized to stir up patriotism and support for America, yet as can be seen, much of the industry’s ham-fisted commentary on Vietnam has aged considerably worse than even the World War II propaganda:





The obvious thing to note is how much more the vilifying of the other side has now descended into overt, uncomfortable racism. Furthermore, this time round such simplistic propaganda could not be carried on a great wave of popular support, as Vietnam was an increasingly unpopular war, and one where lines between good and evil could not be so neatly drawn as some war comics suggested. Cinema had a similar problem. During the war, hackneyed efforts like the John Wayne vehicle The Green Berets did little to accurately portray the reality of the battlefield in Vietnam. It was not until after the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam that cinema began to offer a more authentic picture of the horror and chaos of that conflict, with films such as Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter and perhaps most truthfully of all, Apocalypse Now. These movies showed Vietnam not as a place of heroism and adventure, but one of soul-crushing madness, of unspeakable horror and despair. How could comics respond to this?

A Sgt. Rock for Vietnam would be hopeless, the comic book equivalent of The Green Berets. Hence why Super Green Beret, featuring the Vietcong-booting brute seen above and his magical monkey sidekicks, mercifully only lasted a mere two issues. The ’Nam was a Marvel series that launched in 1987, written and edited respectively by Vietnam veterans Doug Murray and Larry Hama. Desiring to use the comic book medium to provide a more honest portrayal of the conflict, they planned to tell a story in “real-time” that would cover the entire 12 year duration of the conflict, with each issue moving forward a month in time and picking up on where Private First Class Edward Marks and various other cast members had progressed to over the time that had passed. However, despite a desire to carry that ubiquitous burden of responsibility in providing a true picture of what happened, they also believed quite passionately in making The ’Nam an all-ages title that could be approved by the Comics Code Authority, in order to better educate children on the realities of the war. This of course created an inherent tension which prevented them from showing the full horrors of Vietnam, though Murray has often stated he feels he still managed to capture the spirit of a soldier’s life during that time. The book received quite a lot of critical acclaim, but audiences lagged to the point where Marvel resorted to having The Punisher (!) guest-star a few times, before ultimately cancelling the book. It is now viewed as something of a forgotten gem. Last month, Marvel started re-releasing the series in graphic novel format – I might be tempted to check it out.

The Other Side is not a book that falls within the Comics Code. The very first page is a full-page splash image of a screaming, terrified American soldier’s face as he dies a horrific death, described in blunt detail by the narration of our protagonist, Private Billy Everette:


And in the Quang Tin province of SOUTH VIETNAM, 19-year-old Marine Private Jon J. Faulkner earned his one and only PURPLE HEART… when an 82mm mortar round blew off his legs and ripped open his bowels. The poor bastard probably dreamed of marrying his high school sweetheart and opening the first drive-through burger joint in Bumf*ck, Missouri… but instead he died facedown in his own sh*t and the mud of the Que Son Valley.


Billy Everette is no Sgt. Rock. This is no glorified hero. He’s a scared young man, still a boy really, who is drafted into the army, and desperately tries everything he can think of to get out of being sent to Vietnam (“I even told their doctor I was ***** as all get-out and would F*CK every boy’s ass I could get my hands on. But they still took me.”), and as we see him reluctantly depart from his devastated family, we are quickly invested emotionally in his plight far more than we would be with an invincible, gung-ho adventurer.

Of course, following an American everyman through the life-altering horrors of Vietnam is a storytelling device well-worn in Hollywood. But the clever twist Jason Aaron includes in The Other Side is providing us with a second protagonist, one who we become just as invested in emotionally: Vo Binh Dai, a young recruit to the People’s Army of Vietnam. While the Vietcong have often been portrayed as faceless, bloodthirsty monsters even in rightly celebrated Vietnam movies like The Deer Hunter, Aaron here goes to great lengths to give an even-handed account of the war, showing bravery and atrocities on both sides of the conflict. And the cruelest trick of all is that, as much as he makes us care about both Billy Everette and Vo Binh Dai, he makes it abundantly clear from early on that the two are on a collision course, their fates intertwined, both on a one-way path towards an inevitable encounter that will without doubt end in death.

Earlier I talked about how the early war comics seemed to borrow their structure from the superhero genre. But with his structure for The Other Side, Aaron seems to follow the rules of a markedly different genre: horror. Employing a classical horror structure, we see a peaceful and happy status quo interrupted by the arrival of a monstrous threat – in this case the monster being the war itself – with terrifying consequences, following along a chain of set-pieces that escalate in violence and intensity, growing from brief frights to a climactic ordeal of sustained terror where the monstrous threat is defeated (or in this case, escaped from) and equilibrium is restored, but with the status quo forever altered. Billy survives the war, which is initially a relief, as for much of the story Aaron had shifted from really making us desperately want him to make it back home (“Dear Jesus…PLEASE don’t let me DIE here.”) and heavily foreshadowing that he was doomed. But the biggest sucker-punch of all comes at the very end, as we see the awful fate that now awaits the “safe” Billy:


My bedroom back home is just like I left it. But still, ain’t NOTHIN’ the same. My bed’s too soft to ever sleep on. My momma’s cookin’ makes me sick to my stomach. Welcome to the rest of your life, Private Everette. This is what it’s like BEYOND the wire. You’re walkin’ point without air support from here on out. And ain’t no going back. NOT EVER. THERE IT IS. Welcome to the OTHER SIDE.


The panel on the second last page that accompanies the caption about his “momma’s cookin’” is particularly cruel. In his moments of deepest despair in Vietnam, we see that Billy Everette’s one source of solace is dimly-remembered thoughts of his momma’s home-cooked meals, all the delicious delights he hopes to one day taste again. And he finally gets home, finally gets his hands on that one shred of hope… and it is left as a pile of vomit at his feet. But most devastating of all is that full-page image on the last page, a reminder to us all that Billy Everette might have left Vietnam, but Vietnam will never leave him.

On the subject of devastating images, special acknowledgement must be given to artist Cameron Stewart. For as powerful as Aaron’s script may be, it is ultimately Stewart’s art that makes the book. In 2005 Stewart travelled to Vietnam to get a first-hand feel of the place. He travelled all around, visiting war museums to get a sense of the atrocities committed, walking the streets to get a feel for the civilian population, exploring the remains of American barracks, and even venturing through the underground tunnels used by the Vietcong. As such, his renditions of Vietnam’s various locales have a real feeling of authenticity to them, perfectly capturing the disorder of an American base or the stifling claustrophobia of a Vietcong tunnel.

But beyond that, it is Stewart’s art that really hits home the horror structure Aaron sets up, most notably in the terrifying apparitions that haunt Billy, visions of mangled, decomposing American soldiers that taunt him about how he will soon join their ranks. One image that stuck in my head as particularly horrific comes on page 18 of Chapter One: If You’re Lucky, You’ll Only Get Killed, as one decayed corpse opens its gaping mouth to impossibly wide proportions, and screams, “WHY DID I DIE!” right in Billy’s face, with talking maggots flaking off its rotten skin. Such vivid imagery as this is arguably more effective in a comic book than in any other medium, and so we really get the sense with The Other Side that comics can really make their own statement about war, without simply being derivative of movies. The Other Side is not your typical war comic. It is a horror story, which oddly enough makes it the most appropriate, authentic, honest portrayal of The Vietnam War you’re likely to find in comics.

Time to jump forward in time again to a more recent war: The Bosnian War of 1992-1995. Now this conflict has a greater sense of immediacy about it for me personally, as this was a war that took place in my lifetime, and is one I can remember hearing about on the news, though at that age I didn’t know much about the details. Thinking back on it now, though, it seems to have become something of a forgotten war. Which is where Safe Area Goražde, the non-fiction graphic novel written and drawn by journalist Joe Sacco, comes in. In the case of World War II or the Vietnam War, Hollywood has already provided us with an abundance of depictions of what the reality of those conflicts was like. When either conflict is mentioned to you, odds are you get at least a mental image in your head, iconic images gleaned from popular culture that at least offer some kind of limited insight into these dark moments in history. But less people have such images of the Bosnian War in their heads. It is a conflict that has been obscured by history, one less people know about in any kind of detail, and so the burden of responsibility war fiction has acquired sits more heavily on Joe Sacco’s shoulders than on the other writers featured in this meeting. While Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place and The Other Side could evoke existing imagery from their respective wars, Safe Area Goražde is tasked with creating new imagery for readers who may be entering the story of this conflict cold.

The first thing to say about the Bosnian War was that it was very complex, fought amongst many sides and across a multitude of fronts and overshadowed by a complex web of international agendas, and has proved difficult to even define, never mind explain. Though Sacco does have extended sequences of exposition running through a brief history of the region, for the most part he steers clear of detailed explanation of the convoluted mess that was The Bosnian War, appropriate enough given that it seems few of the people involved really knew what was going on either. It is to these people affected by the conflict first hand that Sacco narrows his focus. Though unlike the other books on the reading list, Sacco does not focus on soldiers in the midst of conflict, but rather for the most part on civilians, who relay second-hand (or sometimes even third-hand, repeating stories they heard from others) accounts of a war that by this point was finally coming to an end. One might guess that this would create a distancing effect, but quite the opposite, because Sacco is portraying real people, and mostly just letting those who experienced the war themselves tell their own stories (though there are points where his own outrage over events slips through into the narration), instead the book becomes an utterly immersive, intimate account of the conflict, and is all the more truthful for the approach it takes.

Safe Area Goražde tells the story of Joe Sacco’s visits to Goražde, one of several UN-sanctioned “safe zones” for Muslims in war-torn Bosnia. Disregarding U.N. authority, Serbian nationalists – referred to as Chetniks – invaded these safe zones, and those Muslims who could not escape were subjected to a murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing. Before long, Goražde was the last safe zone remaining in Eastern Bosnia. Besieged and under attack, it seemed like it too would fall, but decisive N.A.T.O. action finally forced Serbian forces to withdraw, leaving Goražde protected, but as an enclave isolated from the rest of Muslim Bosnia, with the only road into it through Serbian territory. Sentiments among the people of the community are presented as mixed between relief that their home had come back from the brink of oblivion, and terror that their ordeal was not yet over. After all, the U.N. and the Bosnian Government were at the time considering trading Goražde and its people over to the Serbs in exchange for more desirable urban real estate near Sarajevo…

If there would be any argument against the authenticity of Sacco’s account, it would be that it is largely one-sided, focusing on the plight of the Bosnian Muslims targeted by Serb forces. But given how genuine and immersive their stories are, and the level of detail that goes into recounting them, it’s hard to think that we’re somehow not getting a full picture of the Bosnian War from the book. Perhaps because, judging by the eyewitness accounts, this “war” was incredibly one-sided. We are told harrowing stories of Chetniks indiscriminately picking off unarmed Muslim civilians – including women and children – with sniper fire, shell-shocked women recall Serbs paying daily visits to the maternity wards to rape the stranded pregnant women, and we get horrifying glimpses of bloody executions and mass graves. What is terrifying is how mundane and normal the Chetniks make these atrocities seem, drinking and singing nationalist songs while cheerfully giving their Muslim prisoners messages like, “When you’re finished with this job, we’re going to take you to the bridge and kill you.” Though Sacco rarely tells us how to feel, by simply letting these Muslim survivors tell their stories, we are encouraged to feel anger and frustration over what they were put through. On page 125, Dr. Alija Begovic offers a succinct summary of the dynamics of the war as presented:


I can’t understand why the rest of the world hasn’t intervened more forcefully. The U.N. is always pointing out its neutrality. Even now. Neutral in what? In a slaughter of lambs by the wolves?


But as monstrous as some of their actions may be, Sacco is not interested in simply portraying the Serbians as faceless, inhuman animals. Throughout the book, a recurring trend amongst the Muslim interviewees is that they refer to the Serbs as formerly being their friends, their neighbors. At some points we hear stories of Serbians standing on one side of the river – in Serbian territory – and shouting over to the Muslims on the other side of the river, asking about Muslim friends in the community. When the Muslims asked these Serbians about why they were doing this, even the Serbians didn’t really seem to know, merely going along with the hysteria of the majority. Many Muslims interviewed even say that they would accept the Serbians returning to the community and living alongside them once more, even if things could never go back to the way they were. Sacco seems to demonstrate that the greatest tragedy of all is the loss of what was once a thriving, multi-cultural community. One particularly powerful scene features the Muslims returning to Goražde after the 1992 raid, only to discover that the Serbian forces had burned their homes to the ground before retreating. Angry and confused, some of the Muslims responded by burning down all the Serbian houses in the community too. The narrator remarks that this is a shame, as all they achieved was making sure nobody had a house to live in.

The real target of Sacco’s scorn seems to be the various politicians and senior military figures bargaining over the fate of Goražde from a safe distance. In the chapter titled “The 94 Offensive”, we are presented with a series of blunders on the part of U.N. peacekeepers and even US president Bill Clinton that would be farcical if their consequences weren’t so nightmarish. As the Serbian leaders agreed to U.N. policies on ceasefires, then immediately ignored them and kept on pressing into the U.N. “safe zones”, the armed forces stationed in the region were prevented from taking any action to stop them or to protect the Bosnian Muslims under their care – the people who had come to and were now stranded in these “safe zones” because the U.N. had promised them refuge – because orders from above prevented them from doing so in any decisive manner. America was trying to broker a deal with the Russians, and felt it might benefit that deal if the Serbians were allowed to press forward with their genocide uninterrupted, and when they finally were forced to act and endorse action against Serbia, complicated internal bureaucracy of the U.N. and N.A.T.O. slowed everything to a crawl, with top U.N. official Yasushi Akashi – a dupe who believed every broken promise of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic – in particular throwing up hurdles against armed response at every turn. And whenever half-hearted attempts to protect the “safe zones” were embarked on, all it took were Serbian forces taking a few U.N. hostages to force them to back down. Serbs were openly shooting U.N. helicopters out of the air, but the decision-makers were still worried about the political ramifications of siding with Bosnian Muslims in the dispute. At Sebrenica, 7000 Muslim men were killed and their bodies were dumped in mass graves. It was, Sacco informs us, “the largest mass killing in Europe in 50 years.” Sebrenica was a safe zone, these Muslims were here because they had congregated here under advice from the U.N., whose peacekeepers were forced to stand by and watch as these executions took place. And with the same fate to soon befall Goražde, military and political leaders argued over whether the town was worth saving from a similar fate. On page 180, we are shown an excerpt of a letter from Bosnian President Izetbegovic to U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali:


The so-called safe area has become the most unsafe place in the world… Neither you nor your personnel have done anything to use the mandate of all those resolutions to protect the people of Goražde or the credibility of the United Nations.


The atrocities of Sebrenica were seen as an embarrassment to these global authorities, and so at last America, Russia, Britain, the U.N. and N.A.T.O. all put aside all their conflicting agendas and finally put on a unified front and made a decisive stand against Serbia. With committed action against them, the Chetniks were very quick to withdraw, and when these outside forces finally decided to act rather than watch disaster was averted quickly – if too late for some.

And so through Safe Area Goražde, it perhaps becomes clear why the Bosnian War has been largely forgotten. It is a shameful period for America, the UK, the U.N., and all the outside agencies that were so ineffective in resolving this conflict, when they were in a position to do just that. We have moved on to other conflicts, but Bosnia is still picking up the pieces. Joe Sacco describes himself as a “guest of war”, able to breeze into Goražde with the U.N. convoy, then flash his press pass whenever he wants to leave. And through his book, he shows us that we – all of us who were horrified at the atrocities of the war before changing the channel – were just the same. But with Safe Area Goražde, Joe Sacco gives the victims a voice and makes us listen. He shows us the harsh realities of this conflict, and carries the burden of responsibility that comes with telling stories – be they fictional or factual – about war.

We view war differently than we did in the 1940s, and the changing face of war has been reflected in the changing way war stories are told. In recent years, comic books have moved to adapt to this change, and once again we see that not only are comics able to keep up with other mediums’ portrayal of a genre, but are able to tell stories of war in ways no other medium could manage quite so well.


Meeting #23
In the next meeting we don’t talk about a genre, but a writer. Warren Ellis, to be precise. We’ll be looking at how Ellis has exploited the inherent strengths of the comic book format to tell stories that are unmistakably his, and the role a writer plays, if any, in capitalizing on comic books as a visual artform and generating a distinct visual aesthetic.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Desolation Jones: Made in England
Warren Ellis and J.H. Williams III

Planetary: All Over the World and Other Stories
Warren Ellis and John Cassaday

Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street
Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson


Meeting #24
Casanova: Luxuria
Chew: Taster’s Choice
I Kill Giants

[tiggerpete]

yeah, for some reason old war comics are more fun to me than old war movies (maybe because it is ridiculous to see Batman manning a machine gun, and if I know anything it is rediculous=fun when it comes to comics) the Vietnam covers were just uncomfortable, I think that states that pretty clearly. I know Unknown Soldier has a Vertigo series right now but I haven't read it, I guess I am just not much of a war comics person. (now throw a superhero back in time and into the war and I am all over that for some reason, like the recent issue of Brave and the Bold where the Flash gets sent back in time to WW2 and teams up with the Blackhawks, that was incredible IMO) plus Enemy Ace is awesome (who doesn't like a conflicted psychologically complex villain, or as I like to think of it, a hero who happened to be on the wrong side)

[JohnLees]

The lack of replies might imply that the regulars could still be behind on their reading. And given that I was so late in posting this one, posting the next column on its regular Monday slot would mean that there's just over a week between columns, much less than the fortnight I usually set aside for everyone to read up. It might be better to set the next column for a week on Monday instead of this Monday, to get everything back on an even keel.

[tiggerpete]

sounds like a plan to me

[BrandonBarrows]

The shock of Batman and Robin showing up in the jungles of a Japanese-held island somewhere in the Pacific has clearly broken this man's fragile hold on sanity.

He stands there smiling insanely, clearly glad to see someone who isn't obviously intending to do him harm but he neglects to form the correct words for the situation.

Specifically:

"Hey, Batman! Hey, Robin! Thanks for the new gun. You think you could maybe, you know, stick around and help us end this thing a little bit sooner?"

To which the response would likely be:

"Uh...well, enjoy that new gun, soldier! Be seeing you stateside."

[tiggerpete]

lmao, I thought the soldier looked ripe for a section 8, because clearly he has snapped if he is seeing Batman and Robin in the jungle.

[JohnLees]

Anyone interested in seeing more of those barmy wartime covers should check out the propoganda sectino of superdickery.com. Some of them are hilarious, others are horrifying, but most manage to be both in equal measure.

[tiggerpete]

I am gonna have to check that out

[wiegeabo]

Finally finished Sgt. Rock and Other Side. Thoughts to come soon. Couldn't get hold of a copy of Safe Area.

[JohnLees]

Look forward to reading your thoughts, wiegeabo!