Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman’s Shooting War graphic novel has just hit bookstores after a very successful online serialization on SMITH, which was reviewed last year in Wired magazine ("A Graphic Future"). The book version looks nothing short of spectacular, reveling in a near-future (2011) technological dystopia where the global war on terror rages further and further out of control, lurching ever closer to apocalyptic fulfillment.
Strangely, the last great hope for humanity is a strapping young anti-corporate video blogger from Brooklyn, Jimmy Burns, who hilariously buddies up with former network anchor Dan Rather, also now a vlogger, as the two struggle on the ground in Iraq, unraveling important mysteries along the way such as what Kenneth's frequency actually is.
Lappé, a veteran war correspondent* who executive edits GNN.tv (Guerilla News Network), nails this timely cautionary tale, which has a despondent President John McCain resorting to pill-popping and blaming his predecessor for the "intractable quagmire:" American remote-control robots mercilessly kill unarmed civilians and al-Qaida** has cornered the market in overseas call centers as a source of income, stooping so low as to use a suitcase nuke on Bangalore to neutralize the competition. All of this fast-moving, 24/7-style news action is perfectly captured by Goldman's jarring, photorealistic artwork.
(*The author prefers not to be referred to as a "veteran war correspondent," though he has traveled to the Middle East several times on journalistic assignments and did produce the award winning film Battleground: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge. **The fictional terrorist group in Shooting War is called the Sword of Mohammed.)
