WAR IS HECK: If this sounds tasteless, it is, and that’s the point. |
“Your life. Your war.” — that’s the slogan on the cover of the first issue of Rick Veitch’s Army@Love (Vertigo). The man and woman are cuddling post-coitally, amid rubble, as a building goes up in flames behind them. They’re wearing unbuttoned military fatigues, dog tags dangling on their chests, staring seductively at the camera. It looks like a fashion ad.
Veitch’s new comic book is the blackest satire the American war in the Middle East has yet produced. Army@Love is set in the near future, when the US military, desperate for troops to fight in its endless war in “Afbaghistan,” has called on middle managers from globalization-friendly companies to rebrand the war as a thrilling, sexy experience for young adrenaline junkies: “spring break on steroids.” The “ultimate peak experience” they’re offering is the “Hot Zone Club”: sex in the middle of a firefight.
If this sounds tasteless, it is, and that’s the point. Veitch has noted that war is always a sacred cow when it’s ongoing and that comedies about war don’t usually appear until years after the conflict has ended; he’s just jumped the gun to put together a big, brutal, bludgeoning joke that’s about a greed-driven war with no exit strategy and about the worst excesses of culture on the home front.
In satirizing something as touchy as an in-progress war, there’s always the question of how far over the top to go. Army@Love goes all the way. An American soldier uses her majestic naked physique to distract Afbaghi “insurgents” so her partner can shoot them. Smiling American officers hand out candy to eager local kids: “Remember — haha — without globalization there won’t be chocolate bars!” A team of National Guardsmen open fire in a shopping mall while gossiping about their love lives. A stage magician adapts an Abu Ghraib–style torture device into an on-stage escape act. The army’s “creative consultant” coordinates a bombing raid using an electric guitar plugged into a laptop.
There’s a long tradition of war comics that’s fodder for Veitch’s grinder here — until the early ’80s, titles like Sgt. Rock and Unknown Soldier and Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos appeared regularly on newsstands. And he strips and humiliates their conventions one by one. Instead of the sentient weapons of old war comics — the “Haunted Tank” occupied by the ghost of a Civil War general, the talking gun and helmet Rogue Trooper carried — we get Roy the Robot, a useless, pint-sized tank that ends every one of its sentences with a smily or frowny face. Even the title of Army@Love is a riff on the long-running ’50s-era series Our Army at War, which introduced Sgt. Rock.
Veitch’s comics often suffer from an excess of ideas (last year’s mammoth graphic novel Can’t Get No was innovative and original but also kind of a train wreck), and Army@Love is no exception. Beyond its scalding satire, it tries to be a soap opera about its reprehensible characters’ romantic entanglements — these people are supposed to be as sympathetic as they are repugnant, and that dissonance of tone extends to the way Veitch (along with inker Gary Erskine) draws them. But the central conceit of the series hits its target as if laser-sighted. “Whatever gets your adrenaline going, you’ll find it in the National Guard.” More Veitch satire? No, that’s from the Web site of the National Guard.
