Customer Reviews

Shooting War

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Length:: 0:28 Mins

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Shiny, pretty, without too many words, Shooting War takes a look at the war, at our media, at the corporate take over of our country without taking itself too seriously. Hiding behind animation, Shooting War is able to face, head on, the brutality of the war without any danger of becoming a sensationalistic blood fest.

Makes a great gift for any socially active person!

Although the author and illustrator say their graphic novel is a political satire that extrapolates current events regarding the Iraqi War, the Mexican immigration issue, and emerging technology as well as a healthy dose of politics, SHOOTING WAR is also a wonderfully compelling read. I was blown away by the storyline, the art, and the voice that comes from the material. I was also completely surprised by the appearance of news anchor Dan Rather and his hefty part in the graphic novel's plot and action.

Lappe and Goldman obviously know their material and believe in their message. They don't hold back and reach out viciously to grab the reader by the hair of the head and drag them through the harsh world they've created. I'd read a preview of the graphic novel almost three months ago, but even that failed to prepare me for the emotional and thought-provoking odyssey I was embarking on when I first began to turn pages.

The book actually started out as an on-line comic. Lappe had written a nonfiction book, TRUE LIES, with Stephen Marshall that focused on the disservice they believe the media is doing to the American people. Lappe is also the executive editor of GNN (Guerilla News Network), has written for a number of magazines and other media, and was the producer of the Showtime documentary about Iraq: BATTLEGROUND: 21 DAYS ON THE EMPIRE'S EDGE.

Goldman writes and draws the strip, KELLY, for www.act-i-vate.com and co-authored the graphic novel, EVERYMAN: BE THE PEOPLE. His art is the result of a mixed media effort.

I liked the character of Jimmy Burns from the opening pages. He's just a big kid with a new toy, a wireless camera that allows him to video-blog from anywhere there's an internet connection. I liked his innocence, but I knew it was going to be blown out like a candle flame before the story ran its course.

In just the first few pages, Jimmy happens to be on-hand in front of a Starbucks (and you have to love the way iconic features of today's popular culture are used and destroyed in the book) where a terrorist bomb explodes. The building, including Jimmy's apartment, is destroyed and several people are killed. Almost overcome by the horror around him, Jimmy keeps talking into the video camera. But I got the impression that it was because he was freaked and wanted to share what was going on with someone else more than just to present a breaking news story.

Jimmy's transmission gets seized by a local network and pumped into an international grid where the world watches. In just a couple of pages, Jimmy gets hired by Global News, the television station that hijacked his video upload, as a troubleshooter, a reporter who's going to be in the middle of all the world's hotspots.

Before Jimmy knows it, he's launched into the middle of the Iraqi War. Since, in the book, it's the year 2011, there are a lot of changes. Sadly, which is one of the messages of the book, many things remain the same.

Goldman's art is beautiful. He overlays comics-style drawing over real photographs of places and events. The explosions are frozen, destructive poetry that draw the eye. The faces, though loosely drawn, convey strong emotions. He uses color like a weapon, subtle when he wants to stay out of the way of the reader and a barrage of attacks when he moves into a full assault on the reader's senses.

In addition to writing a terrific plot that's ripped from today's headlines and giving us characters we all know and understand, Lappe also designs link titles for Jimmy's webpage and magazine covers that are hilarious! Check out: Tom Cruise and Mary-Kate Olsen Call It Quits and let your imagination run wild.

Even though the grim material is salted with humor, Lappe and Goldman never step completely out of the darkness. The execution of a "traitor" at the hands of Abu Adallah and the Sword of Mohammed is horribly bloody business, callous and cruel.

Another aspect I truly enjoyed about the book was the use of technology. It's not going to go away and it will continue to change our lives on a daily basis in small and large ways. SHOOTING WAR uses the emerging tech constantly, whether it's on the handheld camera Jimmy uses or the PDAs or wallscreens on the sides of buildings. The military hardware also gets a lot of play, the older stuff as well as the newer defensive and offensive hardware.

One of the best examples of the emerging technology is the image of the recon and search and rescue teams. The blue faceplate glows and looks like a cross, making them look like instruments of some divine justice.

The authors are merciless in their views on the war. They bring in a lot of information about other freedom leaders, and point out when the United States aligned themselves with those leaders and when they didn't. Again, all of this information came from today's and recent headlines.

The scene where the United States soldiers get attacked and inadvertently shoot and kill a small boy is heart-wrenching to read. You can't read stuff like this and not think of what's going on over in the war. Innocents (and innocence) are being lost on both sides, and you can understand why people who would normally not take issue with occupying forces or domestic rebels, but how they are sometimes forced to.

I loved Dan Rather's presence in the book, and I have to wonder how the authors and publisher got him to agree to be presented with such a strong opinion on the war and the presidency. The line between fiction and non-fiction, reality and possibility, is definitely blurred at this point, and during several others.

SHOOTING WAR has a definite slant on the war and the American presidency, as well as politics. A lot of people aren't going to agree with everything in this book. That's all right. I feel the authors were really provoking their readers into at least thinking something, and feeling it as well.

And if you decide to leave politics out of the entertainment, I feel you'll be thrilled with the story that's drawn, rendered, and written so eloquently between the pages. SHOOTING HERO is a terrific read with enough tension to keep you nailed to the pages till you finish. Even without the political statements, readers are going to feel the rush of fear, the despair of failure, and the allure of triumph.

This savvy look at the all-too-proximate future couldn't be smarter or more gripping. It holds up a mirror to our own times and beams back an absurd apocalypse. It's a beautiful hardcover coffee table accoutrement. The pictures are amazingly vibrant. A great conversation starter.

Lappe & Goldman's "Shooting War" is a fast-paced, gorgeously illustrated rollercoaster ride through a predicted future of the state of war in the Middle East. The hypothesis is that the conflict won't be over by 2011 (of course, it has been going on, "with or without" the USA for decades) and a video-blogger, Jimmy Burns, gets his big break with a very "lucky" live feed of the explosive destruction of a local Starbucks. We follow Burns, a limelight-chasing media newbie, in his quick rise to fame to the warzone in the Middle East itself. His experiences prove that life doesn't just exist through the lens, but that it's happening all around him and TO him, but he is there to do a job, hence the only way he is permitted to survive in such a volatile place is by way of his camera. Lappe's story gets a little confusing at times, but moves very quickly and is chock-full of warning. But it's Goldman's illustrations that are the star of the show, mixing real photography and digital drawings on two-page spreads that make one look away due to the occasional gore. It's a beautifully executed book and well worth the small price.

Shooting War is an interesting, horrifying and superbly flawed work that envisions the Iraq War in the near future.

The story sees smartass liberal blogger Jimmy Burns, an angry twenty-something who accidentally films a suicide bombing in New York, recruited by the exploitive, exhibitionist Global News and sent to document the Iraq War. It's now 2011, with McCain in the White House and Iraq even worse-off than it is now, and Jimmy soon finds himself embroiled in a battle between a group of chic Marxist jihadists and a US army group led by a brutal, possibly insane war hero. Oh, and Dan Rather is in there, too.

The art is a mix of stylized drawings and what appear to be real pictures, and sometimes can be quite striking. The group of US soldiers, and their leader, "Colonel Crash," are most noteworthy, and it does a good job of depicting the havoc and chaos of this brutal war. It's not my favorite art ever, and I'm not sure it would've worked in a different book, where the frenetic and sometimes sloppy-looking style didn't serve the story, but it suits Shooting War fine.

The book also does a good job of characterizing its major players. Jimmy Burns is appropriately conflicted, going from an overconfident yuppie to a despondent and hopelessly depressed kid realizing how far in over his head he is to something of wiser veteran journalist by the end. That last transformation comes a little abruptly, and his story arch is a fairly typical coming-of-age type story, but once again, it's done well-enough. If the piece has true villains, they'd be Colonel Crash, an evangelical extremist and a brutal war criminal, and the leader of the jihadist group Sword of Mohammed, who styles himself as a twenty-first century Che Guevera, beret and all. I was particularly pleased by the characterization of these two characters; both are shown to have admirable qualities (Che-clone has some good ideas about bringing Islam out of the dark ages and ending Western exploitation, while Crash has something of a sense of honor to him) to counter the monstrous crimes they commit. The book certainly doesn't allow the reader an easy judgment as to right and wrong in this case.

Ultimately, the portrayal of the brutal chaos of Iraq is the highest point of the book; whether or not it is a strictly realistic picture of Iraq in 2011, I cannot rightly say, but it does an excellent job of portraying a nation torn apart by war--and as we know, we won't have to wait till 2011 for that situation to be true in Iraq. Frankly, though I recognized many of the elements of the book to be satirical, I often couldn't laugh; the thing is just too dark, too horrific. And I can't imagine that's not the point--you should be horrified at what has been wrought in that country, what is happening there right now. Shooting War succeeds on the front of stirring rage in its reader at the suffering of all the innocent victims of this war.

The pointed portrayal of American mass media also hits home; here, the book is at its most satirical, with the bloodthirsty Global News but also with familiar companies like CNN being blasted for their raw exploitation and manipulation of their viewers. Dan Rather makes several appearances as a hero and mentor of sorts to Jimmy, being one of the few American journalists left in Baghdad, and provides most of the book's comic relief.

Where the book falters is, I think, in the details. The dialogue is often stiff and stilted; characters soapbox and make speeches a great deal, and many interactions are fairly awkward or heavy-handed. And though I generally agree with the book's politics, I hate how it crams them down your throat with a wooden stick. A bit more subtlety and a bit less preaching would've done the book a lot of good. The plot also tends to meander, taking lots of dead-end birdwalks before returning to the main story; this could've been an interesting approach to showing other aspects of Iraqi culture in the war, but they mostly just mess up the pacing. And the portrayal of the Iraqi communists, mentioned by another reviewer, is kind of ridiculous, the book's only truly absurd scene.

So that's Shooting War--dark, horrifying, bitingly sarcastic, uneven, and preachy. The book's flaws disappoint me--with tighter writing, it could easily have been a masterpiece. I still wholeheartedly recommend it; I think it's worth it to anyone to read.

Quite apart from the stellar graphics, this book is a great day-after-tomorrow commentary that digests - and explodes - the most pressing sociopolitical issues of our time. Goldman's art has a surreal, hallucinogenic edge evocative of the high-pressure/low-bandwidth world of online video content, and it perfectly supports Lappe's keenly observed script. This book will shake you down and leave you wanting more.

P.S. Dan Rather rocks my socks. Bravo for his last hurrah.

Internet buzz darling Shooting War is an excellent comic book. With its slick cgi-real photo imagery meshes, deliberately provocative storyline, and adolescent upper-middle class anti-corporate rhetoric, it creates an appalling yet thrilling view of a possible near future Iraq. It paints a War on Terror two seconds from tomorrow, with the same quagmire and tragedy, except with different politicians to blame and worse atrocities to shock our senses. It's all very edgy, yet blogosphere chic, but ultimately, its message ends up being muddled and unconvincing.

Lappe's version of Iraq isn't much more believable than Alfonso Cuarón's U.K. in Children of Men. Don't get me wrong; I'm not entirely unsympathetic to Lappe's views, and I was listening to M.I.A. while reading this novel, so don't call me a FReeper. But he just lays on his political viewpoint so thickly it ends up sickening. Yes, horrible things are going on in Iraq. Yes, the occupation is not such a good thing for the country and her people. But I have to question the way Lappe chooses to express his beliefs. As much as I enjoy dystopias, did he have to milk the outrage of the anti-war movement? Iraq as it is now is bad enough. Why does he have to trivialize it by inventing his own atrocities? Depicting the sort of violence that occurs right now, that's not as bad (though still rather cheap). But that whole sequence in Baghdad at the end- does he really believe U.S. forces can be so cruel? That the Army would resort to such an indiscriminate measure? That all Iraqis are poor victims whose only source of suffering is the U.S.?

Not to mention the implausibility of the dystopia. If the occupation really went so badly that Arab League peacekeepers under the U.N. are allowed in, the Iraq War would cease to be the sole responsibility of a McCain administration. The U.S. admitting that we need help in Iraq would be a momentous change from current policy. It would no longer be the fault of the neocons, because there would be other people, other nations, presumably people with better ideas to help stabilize the situation. In any case, I find it odd that Lappe chose throw in that plot idea, because while world opinion would certainly continue to be angered towards America, in the U.S. it would cease to be a "let's withdraw" issue and more "let's solve this thing with the rest of the world's help." In other words, it would open the door to multilateralism, something completely different from the current Bush policy.

Oh, and Chavez cutting off oil to the West? And the "mullahs" of Iran as well? I guess they're both tired of running things and would like to retire at the hands of an angry mob of a counterrevolution.

Though maybe bits like that are meant to be satire. Because while there are some lighter, more absurdist Catch-22-esque moments, they're few and far between. Most of the humor of "Shooting War" is derived from the scads of references and in-jokes to the near future. Which I totally dig and eat up. (The real reason why the future is truly terrifying: Only 10 megs per upload on YouTube!) But most of the overall tone is awash in cynicism that Iraq is completely fubared, that there is no hope for it, or for the U.S., or something. Which raises the question just what Lappe's entire point is, besides revel in the fact that we screwed up.

"Shooting War" hides a smarter view. The villain's initial speech at the bunker where he dismisses Chomsky, Negri, and other would-be modern day Marxes, was rather novel for such a genre character. But it ends up muddled, and we never get a clear view of just what the ominous Sword is trying to do. Are they trying to build a Caliphate? Not only is such a notion about as realistic as trying to build a New Roman Empire by recruiting Jack Chick, the Westboro Baptist Church, and the Pope, the villain seems too modern looking for that. Are they new-pan-Arabists? Apparently not, since they are composed of Algerians to Iranians, which is also about as realistic as the previous idea.

There's probably a small mountain of other political inaccuracies, and that's not even counting the patronizing depiction of Iraqi culture. A holdout of Iraqi Communists teaching their children Mao's Three Phases of Guerrilla Warfare? Is Lappe trying to be cute, or does he honestly think that all Marxists are the same?

Ultimately, "Shooting War" is all about the shlock-shock value of its subject matter and slick presentation. It's the dailyKos version of your 1980's right-wing jingoist action flick. But instead of American triumphalism, you get some sort of polemic against the corporate media, condescension towards the Iraqi people, and a lot of guilt and shame. And instead of Chuck Norris, you get Jimmy Burns. It's definitely worth a read, but ultimately, not enough to take seriously.

The book was brand new and in awesome condition. Great seller and even better product.

The story focuses on Jimmy Burns a video-blogger who happens to "be where people are going to die." When he posts live footage of a Starbucks bombing to his site that is later aired by Global(the all terror network), he soon finds himself in Baghdad covering the war. This book not only gives us a glimpse of the near future but is packed with laughs, action and a fantastic portrayal of Dan Rather. This is was one of the best graphic novels I have read since Y: The Last Man. Check it out. Like yesterday.