War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones [Mass Market Paperback]

David Axe (Author), Matt Bors (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 2010

Read David Axe's blogs and other content on the Penguin Community.

The war memoir as graphic novel-an utterly unforgettable and highly original look at war in the 21st century.

Street battles with spears and arrows in sweltering East Timor. Bone- jarring artillery duels in Afghanistan's mountains. Long patrols on the sandy wastes of southern Iraq. For four years, war was life for David Axe. He was alternately bored out of his mind and completely terrified. It was strangely addictive.

As a correspondent for The Washington Times, C-SPAN and BBC Radio, Axe flew from conflict to conflict, reveling in death, danger, and destruction abroad while, back in D.C., his apartment gathered dust, his plants died, and his relationships withered. War reporting was physically, emotionally, and financially draining-and disillusioning. Loosely based on the web comic of the same name, with extensive new material, War Is Boring takes us to Lebanon and Somalia; to arms bazaars across the United States; to Detroit, as David tries to reconnect with his family-and to Chad, as David attempts to bring attention to the Darfur genocide.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. War journalist Axe has been to some of the most volatile regions of our globe in the past decade, and since 2006 he has used comics to tell the stories he sees there. In his previous War Fix he expressed the drive that inspires him to return to war zone after war zone, in search of the truth about conflicts around the world. Axe founded the Web site War Is Boring, which gives war correspondents and cartoonists a place to report and react to modern-day warfare. At first glance, the combination of hard-hitting war journalism and cartooning is incongruous, but as those who have read Joe Sacco will testify, the graphic novel can be a potent medium in which to show both the fearful tedium and the violence of war. Axe and artist Bors (3 Car Pileup) are well on their way to mastering the balance, using a traditional six-panel grid to give the art a documentary feel. Bors's art has an indie vibe that will pull in readers from other genres, lending sympathy and depth to Axe's troubled protagonist. Like War Fix, this suffers a bit from Axe's ambivalence toward his calling, but his honesty sets it apart from other war narratives.
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From Booklist

Addicted to danger, freelance war correspondent Axe found himself irresistibly drawn to conflicts in Iraq, East Timor, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. Each time, once his itch was scratched, he would return home, where his tolerance for smug, ignorant Americans grew slimmer and his relationship with his girlfriend became more and more strained. Then his death wish would resurface and the cycle would resume. The visuals and dialogue in this graphic novel—adapted from his webcomic of the same name—convey his harrowing experiences and encounters with soldiers and civilians in the worlds riskiest war zones, while his growing internal distress is related in captions that serve as an anguished voice-over commentary. Axe’s tale is heartfelt and compelling; however, Bors’ awkward artwork does it a disservice. But if their collaboration falls short of the mastery of comics-journalist Joe Sacco’s war-zone reportage from Bosnia—or, for that matter, the Afghanistan dispatches of cartoonist Ted Rall, who contributes an introduction to this volume—it’s nonetheless a convincing document of a daunting internal conflict. --Gordon Flagg

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: NAL Trade; 1 edition (August 3, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451230116
• ISBN-13: 978-0451230119
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #447,755 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Axe is a military correspondent living in Columbia, South Carolina. Since 2005 he has reported from the U.K., Iraq, Lebanon, Japan, East Timor, Afghanistan, Somalia, Chad, Nicaragua, Kenya, Gabon, Congo and other countries. He is a regular contributor to Voice of America, C-SPAN, Wired and many others. His graphic novel war memoir WAR FIX made Amazon's 2006 top ten list. ARMY 101, his nonfiction tale about Army ROTC, debuted in January 2007. His picture book WAR BOTS received favorable reviews. His next book, a graphic novel entitled WAR IS BORING, was published in 2010 by New American Library. In November 2011, Potomac will publish David's non-fiction book about logistics, FROM A TO B. David can be reached at david_axe-at-hotmail.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Post-Traumatic Stress Reporter, August 19, 2010

By 

T. Simons (Columbia, SC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones (Mass Market Paperback)

A vanishingly small percentage of Americans -- on the order of one percent -- have any direct experience of what life is like under our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're wars behind walls, and only under rare circumstances do Americans get to see an unfiltered, uncensored presentation of what life in those warzones is actually like. Even more rarely do Americans get access to the lower-profile conflicts that dot the developing world, too far outside our political aims or our military interests for most first-world reporters to even bother with them -- places like East Timor, Darfur, Somalia, places off the edge of the mental map for most Americans: the "Here Be Dragons" of the 24-hour-news-cycle age.

David Axe has spent the past few years going to those places first hand. In this comic, he gives us a retrospective on what he's seen and the reactions he's gone through, taking us with him as he confronts, both physically and mentally, the hollow brutality of modern warfare.

Matt Bor's spare, iconic art provides an excellent substrate for Axe's text, and together they show us a view of modern conflict that might not be possible in a more mainstream medium -- too ruthlessly realistic for hollywood, too graphically violent for television news, too strongly emotional for a newspaper.

If it has a flaw, it's that it's a little too personal -- the focus of the story is slightly more on what the experience of these conflicts has done to Axe's mind than it is on the conflicts themselves -- but that might be a necessary function of this kind of personal narrative. If you want a first-hand account of what it's like "over there" -- and you want to know more about what going "over there" might do to your mind and your worldview -- you won't go far wrong reading this.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Axe Is Never Boring, August 14, 2010

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James C. Gregg "The Rev. J. Carl Gregg" (Monroe, LA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones (Mass Market Paperback)

The boredom of war is debatable. David Axe is many things, but boredom is against his nature. Buy this book; you won't be bored.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Graphic Memoir, August 13, 2010

By 

Rodin (South West England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones (Mass Market Paperback)

I am not usually a fan of graphic novels however I found this one gripping. Whether that is because it is a memoir or because the combination of David Axe's writing and Matt Bors's illustrations goes together so well I am not sure, it doesn't matter because this is a book I did not want to put down.

Page after page has you following David Axe from what most of us call home to one war zone and back, to arms fairs and editor's offices until another opportunity arises to head off to another part of the world to document its troubles. The more I got into this book though, the more I realise that it's not about the trouble spots he goes to but about his own and how he changes from someone who reports on wars to someone who reports on people.

Matt Bors's stark black and white illustrations are ideally suited to this world of contrasts, with a flick of the pen he can lend a wry humour to any situation or convey the sobering reality of a life and death situation. I thoroughly enjoyed this book on the first read through, I'm getting more out of it on the second and I hope you will appreciate it too.