War in Pieces

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Petar Duric

The United States has a war canon. That’s a pretty uncontroversial statement. We can even populate this canon in a trivial way by just listing off war movies. American Sniper. Eye in the Sky. Zero Dark Thirty. The Green Zone. Saving Private Ryan. And the list goes on, with movies as well as written work from Tom Clancy to James Fenimore Cooper.

But there is not a whole lot of room in that canon for movies that make the audience really uncomfortable with war. Eye in the Sky is a major exception, but even that movie depicts war as the moral backdrop against which brave soldiers prove their dedication by making the difficult, but necessary decision to risk murdering a child. You know, to keep us safe
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Regardless, these movies, and many more, all depict war as the backdrop against which mere mortals become heroes. Almost always, they do this by demonstrating their masculine willingness to kill civilians (American Sniper, Eye in the Sky), or by demonstrating their masculine willingness to torture (Zero Dark Thirty). The Green Zone presents an exception in that Matt Damon spends the film invalidating the justification for going to war in Iraq. But it is still a story about a white guy demonstrating his heroism with the Middle East as the backdrop for his journey.

The American war canon is, therefore, largely designed to whet the audience’s appetite for war, as a system and an action. So what if you were to construct a war canon that dulled the audience’s war appetite, a war canon antithetical to the one we are saddled with now? Setting aside the fact that such war canons already exist in other nations, where would we start if we wanted to construct a new one?

I argue that the manga/anime (I discuss the anime) Attack on Titan, the comic Saga, and the webcomic Gone with the Blastwave form a solid base from which to start. Of the three, Attack on Titan is the most comprehensive and forcefully crafted, but all three depict war as a hellish landscape (metaphorically and literally) from which you escape only if you are lucky, whether you are a civilian or a combatant.
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The anime, Attack on Titan, provides an excellent position from which to start, as it directly confronts the subjects of trauma and class during wartime, and presents a direct challenge to the American notion of heroism in war. When substantiated by, and viewed in tandem with, Saga and Gone with the Blastwave, Attack on Titan forms the solid base for a new war canon that acknowledges war as a hellish landscape from which combatants and civilians alike escape only of they are lucky.

The most stark and obvious of the three is Gone with the Blastwave, which depicts a handful of soldiers navigating their way through a city that is so drenched in radioactive fallout that the soldiers only survive because they wear full-body protective gear and gas masks that obscure any identifying features. The only way to tell them apart as they traverse a gray, rubble-covered, otherwise featureless landscape is by tiny emblems on their helmets. In this way, the environment literally created and mirrored by war itself dehumanizes those involved, stripping them of their identities and forcing them to some disgusting lows to survive.

GWTB doesn’t even ennoble this struggle for survival with a reason for the war’s perpetuation. The faceless soldiers fight a meaningless conflict against equally faceless enemies, themselves having no ideology or allegiance accept to fight and to escape. Saga achieves the same fatalistic effect by relegating the origins of a galaxy-encompassing conflict to long-lost historical memory. The war goes on because those people over there shot me, so fuck them.

In this way, Saga’s depiction is equally bleak, despite its forcefully colorful artwork. The rationale for the persistence of this galaxy-spanning war is that it has always happened. An interplanetary system of violence naturally reproduces itself through hatred and trauma, and so the only response the average citizen can muster to the question, “Why do we fight?” is, “To win the war,” followed by a fatalistic shrug, “Meh…works for me.”

The conflict rages on, because fuck the enemy.

Of course, the central conceit at the heart of Saga is that two new parents from opposite sides of the conflict fall in love, and resolve to raise their child away from the war. The panel above represents the war as a literal barrier to parenthood, blocking the nascent parents’ path to safety, where they can raise their child. The whole thrust of the series is these parents, Alana and Marko, trying to escape the war, literally and figuratively, for the sake of their child. When they eventually find a safe place to settle down, away from combat, they are then faced with the demons they brought back with them. Alana is driven to narcotics in order to endure her trauma and the soul-crushing nature of the work she takes to make a living. Marko is haunted by the specter of his own history of violence, on and off the battlefield. In both cases, the parents are chased from the battlefield by demons that repeatedly threaten to endanger their family, as bodies and as a community. As their favorite author, Oswald Heist, notes in a kind and sagely voice, “In the end, nobody really escapes this thing.”

This truism makes Attack on Titan especially tragic, as the main character, Eren Jaeger, hinges his entire motivation on his desire for freedom. Eren lives in a society that is hemmed in by huge, 50-meter walls, which serve to protect the last vestiges of humanity from the Titans, bloodthirsty, man-eating giants. The Titans devour and crush humans, creating a literal embodiment for the way in which war figuratively devours and crushes humans. Eren becomes a soldier in order to slaughter the Titans and bring an end to the fear and captivity of living behind walls. He learns to use “omni-directional mobility gear,” designed with a grappling hook-and-gas power mechanism to allow humans to swing around vertical environments like Spiderman, enabling them to fight the Titans with some success. By any measure, these soldiers learn to move and fight in ways that are nigh superhuman. In the lead-up to Eren Jaeger’s first battle with the Titans, he and his fellow cadets talk trash to each other and boast about how they will beat the Titans back with ease. The bravado is so intoxicating that it is a genuine shock when Eren and his fellow cadets are almost immediately decimated by the Titans, eaten alive in a matter of minutes.

This turns out to be merely the beginning of the carnival funhouse of horrors that is the Battle of Trost District. A young woman tries to revive her clearly deceased sweetheart in the middle of an empty street. A central character wears a look of visceral shock as he stumbles around the city after watching his friends get eaten alive. A group of cadets cowers inside a building as the Titans roam outside, staring into the windows, while one calmly cleans a rifle and blows out the back of his head in front of them. And amidst all of this, vital officers and support personnel all lose the will to fight, leaving the majority of the cadets out in the cold against their monstrous adversaries. Where the arc starts with vibrant colors and blue skies, the main body of the arc paints the scenery in dull, muted grays, as the once cocky and macho cadets wear looks of fatalistic resignation. In short, this is not an environment that breeds heroes. It devours them whole.

So when one of the cadets, Jean Kirschtein, takes the lead, he makes ruthless decisions that prioritize the survival of the majority over heroism and nobility. As he watches a comrade get caught and eaten by Titans, he freezes in place, and when two more of his comrades heroically enter the fray to save the very same comrade, they get caught too. Jean can do nothing but watch his friends get devoured as he grows roots in a high place away from the Titans’ reach. That is, until he takes command and orders the remaining cadets to use the Titan feeding frenzy as a distraction in order to grapple past them to safety.

What follows is a high-octane, pell-mell sprint to safety through a mass of Titans that continue to swat and chomp Jean’s comrades, and he uses every death as an added distraction to aid his own flight and the flight of his remaining friends. Upon landing in a safe place, he kneels in shock and asks himself, “How many friend’s deaths did I use?” We never get an answer, but we do witness a later conversation between Jean and Marco Bodt, a talented and friendly comrade, who praises Jean’s ruthless decision. When Jean castigates himself for weakness, Marco says that he thinks the fact that Jean is not strong helps him appreciate how the weak feel in battle. Marco goes on to say that it is this “weakness” which led Jean to a decision that kept Marco, and many others, alive. The sweet, sensible, and affable Marco tells Jean that his outwardly ruthless and cowardly decision was actually the compassionate and brave response needed to save his friends.

But the escape that Jean engineered is only temporary and superficial. When the battle ends and the cadets are no longer in danger of outright death, they have to deal with the trauma of combat. A particularly illustrative scene shows Jean aiding in the triage and cleanup after the battle, and finding Marco’s body, cleaved in half as if by a giant maw, laid down in an isolated corner of the battlefield. Jean is visibly shaken and worn by the realization that the friend who praised his leadership and character suffered a lonely death at the hands of a monster, with no friends to aid him, or even witness his demise. It is a brutal and blunt reminder of the lingering effects of war.

However, the war lingers much further beyond the battlefield than the triage tent. Attack on Titan extensively demonstrates the effect the war against the Titans has on society, namely the class stratification aided and abetted by the military hierarchy. One scene has a member of the landed gentry, living near the center of human territory, far away from the danger of the Titans, attempting to brow-beat a high-ranking commander, Dot Pixys, into abandoning the perimeter towns to the Titans, instead pulling his forces back to protect the noble’s lands. While this effort fails, the landed gentry, the clergy, and the merchant class nonetheless form a powerful block that clearly benefits from a stratified society, with wealth clustering in the center of human territory, and the poor scattered about the fringes. This structure is aided by the military, which depends heavily on the patronage of the merchant class for its supplies and food. Moreover, military politics threaten to squander multiple strategic opportunities to fight back against the Titans, with the military police serving the interests of the merchants and the nobility by suggesting conservative strategies, which prioritize the wealth of that class. In the midst of all this, the military is the only way for the poor to access a comfortable life in the interior, with upward mobility by other means relegated to the dustbin of utopianism.

Guess where all the rich people live.

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples depict essentially the same scenario in Saga, except it is less symbolic and more concrete. Vaughan’s narrator, Hazel, goes on a lengthy aside to discuss the society in which her mother grew up, saying about military recruits, “Many of those who answered this call [for military service] did so out of a genuine sense of duty. Others were merely looking for adventure. Some were trying to escape a bad situation. Almost all of them were poor as shit.” When a poor man named Dengo kidnaps a royal heir of the Robot Kingdom, an ally of one of the warring sides, an intelligence operative tells the Prince that is the heir’s father, “If you’re lucky, he’s hiding. If you’re not, he’s trying to start a revolution. And trust me, that’s the last thing you poor bastards want. The whole point of having enemies abroad is getting to ignore the ones back home.” In these cases, and in Attack on Titan, constant warfare plays cover for class stratification, and the military serves to weaponize the poor against a foreign enemy in the interests of the political class and the wealthy.

Which brings us back to the original point of this piece, that being why these three works could form a fruitful basis for a new American war canon (in spite of the fact that two of the three works were not originally made by Americans). Saga and Attack on Titan both depict societies dominated and consumed by warfare, and GWTB mirrors this by crafting war into a literal, toxic environment against which the protagonists set themselves. In all three cases, the protagonists’ main concern and goal is survival, in the short and long term, actions can be judged as heroic only against that goal. In other words, all three works depict their protagonists struggling concretely and in the abstract against a totalizing militaristic system that presents itself as the main obstacle to their own safety and happiness. As Eren notes in a conversation with Dot Pixys, humankind has a common enemy in the Titans, and yet they still squabble over property and class. Ozymandias’ alien tentacle monster has descended from the sky, and humankind has decided to carry on as usual.

In all three works, participation in the war machine is a Pyrrhic venture at best, and a Sisyphean one at worst. In all three, the protagonists struggle against the totalizing militaristic system in which they live, as much as they do against, “the enemy”. Most importantly, in stark opposition to the predominant American war canon, all three aggressively ask the question, “Why do we fight?” and force the audience to acknowledge the unsettling, blindingly obvious answer, “I don’t know.”

A True War Story Does Have a Moral

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Michael Carson

“A true war story is never moral,” says Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried. “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, “ he continues, “then you have been made a victim of a very old and terrible lie.” A nice idea. I thought of it after finishing Ben Fountain’s novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Certainly I did not feel uplifted in the sense that I wanted to go and fight a war. But the story quite clearly had a moral, even if I couldn’t quite put the moral into words. Would this book be proscribed according to O’Brien’s ideal? Would O’Brien’s own book? Were they in fact true war stories or did fiction circumvent this requirement? For some time now, Americans have been caught in a frustratingly circular conversation about war movies and war literature (see here and here for examples of those using O’Brien to break the impasse). The debate is not so much pro-war versus anti-war, but the authentic versus the non-authentic, with each side accusing each other of the same lack of authenticity. I blame Tim O’Brien. A true war story is always moral. Encouraging young writers, young soldiers and young civilians to believe such amoral stories exist or might be someday written is a dangerous American tradition that we would be well advised to stop.

Though nominally a work of fiction, The Things They Carried obsesses over the idea of a true war story. One chapter – appropriately titled “How to Tell a True War Story” – goes so far as to layer successive, often contradictory, arguments as to what makes a war story true. At one point, the reader is told that in a true war story “it is difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” At another, the reader discovers a true war story is actually not even about war, but about “sunlight” and “the special way the dawn spreads out on a river.” During a particularly desperate moment, the narrator asserts with vague spirituality, “a true story makes the stomach believe.” Throughout the chapter, no definitive positive verdict is rendered. O’Brien instead turns to negative affirmations like an apophatic theologian defining God. Thus described, a true war story “does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior.” In other words, “if a war story seems moral, do not believe it.” It is O’Brien’s contention that an author or director who chooses to focus on camaraderie among US troops or the enemy’s sadism actually idealizes war. A story’s moral uplift, however subtle, excuses mistakes made along the way and justifies the entire war effort. Hence O’Brien’s warning to would-be-war-story readers and watchers: be wary of making sense of war’s nonsense lest you end up “the victim of an old and terrible lie” (and in Vietnam or Iraq or where have you).

But there’s a problem. O’Brien’s own book has a moral. If considered as a whole, The Things They Carried must be read as a condemnation of the Vietnam War, himself for fighting in the war, and war in general. The book’s uplift is quite clear in this respect even through the fog of fractured narrative and unreliable narrators. This is why people are so drawn to the novel – it encourages readers into empathy and introspection; it makes them think about war and its consequences. Likewise, movies to emerge from O’Brien’s war, movies one suspects O’Brien would agree with (Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now) quite obviously have a moral as well– mainly, the Vietnam War was a stupid and horrible war and we should think long and hard about what war does to young men before starting another. I am not old enough to vouch for how they were received at the time of release, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that they were interpreted as movies with a message. Yet in the intervening years something has changed. They have been turned into War Art, divorced from their original motivation, their original justification, and, unbelievably, have been used to justify exactly what they sought to condemn. This is possible, I believe, because Americans sincerely imagine true war stories to be without morals, an experience rather than a re-presentation, which can be enjoyed or appreciated rather than confronted.

Just because war is about as moral as two pit bulls tearing out each other’s throats, we should not assume stories written about war will lack morality as well. Unless the director/writer happens to be a computer or camera, the very act of re-presentation requires an argument on the part of the writer/director. Yet if one believes a true story is never moral – that it mirrors the violence it purports to represent – then one can conveniently ignore uncomfortable intellectual arguments made by the writer/director or any intellectual investment whatsoever. A liberal can enjoy Lone Survivor and a conservative can appreciate Platoon. This would be a fine moment of open dialogue if any attempt were made by either party to engage with the moral and intellectual arguments in these movies. Sadly, this is not the case. The viewers shut down that part of the brain and simply enjoy being party to pure violence for several hours. They use the fiction of the amoral war story to fantasize about what they would to in a world without morals. They pretend at broadmindedness while uncomprehendingly confirming their own desultory morality.

This disconnect extends to the soldiers as well as civilians. Even before 9/11, the US military consisted (and still consists) of culturally conversant generation Xers and Yers. We are not talking about Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming here. There is no need to keep them down on the farm as the Internet and television already took them off the farm. They knew of Kubrick, Stone and Coppola before they even volunteered. Thus, the same soldiers can schizophrenically reference Full Metal Jacket and then cry like a baby at the end of the Notebook (which is the point of Kubrick’s “Mickey Mouse Club” ending I think). They can laugh hysterically at Team America and then order their soldiers to do exactly what the movie mocked without feeling the least sense of contradiction. Soldiers can do this because they truly believe a war story – like war itself – has no inherent moral so they can use these movies and literature as they see fit. Soldiers can ignore the moral messages in these movies – indeed celebrate movies with what they might consider offensive moral values – by telling themselves and being told by others the movies don’t really have a moral to relate.

Toward the end of In Pharaoh’s Army, Tobias Wolff, a Vietnam veteran like O’Brien, has a conversation extraordinarily similar to that of O’Brien’s in The Things They Carried. Wolff cannot quite pin down the best way to tell a story about the role he played in the destruction of a Vietnamese village. Wolff feels terribly sorry for what he did, but even as he tells the reader about his sorrow, he pauses to ask: “isn’t it just like an American boy, to want to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart?” Wolff is not talking about what he did anymore – if he ever was – but how he can relate to the reader what he did without being insufferably moralistic about it. The very act of apologizing becomes an act of conquest and, therefore, justification – look how deeply sorry the American soldier feels about what he did! How uniquely and inspirationally American this introspection is! Yet Wolff does not skirt this very real intellectual and moral dilemma – arguably the heart of the war-story genre – by an appeal to the idea of an “amoral” war story. To do so would divorce war and those who fought in it from any larger context of morality. War, in this reading, just happens, like a miracle or spontaneous combustion; it saves the soldiers and those who sent the soldiers to war – civilians, politicians and generals – from thinking about why they tell these stories and who can’t tell these stories, those benighted souls in Vietnam or Iraq who don’t have the capacity or genius to admire their own sorrow at being immoral. These stories allow us to learn much about ourselves all the while thinking not at all about changing who we are.

So the next time you go and see Lone Survivor or read Yellow Birds, don’t ask yourself if the movie or book has successfully captured war’s authenticity. Do not get hung up debating whether or not the movie’s or book’s moral overwhelms its accurate representation of war’s horrors. Do not ask if it does or does not have a moral. Don’t be stupid. Of course it does. Ask yourself instead what the moral is and if you agree with it. Ask yourself in which way you have been uplifted and if you want to go in that direction and – if you don’t – why or why not? Otherwise, you will walk away believing war to be the one place where morality does not matter, when war – and questions of war’s justification, prosecution and remembrance – should be the one place where morality matters most.
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Michael Carson is an ex-soldier who studied history and now writes fiction on the Gulf Coast. He regularly contributes to and helps edit the Wrath Bearing Tree along with a philosopher and a journalist.

Old Icons, New Context

Posted on October 9, 2013 by RM Rhodes

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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As an avowed post-modernist, I have been known to proclaim that “context is everything” on more than one occasion. And because context is everything, one of my favorite things in the world is when a creator takes a property and recontextualizes part of it. Done properly, this can provide an entirely different viewpoint on something that I thought I knew and understood.

For example: Hipster Hitler by James Carr and Archana Kumar. The high concept is pretty straightforward; in his character bio, the authors write “Failed artist, vegetarian, animal rights activist, asshole – it all just fits.” The concept was originally presented as a webcomic and was subsequently published in book form by Feral House.

(And yes, Hitler was a real person, not a fictional character. However, it could be argued that he has become a larger-than-life caricature of a villain since his death. This is certainly the viewpoint that the comic is written from.)

In Hipster Hitler, the recontextualized Hitler is presented alongside his generals and advisors, who are still in their original context. As you would expect, the interaction between generals and a hipster who happens to be their leader provides the majority of the comic energy in the series. The only other recontextualized character in the series is Joseph Stalin, who is presented as Broseph Stalin, complete with red Solo cups and a popped collar.

What makes the series interesting to me is that a detailed familiarity with both contexts – World War 2 and contemporary hipsters – is required to really understand all of the humor. The best thing about the series are Hitler’s t-shirts, white with a pithy saying. One of the more obscure ones reads “Artschule Macht Frei.” To get the joke, you have to know that Hitler didn’t get into art school and that the phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work sets you free) was over the gates to Auschwitz – clever, but in poor taste. The joke in another strip turns on the knowledge that Hugo Boss designed the uniforms of the Wehrmacht.

Drawing the parallel between Hitler and hipsters didn’t take a lot of work, but writing an entire book of jokes about the juxtaposition without being too overtly offensive did. To a certain extent, anything that humanizes Hitler has the potential to be offensive just by its very nature. Here, though, the comparison doesn’t cast Hitler or hipsters in a favorable light. And that’s why I think it works.

Mind you, it doesn’t say anything profound about the human condition, World War 2, the Third Reich, Hitler or hipsters. But then again, it’s not trying to. As far as I’m concerned, the whole thing is just a vehicle for some really entertaining t-shirts – “Three Reichs and You’re Out,” “Under Prussia,” “Ardennes State,” “I Control the French Press.”

For more profound insights into the human condition I look to American Captain by Robyn. Presented entirely on a dedicated Tumblr, the premise of American Captain is that Captain America (from the movies) is dealing with the culture shock of waking up 40 years later by producing a series of autobiographical comics.

The two contexts are fairly obvious – the universe of the Marvel superhero movies and the world of autobiographical comics, which we get mostly through the art style. There’s a third, less obvious context, however – fandom. The entire point of the series comes directly from the fandom impulse to interrogate the inner lives of characters as revealed in settings and scenarios that are other than the canonical appearances. This comes through in the description of the premise, at the point where I had to specify which Captain America was being presented.

Understanding American Captain does not require nearly as much contextual information as Hipster Hitler does, but it helps if you’ve at least seen The Avengers. Still, a diary comic written by a fictional superhero is a concept that begs to be at least partially unpacked.

In addition to the understanding that Steve Rogers has an artistic background and would probably gravitate to autobiographical comics as a form of self expression (which has a weird mirror in the canonical comic series in the 1980s, when Mark Gruenwald had Steve Rogers penciling the Captain America comics), the series explores the fish-out-of-water experience of a time traveler from the past. In the comic book, this is old news and Steve Rogers has long since acclimated to the present. But in the movie universe, this is still relatively new information, ripe for exploration.

A few strips capture quiet one-on-one moments among the team and there is an entire series of strips following Pepper Potts, who has taken it upon herself to educate our narrator about recent art history. One of the more profound sequences follows Steve Rogers and his undiagnosed PTSD and the ways he deals with the revelation that he’s not as mentally together as he’d like to believe.

The strength of the strip is in the vulnerability that Rogers reveals in his diary comics. Presumably, nobody is reading them but him. However, we know that isn’t the case because we, the readers, are reading them. By doing so, we get a direct insight into his most personal thoughts and interactions in a format that is utterly private (or so the conceit goes).

The effect is unsettling and deliberately so. A man who wakes up decades after everyone he knows has died is not going to have an easy time adjusting to the modern world. The biggest issues will be the smallest things. In a universe that seems to be focused on blowing stuff up real good, being able to slow down and appreciate the details is a breath of fresh air.

Whereas Hipster Hitler is primarily concerned with from pointing out that certain entitled personality types have been around for much longer than we’d like to believe, American Captain is more subtle and nuanced. Considering that the former is a comedy and the latter is focused on the quiet desperation of Steve Rogers, this makes sense. However, both work because someone noticed that there is more than one way to look at the characters.

By picking the characters up from their original context and shaking off the detritus that has accumulated over time, the original foundation of what makes the characters who they are is revealed. Hitler is a hipster. Steve Rogers is an artist. Context is everything.

Thunderjet! Revisited!

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

**All text from The Korean War: A History (2010) by Bruce Cumings**

Scans taken from Frontline Combat #8 by Harvey Kurtzman and Alex Toth. A story based on fact….

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Curtis Le May …said that he had wanted to burn down North Korea’s big cities at the inception of the war, but the Pentagon refused—“it’s too horrible.” So over a period of three years, he went on, “We burned down every [sic] town in North Korea and South Korea too, …Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening—a lot of people can’t stomach it.”

General Ridgeway, who at times deplored the free-fire zones he saw, nonetheless wanted bigger and better napalm bombs…in early 1951, thus to “wipe out all life in tactical locality and save the lives of our soldiers.”

The Pujon river dam was designed to hold 670 million cubic meters of water, and had a pressure gradient of 999 meters…According to the official U.S.Air Force history, when fifty-nine F-84 Thunderjets breached the high containing wall of Toksan on May 13 1953, the onrushing flood destroyed six miles of railway, five bridges, two miles of highway, and five square miles of rice paddies…After the war, it took 200,000 man-days of labor to reconstruct the reservoir.

One day Pfc. James Ransome, Jr.’s unit suffered a “friendly” hit of this wonder weapon: his men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them, as their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back “like fried potato chips.”

…Operation Hudson Harbor…part of a large project involving “overt exploitation in Korea by the Department of Defense and covert exploitation by the Central Intelligence Agency of the possible use of novel weapons.” This project sought to establish the capability to use atomic weapons on the battlefield…lone B-29 bombers were lifted from Okinawa…and sent over North Korea on simulated atomic bombing runs, dropping “dummy” A-bombs or heavy TNT bombs.

After his release from North Korean custody Gen. William F. Dean wrote that “the town of Huichon amazed me. The city I’d seen before-two storied buildings, a prominent main street-wasn’t there any more.” He encountered the “unoccupied shells” of town after town, and villages where rubble or or “snowy open space” were all that remained.

Meray had arrived in August 1951 and witnessed “a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital,” Pyongyang. There were simply “no more cities in North Korea.”…A British reporter found communities where nothing was left but “a low, wide mound of violet ashes.”

…at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North’s twenty-two major cities were obliterated.

…the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do.

EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Ng Suat Tong

Part 1 here.

(Concerning Harvey Kurztman’s EC War Comics)

A Reply to R. Fiore reprinted from The Comics Journal #253 (2003) Blood and Thunder Section. The reply is preceded by scans of Fiore’s response to my initial article. These scans are reproduced with Fiore’s permission.

I will respond to R Fiore’s first few statements by reproducing an edited version of my response from the TCJ message board:

I don’t think my statements in the essay deviate substantially from Fiore’s comments above. I single out a number of stories from MAD #1-20 for praise including a Krigstein story and follow this up by citing three Johnny Craig stories which manage to rise above the dross. However, whatever Bradbury’s own views on the subject matter, I still prefer most of Bradbury’s original prose to the adaptations. As stated in the essay, I do not have much argument against a select few of the early MAD stories being chosen the highest forms of comedy as yet produced in comics. It is the wholesale embrace of the early MAD issues that I’m arguing against

The films and books mentioned in the essay were chosen for easy recognition and their generally accepted levels of quality. I have no difficulty in naming many other modern books of lesser renown (and reputation) which far surpass the Kurtzman war stories in ability and passion: Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, Hikaru Okuizumi’s The Stones Cry Out etc. Further, I will go on record as saying that I find Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches superior to the best of the EC war stories.

As Fiore states in his letter, the orthodoxy within the Western comics sphere is that the Kurtzman comics are the best war comics ever made. All these meandering discussions will do not one bit to change this fact. Kurtzman certainly is one of the standards as far as war comics are concerned but he is an unacceptably low standard by which to gauge the genre in my view.

What logic is there in rating the EC War Stories over Palestine or Safe Area Gorazde except some misplaced sympathy for the backward aesthetic and cultural values of comics of a certain vintage? It should not be our concern if the practitioners of a certain period in comics did not have the imaginations or ambition to think beyond the accepted boundaries of their chosen livelihood. There were numerous cultural precedents for superior, honest work on war before that period.

The difference between the majority of the EC War stories and modern war comics is that, in comparison to the great works of war literature (and film), the latter are recognizably possessed of the same purpose and qualities we expect of the finest art. Neither of these works by Sacco may be on equal footing with Catch-22 but both possess that element of artistic ambition and maturity which has characterized many worthy artistic endeavors over the centuries. Kurtzman’s “Big ‘If’” and “Corpse on the Imjin” manage to engage the reader at that level but neither have stood the test of time in terms of their emotional complexity or their meditations on reality and truth.

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R. Fiore’s letter demonstrates that he is either bereft of comprehension skills or a pathological liar. His willful misrepresentation of his opponent’s views both here as well as on the TCJ message board (placing words in their mouths as it were) indicate a steep decline into critical indolence.

Fiore tries to mislead his readers by suggesting that I am of the opinion that “Kurtzman and the EC artists should not be considered superior cartoonists to Joe Sacco just because they drew comics better.” Nowhere in the article do I even suggest this. Rather my dispute with many of the EC artists is that drawing well (and this is certainly not beyond dispute) is just about all they did with any level of accomplishment. Fiore may be anxious to dump content, narrative and dialogue into a bottomless pit reeking of nostalgia but I certainly am not.

It is telling that Fiore considers my description of the EC war line as children’s comics a form of condescension. In so doing, he totally ignores my statement that immediately follows this labeling in which I state, “I do not say this in a derogatory way, but to set out discussion of these comics within the proper context.” My use of this limitation was, therefore, not meant so much as an insult (though it would certainly be perceived as such by an EC fan who has always considered the EC line as pretty “grown-up”) but as a tool for judging them fairly within an appropriate framework.

Fiore, it would appear, has a latent disregard for children’s books despite his protestations to the contrary. In my view, comics crafted for children and comics crafted for adults must be judged using different criteria. The exact nature of these criteria is not within the scope of this reply, suffice to say that when it comes to children’s literature, a proper account must be taken of their accessibility (both emotionally and intellectually) and limitations. A work that does not meet or work within these criteria must be deemed bad children’s art. A comic prepared for an adult will therefore often fail miserably as art for children. It is precisely within the parameters of children’s literature that a few of Kurtzman’s war stories can be deemed of some merit.

As for my use of the word “juvenile”, readers will find that only once in the essay do I use this word and this is at the beginning of the essay when I am assessing the output of EC as a whole. When I label them “juvenile”, I mean that they were silly and immature. While it may come as a surprise to Fiore, I doubt that looks of stupefaction will greet my suggestion that there exist strange things known as “mature” children’s books. These are books that are considered and fully developed, and which speak to children in ways that are sometimes deemed inappropriate by an overprotective society. This is the reason why I quote Walter Benjamin in my essay as saying, “Children want adults to give them clear, comprehensible, but not childlike books. Least of all do they want what adults think of as childlike…” Benjamin was writing in an era of different “moral” standards but his words retain their significance even in this day and age of ever shifting moral boundaries. The problem is that Kurtzman failed so often even within these parameters, namely what is useful and relevant for the minds of 14 year olds.

In yet another deft act of conjuring, Fiore suggests that I have denied Kurtzman the “title of artist”. This is pure hysterical bluster. The reality is that my criticisms of EC have never centered around Kurtzman’s status as just that but rather the exact quality of the art works he produced. Truly, it is a sorry day when the esteemed critic’s rhetorical skills are coupled with an endless stream of lies.

Fiore’s next deception is to accuse me of failing to articulate that “quality” which is missing from the Kurtzman’s output. Yet even the most slothful reader need only turn to the “War Comics” section of my essay to see that I have provided quite a few details concerning my objections to EC. Fiore, in his geriatrically-imbued arrogance, ignores my points. Within the best of my capabilities, therefore, I will reiterate and expand on what is lacking in Kurtzman’s war stories and why I consider some of these inferior to Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches.

In the essay, I provide a short list enumerating the deficiencies which pepper the EC War line. (It is not a definitive listing but it will serve as a skeleton upon which to base further discussion):

(1) Jingosim (“Contact!”; which Kurtzman himself admits was “pretty dreadful stuff”)

“Contact” is a story about a surprise attack by the Chinese on an American patrol. In the course of the story, we see the American soldiers mowing down the communists with great efficiency after an initial shot by those sneaky communists leaves the lieutenant in charge of the patrol quite dead. Some of this is done with great flair as when the Sergeant opens fire in a darkened tunnel creating momentary lighting effects in otherwise darkened panels. Amidst the chaos, a young soldier who is saved by his superior asks in wide-eyed fashion, “What’s the good sergeant? There are hundreds of them…and there are just two of us!…How can we ever hope to win against so many Chinese? There are ten of them to every one of us!” The sergeant replies, “I’ll show you how we’ll win, Weems! Look up there!” He points up to a T6 observation plane. Cut to a command position where a flight of F-86s and a column of tanks are called in. They proceed to bomb the living daylights out of the enemy. The Chinese are annihilated. Without a trace of irony, Kurtzman has his sergeant exclaim, “Americans aren’t supermen, Weems! An American is a man just like an Asiatic is a man! But America is a way of life! We can produce! We can turn out bullets by the billions for war, and we can turn out automobiles and washing machines for peace! Get it, Weems? As long as we believe in good we can’t go wrong!”

End summary. Now you would think that a story of this flavor would be a prima facie case of pretty abominable propaganda but it would seem that Fiore is quite happy to swallow this kind of bullshit whole.

(2) Dramatic draftsmanship and intelligent structure illustrating inconsequential content (“Thunder Jet”, “F-86 Sabre Jet!”)

Both of these well known stories are beautifully illustrated with planes delineated in clean and precise Toth-ian geometric minimalism. “Thunder Jet” purports to provide the reader with a ride along with the pilot of a Thunder Jet through ‘Mig Alley’. It seeks to communicate the concerns of said pilot with regards a perceived technological and skill gap. In the story, the Thunder Jet patrol spots an enemy train convoy and bombs and disables it. They meet some Chinese Migs, beat the shit out of them because they’re “being flown by kids…no formation, no nothing! They come up, every day, like a class room!” The patrol returns to base and you (the pilot, as the story is partly told in the first person) emerge from the plane as the narrator solemnly declares, “And as you finger the torn aluminum, you think of the 20mm cannon the Migs have! And then you think how the Migs go faster than you, and you think how the Migs outnumber you. And you think of that classroom in the sky! And then you think…We’d better do something, soon…pretty gol-darned soon!”

While this story displays a high level of achievement artistically, its narration flounders in insipid hard-boiled mannerisms which would not look out of place in a modern day superhero book. The story is devoid of any recognizable human emotions be they fear, remorse or courage. Maybe there’s a whiff of arrogance but not much else. Nothing beyond a plain stating of the facts—in other words, it’s a technical manual empty of human interest. If the work is assessed as a tale of adventure, the reader will search in vain for evidence of heroism or any trace of visceral excitement. It is a pleasure to look at and that is all.

(3) Exquisitely dignified corpses (“The Caves!” from the Iwo Jima issue)

“The Caves” is an interesting story because its intent may seem fair minded and noble. The story starts with some portentous dialogue: “…and amongst the boulders and ravines, lay the sinister constructions formed by the hand of man…The Caves!”. The story concerns a Japanese foot solider who entertains treasonous thoughts about betraying his emperor. In essence, his crime is that of planning to stay alive while others choose death over the dishonor of surrender. Among other things, the story attempts to relate the not unheard of conflict between Japanese foot soldiers and the high minded ideals derived from bushido demonstrated by the officer class. It ends in a sort of positive light when the Japanese foot solider is demonstrated to have regained some of his honor within his own fixed parameters of reference (he kills himself in a Kamikaze-style charge).

In this story, Kurtzman shows some willingness to extend a degree of humanity to the enemy, something he was a tad more reluctant to do in the case of the danger posed by North Koreans and Chinese in the more contemporary Korean War. The difference is the distance provided by the passage of a few years.

With all these factors going for it, one might honestly ask why this story remains so utterly unconvincing. Why does the reader remain thoroughly unmoved by the condition of the Japanese protagonist? For one, there is no context for his betrayal of his culture’s values. We are not made to understand or perceive the awe with which Japanese infantry men often looked upon their officers or the reasons for their almost unquestioning obedience. The Japanese officer might just as well be an insane Allied officer as far as the story is concerned. We don’t understand the depth of his betrayal or cowardice and we therefore do not care for his predicament. Empty of both emotional connection and cultural information, it reads like a trite narration of a war time snippet. Kurtzman had no understanding of the Japanese he was portraying and failed in this nobly intentioned depiction of the enemy.

While “The Caves!” fails quite completely in its understanding of the “enemy”, I also chose this story because of its conspicuous falsity in pictorial representation. I’m not only talking about the failure in mere technical details like the overly enclosed space of the cave which makes the infantry man’s survival of several grenade blasts next to impossible but also the failure to represent the true horror of men throwing themselves into the arms of the enemy and hence death, and the truly awful consequences of a close quarters grenade blast. These shortcomings have a direct bearing on the effectiveness of the story. With death made so eminently easy on the eyes, there seems no reason for the infantry man’s cowardice. Where is the courage inherent in such a sacrifice? Why the vacillation? If we do not feel his dread, we do not journey with him through his resultant emotional turmoil.

(4) The poverty of the enemies’ beliefs and the failure of their resolve (“Dying City!”)

(5) Sanctimonious depictions of the plight of good, honest, salt of the earth Koreans (Southern presumably; in “Rubble!”)

For reasons of space, I will allow interested readers the pleasure of exploring the catalogue of half and one-sided “truths” depicted in the above two stories.

(6) Retribution for cowards (“Bouncing Bertha”), traitors (“Prisoner of War!”) and grinning, nefarious enemies (“Air Burst”).

In the opening sequence of “Bouncing Bertha”, a bug struggling on the surface of a pond is compared with man — “…and yet, that little bug has enough sense to keep struggling…to keep fighting and to have hope till the very end. Even though he doesn’t know how he’ll save himself! It’s just like people!”. In the story proper, a tank crew meets with an accident, are deprived of their tank and find themselves behind enemy lines during the Korean War. While most of them decide to stand and fight, one of their number, PFC Allen, deserts and decides to surrender to the enemy. The heroic crew is finally saved by an air strike and an airlift via helicopter while the craven coward (and he is certainly drawn, somewhat predictably, with villainous, slovenly features) is left to the mercy of the angry Chinese.

What we have here is a crude extension of the black and white values propagated by the EC Horror, Crime, and SF titles where every villain gets their just desserts and where noble acts are rewarded. Fiore says that I have somehow misread Kurtzman’s purpose here. He suggests that I have inserted the false theme of cowardice where the story’s actual focus is that of the concept of “struggle”. But Fiore’s faculties are blinded by his passion for Kurtzman. His idol’s deployment of the word “struggle” is inextricably linked with the concepts of loyalty and courage. Fiore wants us to believe that Kurtzman was focusing on something amoral and existential but the denouement of the story suggests otherwise. Kurtzman is really only interested in a particular form of struggle—the “good” type—one which is plainly linked with faithfulness and bravery.

If Kurtzman had meant only to illuminate the concept of man’s “struggle”, he would have chosen a dramatic situation which was less clearly black and white. Instead of muddying the waters, he would have chosen to have the traitorous Allen survive rather than his more loyal comrades. For Allen also “struggles” in his own way, he clearly wants to live and will do anything to survive his situation. He chooses the rather risky avenue of surrendering to a somewhat unpredictable enemy and is willing to buck the trend of stalwart courage demanded by society. His death can only be seen as the result of a lack of bravery. Allen only fails to “struggle” for his country and his fellow soldiers. His crime—a deplorable brand of cowardice in the eyes of his fellow soldiers.

In “Prisoner of War!”, a group of American soldiers is taken captive by the North Koreans. The not too subtly named Benedict—who is seen to have a vile, insane look on page 2 of the story—cozies up with his North Korean guard and even helps him track down his comrades when three of the prisoners try to escape. The three, however, do manage to evade capture and, while recuperating behind their own lines, hear a retrospective account of how Benedict is killed by his North Korean captor during a summary execution of American prisoners.

Yet again, this story represents a return to the retribution ethos of the horror, science and crime titles. On this occasion, it is partially “softened” by the fact that the rest of Benedict’s non-traitorous comrades also die in the same ignominious way. The traitor’s end is, however, more focused and wretched because he is killed by the very person he was sucking up to. He gets his just desserts for being a turncoat (it never pays to be a turncoat in EC-land). Like many of the other EC stories, this is a conception of humanity and reality that would not look out of place in a Silver Age superhero comic.

“Prisoner of War!” is also firmly locked in a 50s time warp both politically and culturally. The communists, as in many of the other EC stories, are seen only as inhuman beasts; distorted and corrupted in the best tradition of political propaganda. While it is undoubtedly true that the North Koreans were guilty of committing numerous acts of democide, we of course hear nothing of the equally wonderful massacres by the squeaky clean South Koreans and American GIs. Clearly such insights and journalistic integrity were beyond Kurtzman (and many others of that time) but this propensity to swallow the party ethos hook, line and sinker must suggest that the work is bereft of the insights which are the hallmark of the best literature. The story’s usefulness as a historical document extends not so much to its portrayal of the realities and complexities of the Korean War but the prejudices surrounding it. The modern day reader is often swayed by the more realistic setting and the less fantastic turn of events in the Kurtzman war stories but the underlying falsity is clearly in evidence.

“Air Burst” (Frontline Combat #4) concerns two Chinese mortar squad soldiers who find themselves alone after the rest of their squad is decimated by American air bursts. One of them, Lee, decides to set an explosive-tipped trip wire to kill any Americans who happen to follow their line of retreat. The two Chinese soldiers continue to use their sole mortar to assail the Americans but finally meet their match in a strafing fighter plane. Lee is injured but his comrade, Big Feet, manages to escape unscathed. Big Feet attempts to carry Lee to safety but then encounters a flight of American bombers which drop “surrender papers” on their position. Big Feet decides that they should surrender and retraces his step to surrender to the Americans. He forgets about the tripwire explosive device and kills them both in the process.

There are a number of ways to view this story. Those of a charitable disposition would suggest that this is a balanced depiction of the communist Chinese. Big Feet is depicted in a reasonably objective fashion. He tries to save Lee because of the bonds of friendship and, in his own simple way, realizes that the Americans offer hope and safety. He is defeated only by the calculating, malevolent Lee who is the cause of their misfortune (he is the one who sets the trap to kill the Americans).

Someone of a more critical disposition would suggest that this is unadulterated American war office hoopla. The story draws broad caricatures of the Chinese communists. On the one hand, there are the simple-minded natives who have been caught up in a war which they don’t really want to fight and, on the other hand, there are the nasty communists who are a danger to both us (the Americans) and themselves. Filled with the dividend of self-righteousness emanating from the conflict during World War 2, the story ends with the approach of the Americans whose generosity and mercy even extend to those horrible communists.

If Kurtzman’s purpose was to narrow the “humanity gap” between the American and Chinese soldiers, he can only be accounted to have failed miserably in “Air Burst”. An enemy who is seen to contemplate the death of a fellow American with pleasure would not have met with approval among his readership nor would it have reduced their inherent prejudices. There is a marked difference in the portrayal of the enemy here and that of Rommel (the “good” enemy) in “Desert Fox!”.

***

To end, I will look at the two stories which have come to represent the peak of Kurtzman’s war oeuvre.

“Big ‘If’” (Frontline Combat #5) is a story which relates, in flashbacks, the untimely end of an American GI (called Maynard) from a shrapnel wound. The formal and structural elements of the story have been cited most often for praise. Kurtzman makes liberal use of a three panel staggered close-up, a technique that is also used with great regularity throughout the war stories. The wooden devil posts which bookend the story provide a sense of impending doom as they fill the background in the small panels on the penultimate page of the story. The sound of a descending shell substitutes for the absent laughter of the same. On the final page of the story, the soldier’s face is wracked with agony in contrast to the grinning devil posts on the opposing page. The reader’s expectations are tautly held by the snaking narrative, the tension slowly building to a climax in which the reader’s barely held suspicions are made flesh in the form of a bleeding shrapnel wound

As an example of deft narrative technique, “Big ‘If’” remains an interesting case study. Yet it fails to match this achievements in terms of its emotional impact. “Big ‘If’” strives to delineate the fragility of life by throwing light on the fine threads of possibilities upon which life hangs. The protagonist is a man beset by unfathomable forces. It is an existential tale which could be transposed to a non-military setting without much difficulty (it has thematic similarities with Eisner’s “Ten Minutes”—from The Spirit Section Sept 11 1949— for example). Yet we do not feel for him because he is an enigma shackled by leaden narration, a disconnected collection of lines bemoaning his fate. There is little in his characterization which suggests that he is a fleshy human, nothing in his words to allow us to empathize with him. Each twist in Maynard’s destiny is rushed as a result of constraints of length thus diluting our sympathy with his final end. The choices he makes are insufficiently jarring or nuanced, his despair without context or meaning for the reader. In “Big ‘If’”, Kurtzman allows us to view the death of a soldier away from the dehumanizing aspects of mechanized warfare. It is one of his most valiant attempts at concentrating and humanizing mass conflict, but he falls short by a few degrees despite or, perhaps, partly because of his elaborate forms of artifice.

“Corpse on the Imjin!” (Two Fisted Tales #25) is one of Kurtzman’s most powerful war stories. There are few pages in the EC war comics as powerfully drawn and composed as the final two in this tale: the violent movement of the American solider as he drowns his enemy are given force by the use of the words “dunk…dunk…dunk” in the narration as well as the desperately clawing hands of his opponent. The intensity and concentration of the reader is brought to bear on the act of murder by the staggered close-up of the man’s last drowning breaths and then the gradual movement away from the floating corpse who remains, to the end, without name or origin. The entire incident is driven solely by bestial instincts and the final detached corpse as objectified as the inanimate cases and tubes which are seen floating down the Imjin at the start of the story. Artistically, “Corpse on the Imjin!” is short, sharp, and brutal and this is exactly what is required to communicate the act of killing both in war and in self-defense.

There is, however, a familiar dark cloud which sullies the experience. It is one that overwhelms almost all the EC line—the clumsy, redundant narrative. The fight scene on pages 3 and 4 is filled with burdensome text and there’s even more scattered throughout the story. Kurtzman (as in many of his other stories) felt a need to shove his point in his readers’ faces. Subtlety is at a premium. On page 2 of his story, he has his American soldier drive home his “moral” when he shows him thinking to himself, “Now with all the long range weapons, we can kill pretty good by remote control! And we never get closer’n a mile to the enemy!” This is naturally followed by close hand to hand combat with a communist soldier. Not satisfied with merely showing the enemy at close quarters peering over the American, Kurtzman finds himself locked into the narrative conventions of the time as he intones, “Correction, Soldier! Not closer than fifteen feet…for the enemy is watching you eat your C-rations not fifteen feet from your rifle”. On the final page of the story, rather than let us experience the full force of his artwork, he force-feeds us some insipid platitudes: “Have pity! Have pity for a dead man! For he is now not rich or poor, right or wrong, bad or good! Don’t hate him! Have pity…For he has lost that most precious possession that we all treasure above everything…he has lost his life!”

Kurtzman apologists and fans have been willing to forgive the avalanche of ham-fisted writing which marks most of the EC war line (this being but one example amongst many) but I certainly am not. They want to sweep these sins under the carpet, as if words are somehow irrelevant to the cartoonist’s art. When called into account, they plead historical context as if good writing was only invented during the late twentieth century.

In his letter, Fiore states that “unless you’re giving him extra credit for antiwar sentiment I don’t see that “War of the Trenches” is any better than the best of Kurtzman”. Frankly, I find it astonishing that Fiore is so enamored of Kurtzman’s comics that he will even stoop to making such a statement. Fiore has clearly suckled so long at the teat of “comicness” (the essentialist view of comics which seems to be the basis of all his criticism) that his taste buds have atrophied. His unwavering view that comics are “a crap form contaminated by art” has led to his wholesale acceptance of aging works of only modest aesthetic merit. This can be the only explanation for his blindness to the superior qualities in Tardi’s war stories and his desire to persist in wallowing in his sty of EC mediocrity (don’t forget, this is the man who once wrote, “Any discussion of EC has to begin with the horror comics, not only because they were the most infamous and popular, but because they may have been the best.” This before proceeding to wax lyrical on the aesthetic rewards to be derived from the EC hosts (The Comics Journal #60).

An argument for Tardi’s work over Kurtzman’s would fill another essay. Tardi’s work is richer in characterization as well as moral and psychological subtlety. It is possessed of an aesthetic congruity and consistency between the words and images that is largely absent from even the best of Kurtzman. Further, the war is more perceptively individualized than anything found in the EC war comics creating a greater degree of empathetic truth. The violence is exact, cruel and never an excuse for heroics. The overall artistic vision and undivided purpose of It was the War of the Trenches makes it superior to just about anything in the EC war line.

***

In his letter, Fiore writes, “what gives them [the war comics] their special quality is how he determined to do it. Kurtzman’s theory was that reality was far more interesting than the absurd fantasies war comics had engaged in up to then.” Fiore seems to be of the opinion that Kurtzman’s war comics represent some sort of unshakable benchmark in realism. This is a delusion. I have already enumerated a few of the fantasies that persist within the EC war stories. At best, most of them can be seen as ironic adventure tales to be read at bedtime under sheets with a torchlight. They almost never allow us to acknowledge any revulsion for the abomination that war has always been.

Not once does Fiore counter my claim that the overall weight of the stories in the EC war comics fall drastically short of the mark. Instead Fiore presents us with a few examples of Kurtzman’s realism in his letter thinking to deceive readers too lazy to peruse the comics for themselves. Yet even this very selective list—culled from the first few issues of Frontline Combat—presents a majority of stories that do not sustain any level of realism. Let’s take a look at what Fiore offers up in Kurtzman’s defence [for reasons of space, I will only consider a few of them]:

“As a platoon retreats in the face of the Chinese counterattack during the Korean War, they are pinned down on their way down a hill, and call in the Air Force to burn the enemy out with napalm. “

The summary concerns “Marines Retreat!” from Frontline Combat #1. The napalm attack is seen as a small explosion and the resultant carnage no more than a few innocuously drawn charred limbs gathered in a small corner of the third panel on page 5. If this is the reality and horror of a napalm attack, it is a wonder there’s such an outcry against its use. The napalm attack is followed by two pages of action which would not look out of a place in a boy’s adventure comic (yes, I know, that’s what the EC War line actually was) and a final brave stand by one of the wounded who in good old war comics tradition wants to cover for his comrades since he’s “finished”. If this is “realism”, we should all be so bold as to spit in its face.

“The loan survivor of an artillery barrage on an observation post must call in another artillery barrage on his own position when it is overrun by the enemy.”

The scenario is drawn from “O.P. !”, (Frontline Combat #1) and tells the story of how a soldier assigned to an observation post sacrifices himself in the line of duty in order to hold off the Germans who have infiltrated his trench. In other words, it is one of a number of traditional brave, self-sacrificing soldier stories that pepper the EC war comics.

Still, this is one of the few EC war stories where the dead (who somehow still remain wholly intact after being pummeled by artillery shells) are seen to lie in something resembling an undignified position (the protagonist and hero—that’s clearly what he is—is buried underground at the end of the story). The EC artists may have paid close attention to the number of rivets on a machine gun but they almost always took a step back when it came to the reality of death and suffering on the battlefield. As a result, dispatching the enemy (and the whole concept of warfare) resembles something clean and efficiently humane, not something appalling and despicable to be resorted to as a last resort.

Another example Fiore cites is “Zero Hour” (which is also set in World War I) in which “a wounded soldier is caught on the barbed wire. The enemy allows him to stay there in order to demoralize his comrades and draw them out to be shot when they try to rescue him. After he has groaned piteously for hours, and three soldiers have been killed trying to rescue him, his own officer shoots him to put him out of his misery.”

In the Cochran reprints of Frontline Combat, Kurtzman is made to discuss the genesis of “Zero Hour”. In the interview, Kurtzman says he saw the scene in All Quiet on the Western Front and that it also appeared in “several war movies.” As with the Feldstein-Bradbury stories in the EC Science Fiction comics, Kurtzman is on firmer ground when he follows the example provided by his artistic predecessors. This makes “Zero Hour” one of the more “realistic” stories in the EC war line.

Since the scene in question does not appear in Remarque’s book, one assumes that Kurtzman is talking about Lewis Milestone’s adaptation. Returning to the source material, what we find in Remarque’s book is this: men scrabbling for food and luxuries, pages of just waiting, a feeling of sickness and loathing at the endless descriptions of amputations, decapitations and festering injuries which finally create a feeling of neurasthenia on the part of the reader. All told without hyperbole in an unsentimental, plain narrative voice.

What we get from “Zero Hour” in contrast are some maudlin images of a soldier’s anguish. In the final three panels of “Zero Hour”, we get a gradual close-up of the sergeant before three tear drops mark this hard-as-nails soldier’s face. This is capped off by some truly idiotic narration: “War! What an ugly name! The ugliest disease we men were cursed with! And where did this disease come from?…from men!” If there is any truthful emotion or realism within this story, it is completely obliterated by Kurtzman’s heavy-handedness. If a work of art fails to elicit reflection on its presumed theme because of its narrative ineptness, one can only say that it has also failed a crucial test pertaining to its absolute quality. The resultant sappy entertainment has nothing to do with realism.

“Tales of the gallantry and dash of General Erwin Rommel are juxtaposed with scenes of Nazi atrocities, including scenes from the concentration camps, which Tong claims Kurtzman ignores.”

Fiore once again demonstrates what a poor reader he is with this statement. Frankly, it’s almost getting a bit undignified. Nowhere in my essay do I even suggest that Kurtzman ignores the Holocaust. In only one instance do I bring up the concentration camps (in particular Buchenwald) and in that instance it is only to illustrate the point that young readers are quite capable of assimilating such atrocities (whatever their more protective parents might think). “Desert Fox!” (Frontline Combat #3) demonstrates that Kurtzman was not totally at odds with this point of view and would occasionally overcome his squeamishness with regards violence to show true scenes of horror (“true” violence being reserved only for the pages of the horror comics). The page (drawn by Wally Wood) stands out because it is at odds with just about every other depiction of violence in the EC war lines. Fiore deceives his readers when he suggests that this page is somehow representative of the rest of the war comics. Further, this point does not even take into account the fact that the page is clearly meant to balance out (and deflect criticism) of the honorable depiction of Rommel in the story. The war atrocities are a side dish. It’s just one example of the kind of spineless artistic schizophrenia that inhabits many of the EC war comics.

“A submarine captain is stranded when his ship has to make an emergency dive. He is about to be rescued by an enemy destroyer, but is left to drown because his submarine surfaces to attack and the destroyer must sail away to evade it. “

“A Union soldier at Gettysburg discovers that the Confederate officer he’s killed is his own father.”

“A French civilian notes the drab uniforms of the Allied soldier, and recalls how he and his fellow officers from the Academy insisted on wearing their colorful traditional uniforms in World War I and were slaughtered for their vanity. “

In my article, I suggest that the EC war stories are “gentle, dignified and bloodlessly pleasant” and that “they glorify by exclusion and by failing to relate life’s simple truths.” It is quite obvious from the few examples he chooses that Fiore believes he can counter my statements by demonstrating that Kurtzman’s war stories contain images of people killing each other and dying, as if this wasn’t an element in just about every modern day action movie.

To strengthen this somewhat defective point, Fiore points us towards two tales that once again demonstrate the EC writers’ deft hand at irony and the “shock” ending.

Both “Unterseeboot 133” (Frontline Combat #1) and “Gettysburg!” (Frontline Combat #2) care little for the realities of war. There are exciting explosions and people are knifed and killed. In short, they are mildly disguised adventure tales (masked with “historical authenticity”) striving to titillate their young audiences. “Gettysburg” in particular is a story obsessed with getting to its final twist ending. The war is merely a backdrop and an excuse for the denouement. A person glances at the dead bodies piled up on the final page of the story and hardly even registers them. They’re insignificant, just ink blots on paper without a trace of emotional meaning.

Fiore does Kurtzman a disservice when he suggests that “pacifism was not an option” during that period in the 40-50s. An artistic philosophy which dictates that the atrocities of war should be presented with unadorned, unmasked truth does not equate with pacifism. Further, he does not make a good case for his artistic hero when he writes, “Kurtzman’s sensibility is shaped by World War II, and assumes that in a world that breeds Hitlers pacifism is not an option.” I wonder if this is an inadvertent or reluctant unveiling of Kurtzman’s limitations. How are we to fully respect the works of a war artist whose vision does not extend beyond his immediate social circumstances and pressures?

The barely concealed secret about war is not that people die and that people kill each other but that they do so in ways which are thoroughly repellent. Most of the EC war stories on the other hand present themselves as mere candy floss. Further, there is almost never any adequate depiction of suffering within the EC war line which is strange considering that war is violence directed towards just that end. When you read books like All Quiet on the Western Front or, to take a more recent and less elevated modern example, Philip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (which concerns the Rwandan genocide), the overwhelming feelings are quite simply those of nausea, revulsion, and a very deep anger. We are left in no doubt whatsoever that war is horrible and not an insignificant backdrop to some contrived twist of fate.

If Fiore cannot differentiate between mere portrayals of violence and truthful, cohesive depictions of the same then that is his good fortune. He can fill himself with the masses of similarly half-hearted (if not thoroughly insipid) depictions of the “realities” of warfare which fill the book shelves and cinemas. I would suggest, however, that readers take note of this deficiency when he presumes to promulgate his inadequate standards to all and sundry.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Joe Sacco’s Journalism

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Ng Suat Tong

Joe Sacco’s Journalism collects some of the author’s shorter work which first appeared in various magazines, newspapers, and books. Only those utterly devoted to Sacco’s output are likely to have seen every one of these stories and even in that instance, their compilation in one ready volume should be most welcome.

While Sacco isn’t exactly coasting, he seems to have settled into a certain groove over the past decade—a sure-footed method of attack and transcription that ensures a minimum level of quality. Despite the title of this new book, Sacco’s work here can be more precisely described as reportage which focuses on persons as opposed to the grand scheme of things. This label should not obscure the fact that he does steer his stories in fairly predictable directions while infrequently providing direct opinion (in contrast to the prose form afterwords found in this anthology). He almost never offers up solutions to the problems he encounters and purposefully shuns overt editorializing.

Sacco’s preface (“A Manifesto Anyone?”) clearly articulates the selling point of his comics: the personal touch; the tabletalk; the stray details which betray the messy art of journalism; the fulsome embrace of subjectivity. All these and more present themselves as essential parts of Sacco’s journalistic toolset; his art singling out telling moments in the course of an interview away from the oppressive and quieting glare of a video camera, adding to the stark description of mere prose.

Even so, the comics form presents a number of problems for would be cartoon journalists quite apart from their labor intensiveness and lengthy gestation periods. One of these problems is highlighted by Sacco in his preface:

“Aren’t drawings by their very nature subjective? The answer to this last question is yes…Drawings are interpretive even when they are slavish renditions of photographs, which are generally perceived to capture a real moment literally. But there is nothing literal about a drawing.”

One might say that journalistic drawings inhabit that (un)happy land between the reader’s imagination (in pure prose) and concrete reality (in photography). The former can never be countermanded while the latter—a potent source of “easy” empathy—is beholden to Cartier Bresson’s Decisive Moment.

With comics, the abilities of the artist are paramount, and here far more than in most other cartooning genres. While the emotions in Sacco’s stories are communicated with skill and the faces of his characters reasonably distinct, they are still removed from the direct human connection of photo portraiture. What is often lost in translation is that sense of connection to reality and someone real, an affinity which cannot be adequately conveyed through his stylized cartooning which in the early days broached on caricature. Sacco compensates for this with various forms of artifice. Thus Zura and Raisa (from “Chechen War, Chechen Women”) though separated by 30 pages seem almost indistinguishable, the artist reinforcing that element of despair and the commonality in their suffering by means of repetition.

That same tortured face is seen again on page 70 of the collection and a story about Chechen refugees. It is up to the reader to decide if this represents the artist’s persistence of vision or the limitations of his style.

Sacco is of course nothing if not self-critical, these feelings frequently manifesting themselves in the form of self-derision. In Journalism, Sacco can be seen prodding his mercenary journalistic instincts—that cultivated ambition which must surely be a part, however small, of every reporter’s motivation and which just as surely must be quashed in those who have any level of conscience. In “Trauma on Loan”, we find Sacco champing at the bit when he is almost denied an interview with two victims of torture:

“You brought them here to reopen their wounds. No point worrying about their feelings now.”

At other times, it is simply a case of a journalist’s bread and butter, the search for some “real action” to spice up a story. The kind of story which most soldiers want to avoid.

He is similarly unerring in pointing out his weakest stories. In this case, he singles out “Hebron: A Look Inside” (2001) which he describes as his “least successful piece of comics journalism.”

While Sacco’s tropes will be familiar to long time readers, his comics on Iraq do seem somewhat distinctive within the context of his oeuvre. Not because they are unquestionably the best stories in this anthology. Far from it—that accolade might be better directed at his deeply felt portraits of the most wretched peoples of this earth (his encounter with some Dalits in “Kushinagar” for example). The author is also quite right when he suggests that the first story in his Iraq triptych (“Complacency Kills”) doesn’t “[add] anything new to the immense literature of ‘men at war’.” That story does, however, stand out because of its novelty in tone: the journalist now no longer mining the same vein he’s been chipping at since the days of Palestine; no longer fleshing out the sympathetic and distorted faces filled with hunger and despair; no longer solemnly depicting the genocidaires and unremitting faces of evil but here presenting a more genial portrait of the brutalization of his fellow Americans assigned the task of patrolling the highway between Haditha and Hit.

The philosophical conflicts of these fighting men are put on display, their essential humanity conveyed, and their deaths filled with a sadness which is never maudlin. All this perhaps a side effect of embedded journalism—strangely forgiving of the tormentors but still finding a kind of balance in the middle of the rest of this collection. Sacco is patently opposed to the war, yet he gently skirts the immense futility of the soldiers’ deaths. The reader never gets that sense of waste littered throughout Tardi’s comics on the Great War; all that incipient fury held in check by the dictates of reportage which, in this instance, eschews the imagination (the piece was first published in The Guardian) and the even greater suffering of the resident non-combatants—the shadowy figures traversing the highways patrolled by the American forces.

These anonymous figures get names in the story that follows (“Down! Up!”). While aesthetically less impressive, this piece does suggests that Sacco’s skills are best demonstrated not by his stories of the tortured and maimed but by more mundane subjects. This is an extended piece on trainees attached to the Iraqi National Guard (ING) and their interaction with their liberator-colonizers; the captors and their captives secreted away to some mysterious training destination; the actors playing at master and slave in the comics equivalent of a confined space of undescribed backgrounds; the plot bending the knee to the dictates of human interaction, the faces of every individual contorted into extremes.

So much passion on display and yet, Sacco is clearly wrong in suggesting that it is the comics medium which hasn’t allowed him “make a virtue of dispassion.” This may be the case on a personal basis (and perhaps that is all he means) but it seems excessive to shower blessings on the “inherently interpretive medium” of comics. The truth is that comics are quite capable of conveying facts with dispassion as evidenced by the vast majority of comics non-fiction. Just like authors who cast their words firmly in the direction of human cost stories, it is Sacco’s personal proclivities (and not any comics essentialism) which is responsible for the shape and tone of his comics. The decisions in comics journalism are perhaps more obvious than those in video or photography, yet it should be clear from controversies like those surrounding the depictions of Bosnian Serb concentration camps that even photo journalism is also open to interpretation and partisanship.

“Another trap promoted in American journalism schools is the slavish adherence to “balance.” …Balance should not be an excuse for laziness. If there are two or more versions of events, a journalist needs to explore and consider each claim, but ultimately the journalist must get to the bottom of a contested account independently of those making the claims. As much as journalism is about “what they said they saw,” it is about “what I saw for myself.” The journalist must strive to find out what is going on and tell it, not neuter the truth in the name of equal time.” – Joe Sacco (from his preface)

Similarly, Sacco’s disavowal of “balance” seems overstated if not a deliberate misunderstanding. The pursuit of balance has little to do with not taking sides, coming down in the middle, or pissing off both sides as he caricatures in his preface. Rather it suggests a dedication to teasing out the intricacies of any given situation and recognizing the limitations in human understanding. His advocacy of the journalism of “what I saw myself” obscures the essential mystery of “truth.”

The clarity and concerted purpose of Sacco’s work often elides the complexities of each flashpoint he visits—the very reasons for the insolubility of their problems. Only in “The Unwanted”, his report on the Maltese-African immigration problem, do we get some sense of this intractability. While Sacco’s sympathies lie firmly with the political refugees, he describes keenly the Maltese sardine can of fear, economic hopelessness, and easy racism. The predicament presents itself as a microcosm of the problems faced by Europe as a whole.

In this sense, his extended examination of the African migrant issue can be seen as “balanced” (an insult in Sacco’s book), allowing us to apprehend the dilemmas while preserving his consistent sympathy for the downtrodden

Not so the familiar and lengthy reportage on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the former Yugoslavia. The stories from these war zones present us with an almost Manichean world of the oppressed and oppressors, a long tradition in comics as it happens. A mild-mannered challenge in the Hague by a Serb-American defense attorney fizzles out pretty quickly. The Israelis are represented by a recalcitrant Zionist in “Hebron: A Look Inside.” The powerful, as Sacco puts it, “are excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs.”

“I don’t feel it is incumbent on me to balance their voices with the well-crafted apologetics of the powerful.”

A perfectly sensible view which only leaves the reader the task of deciding which side is the more powerful and which has the greater voice in the mainstream media.

Without any furrowing of the narrative, genuine understanding can hardly be realized. Where one approach might convince us of the righteousness of our aid, our charity, and perhaps our armed intervention, the alternative might give us reasonable pause to consider our moral reflexivity. The former approach lulls us into complacency, the latter challenges all received ideas and sympathies. Sacco’s frequent advocacy of an unwavering crystallized truth suggests that he is not primarily a journalist and reporter but a political activist; one who has consumed the facts, the scholarship, and the primary sources and sees himself as an evangelist, giving voice to those who have none and presenting himself and his works as one of several rallying points in the journalistic sphere.

Hence his protestations against journalistic “balance”, the practice of which must seem hollow and self-serving in the face of taking sides and championing the needy. This is a noble endeavor but like all messages from the pulpit, one that must be tested thoroughly before acted upon. And if we agree with Sacco when he holds to Robert Fisk’s adage that “reporters should be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer”, we should first consider being “neutral and unbiased” on the side of tangled truth.

* * *

Further Reading

(1) Kathleen Dunn’s review at The Oregonian. This article contains a lot of basic background information on Sacco.

(2) David Ulin’s review at the LA Times.

“The rap on Sacco, of course, is that he is less a journalist than an advocate, who in such works as “Palestine” and “Footnotes in Gaza” blurs the line between observer and activist. That’s true, I suppose, in the narrowest sense, but it’s also reductive, and with “Journalism,” he convincingly refutes the argument.

Sacco is rigorous about telling both sides of the story, developing sympathy for the American soldiers even as he questions their presence in Iraq. The key is his attention to the human drama, which blows open in the final frames of the story, where he describes the fate of a river unit with whom he’d gone on patrol.”

Bend Your Knee

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

No lesser a Christian than Martin Luther understood our predicament: Anyone, he wrote in On Temporal Authority, who tried ‘to rule the world by the gospel and to abolish all temporal law and the sword on the plea that all are baptized and Christian, and that, according to the gospel, there shall be among them no law or sword—or the need for either— . . . would be loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everyone, meanwhile insisting that they were harmless, tame, and gentle creatures; but I would have the proof in my wounds.’

The above is a quote from Eric Cohen’s review of Christian pacifist Stanley Hauerwas’ War and the American Difference: Theological Reflection on Violence and National Identity. Cohen’s review nicely encapsulates the argument against pacifism — that argument being, that pacifism is well-intentioned but dumb, and that it will get us all killed. There are dangerous people out there in the world, and if we don’t use force to stop them, then, well, they won’t be stopped, will they? For Cohen, this logic is so clear that anyone who doubts it must be, literally, crazy. Or, as Cohen puts it, “if Hauerwas’ political theology is the true political theology of Christianity, then Christianity is a form of eschatological madness.”

Hauerwas would probably accept that designation happily enough — with the caveat that the efficient rationality of modernity is its own kind of madness, what with the gas chambers, the drone strikes, the enhanced interrogation, and the nuclear weapons always on the table.

Indeed, Hauerwas’ point is that war is not simply a natural disaster from which prudent nations must protect themselves with the minimal force necessary. Rather, war is its own logic and its own morality. This, Hauerwas says, is especially the case in America. He points back to Abraham Lincoln’s justification of the Civil War at Gettysburg. Lincoln, of course, said that the war had to be continued in order “that these dead shall not have died in vain,” and further “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Hauerwas argues:

A nation determined by such words, such elegant and powerful words, simply does not have the capacity to keep war limited. A just war that can only be fought for limited political purposes cannot and should not be understood in terms shaped by the Gettysburg Address. Yet after the Civil War, Americans think they must go to war to ensure that those who died in our past wars did not die in vain. Thus American wars are justified as a ‘war to end all wars,’ or ‘to make the world safe for democracy’ or for ‘unconditional surrender’ or ‘freedom’. Whatever may be the realist presuppositions of those who lead America to war, those presuppositions cannot be used as the reasons given to justify the war. To do so would betray the tradition of war established in the Civil War. Wars, American wars, must be wars in which the sacrifices of those doing the dying and the killing have redemptive purpose and justification.

“War,” Hauerwas concludes, “is America’s altar.”

Eric Cohen recoils at this conclusion, arguing that

There have indeed been times when we have used massive and terrible power against terrible enemies; and yet, right now, brave American soldiers endure great risk to themselves in an effort to avoid killing civilians. And while the history of America’s wars is hardly a story of moral perfection, it is, by human standards, a mostly heroic story of doing the right thing and doing it for the right reason.

Putting aside for a minute the accuracy of the claim that most of America’s wars have been righteous (the Philippines? Vietnam? the Indian wars?), I think Cohen’s rhetoric here is actually an almost perfect example of Hauerwas’ point. Specifically, from a just war perspective, or from a realist perspective, war surely should be limited and pragmatic, always fought with a consciousness of the tragedy, brutality, and terror which war unleashes. And yet, here is Cohen, responding to that argument, by characterizing America’s experience of war as a “heroic story.” Moreover, that story is not “heroic” despite our history of war; rather, it is war itself that confers upon us heroism. Even our “terrible power” gains a grandeur, since it is unleashed against “terrible enemies” — and never, of course, against children, or civilians. America is moral because of the wars it fights, the ways it fights them — and because of the very terribleness of the conflicts. The obvious corollary is that if we did not fight the wars, we would not be moral — we would not, for example, have the opportunity to exercise restraint by not shooting civilians (except of course, when we do.),

Thus, for Cohen, war provides America with its moral standing and its moral experience; its heroism, its bravery, its sacrifice. This is exactly Hauerwas’ point. War is how America understands itself as a good people; it is how we see ourselves striding across the world stage to protect the weak, avenge the innocent, and establish justice for all.

If any war was fought to protect the weak, avenge the innocent, and establish justice for all, it was the Civil War. Hauerwaus acknowledges the evil of slavery, and insists that Christians were bound to witness against it. He insists, though, that the witness against slavery should not be war; that the moral opposite of slavery is not killing. For Hauerwas, to argue otherwise is idolatrous.

War is a counter church. It is the most determinative moral experience many people have. That is why Christian realism requires the disavowal of war. Christians do not renounce war because it is often so horrible, but because war, in spite of its horror, or perhaps because it is so horrible, can be so morally compelling. That is why the church does not have an alternative to war. The church is the alternative to war. When Christians no longer see the reality of the church as an alternative to the world’s reality, we abandon the world to war.

When I read that paragraph, I thought immediately of that superstar atheist, Christopher Hitchens, and his bloodthirsty reaction to the September 11 attacks.

Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.

Hitchens famously denigrates faith…but that’s not exactly a pragmatic, measured, calculus there, dripping with restraint and quiet reason. On the contrary, it’s in the genre of prophetic apocalyptic — it’s a religious statement. And the religion is, as Hauerwas says, the church of vengeance, the church of retribution, the church of death, self-justification, anger, honor, and war.

Hauerwas would like to get rid of war and violence — but what he really wants to get rid of is the church of war. As he says, the abolition of slavery (accomplished in part, of course, through war) did not eliminate slavery. There are still people who are enslaved today around the world. But the anti-slavery movement made it impossible for anyone to justify slavery. The church no longer says that it is god’s will for men and women to be chattel; the state no longer insists that it is righteous for some to be slave and others to be free. The abolition of slavery was the abolition of the church of slavery — and that abolition has had a massive, thoroughgoing effect on how people treat each other on this, our earth.

Hauerwas is asking Christians, specifically, to follow their faith to a similar confrontation with the church of war. He is not saying that all wars will be eliminated, or that all violence will disappear, any more than all slavery disappeared. Rather, what he wants is for the moral underpinnings of war to be systematically knocked out. He’s looking for a world in which Eric Cohen cannot use war to make the United States heroic; in which Christopher Hitchens cannot puff himself up as a savior/prophet in the name of cleansing violence. He’s looking for a world in which war is not the measure of reality or goodness, but rather a sin, indulged in only by those who have deliberately eschewed morality, heroism, faith, and sacrifice.

Again, Hauerwas is definitively, defiantly Christian. His message, therefore, is specifically to Christians. It is Christians, first, he believes, who must determine not to kill each other. It is Christians, first, who must reject the morality of war for the morality of the Cross. On the one hand, this is something of a relief for atheists like myself. Since I’m not a believer, I can cheerfully keep paying taxes for cluster bombs and hating my neighbor just as I’ve always done. Still, there is a bit of discomfort there too. If, after all, Christians were actually to take up Hauerwas’ challenge, if they were actually to bear witness to nonviolence and transform the world — well, I’d hate to say it, obviously, but it would be hard to escape the suspicion that that might actually be the work of God.

Until that day comes, though, we are stuck with war. And since that is the case, it might behoove us all to spend less time questioning the sanity of pacifists, and more time thinking about what this thing, war means to us. Is war our tool, with which we visit justice upon a grateful world? Or, alternately, are we the tools of war, with which it performs the age-old work of violence? Who, in short, do we serve? And is there anything — be it life, honor, love, freedom, or faith — that we will not sacrifice, or have not already sacrificed, in its service?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: war

War in Pieces

A True War Story Does Have a Moral

Old Icons, New Context

Thunderjet! Revisited!

**All text from The Korean War: A History (2010) by Bruce Cumings**

EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory (Part 2 of 2)

(Concerning Harvey Kurztman’s EC War Comics)

Joe Sacco’s Journalism

Bend Your Knee