Army@Love: The Hot Zone Club: written by Rick Veitch; illustrated by Rick Veitch and Gary Erskine (2007): Rick Veitch's hilarious, bleak look at modern warfare and modern love is great satire that seems almost plausible.
As the endless American occupation of/war with the Middle Eastern country of Afbaghistan goes on and on, U.S. military recruitment levels drop to zero. The domestic economy collapses. People get really pissy. So begins this first collection of Army@Love, the title itself a play on the old Sgt. Rock comic Our Army at War.
Desperately seeking solutions in a world where pop-music success is measured solely by how many ringtones a song sells, the U.S. government decides to rebrand...well, warfare itself. By making it sexy. Really sexy. Periodic retreats allow for orgies of the armed forces. Sex is a recruiting tool. The Hot Zone Club welcomes any military personnel who manage to safely fuck during a firefight, one's success in this endeavour commemorated in a Hot Zone patch on one's combat fatigues. Drugs and alcohol are rampant. Actually, the soldiers are also rampant. Boy, are they rampant.
So too the bureaucrats, the civilian employees, and all the assorted family members, acquaintances, native citizens, and hangers-on. A PR expert and his secretary daily, mechanically work through the Kama Sutra as if it were a How-To guide for Power Point. It's that kind of book.
Quickly, the war becomes a success. It still shows no signs of ending, but now the cool kids are all excited about it. It's a Middle-Eastern Vacation! In this brave new world, soldiers carry their cellphones with them on the battlefield and have mundane conversations while mowing down 'insurgents.' Media coverage of the war is micromanaged and megacontrolled. There's no longer anything resembling 'real' reporting. Just the way the government likes it. Welcome to the Hot Zone. Crisis of confidence averted.
Gary Erskine adds a cleanness of line to Veitch's work that makes this stand apart from much of Veitch's pleasingly shaggy, self-inked pencilling jobs. The writing is sharp, the characters alternately sympathetic and pitiable, the war extraordinarily familiar and almost plausible. Truly one of the great comics of the oughts. If only there were more than 19 issues! Highly recommended.
The Filth: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine (2002-2003): It's helpful to know that 'the Filth' is British slang for 'the police.' Morrison and Weston present a world in which a secret police force called The Hand works to preserve Status: Q, the normative state of affairs in which most humans remains blissfully unaware of the extraordinarily strange world they really inhabit. Or so it seems, anyway.
Greg Feely is a normal, porn-loving fellow with a boring job and an ailing, beloved cat named Tony. Then he finds out that 'Greg Feely' is a parapersona, a hiding place for Hand operative Ned Slade. The Hand cleans up the messes that threaten the body politic, monsters and tyrants and murderers whose crimes resemble diseases and bodily frailties.
Giant, flying spermatozoa attack Los Angeles. A giant cruise-ship becomes a floating madhouse populated by hive-mind anti-persons. Normal citizens are found hideously and improbably aged to death.
The Hand's headquarters exist in a strange place over which looms what appears to be the hand of a dead God, clutching a pen. Time moves with hyperrapidity there, with unprotected life living and dying in minutes. In the Hand's HQ, agents come and go at the behest of over-constables Man Green/Man Yellow, given orders by strange, cybernetic beings. And one of the Hand's best agents, Spartacus Hughes, has gone rogue. The world shudders on the brink of destruction and revelation.
As with Morrison's earlier, longer The Invisibles, The Filth rewards multiple readings. The art by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine is clean and straightforward -- the grotesque and the sublime completely in focus (well, except for some pixelated male penises, as DC Vertigo apparently won't show them if they're erect). It's a darned peculiar book, yet it all makes sense in the end. Highly recommended.
Army@Love Volume 2: Generation Pwned, written by Rick Veitch, illustrated by Rick Veitch, Gary Erskine, and Jose Villarrubia (2007-2008; collected 2008): Hilarious, scabrous satire of war and culture in the near future ("A few years from now," we're periodically told), as American troops in the country of 'Afbaghistan' fight to win hearts and minds, and to make the Armed Forces of the near-future a cool thing for American youth to join by any means necessary, including subliminal advertisements and shiny, happy multimedia depictions of the sex- and drug-drenched wonderland of modern warfare.
War isn't like a video game. War has become a video game, but the participants are still prone to the age-old problems of stress disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, separation from loved ones back home, and the occasional enemy infiltrator.
Veitch's career-long love of occasionally goofy, satirically pointed names (Beau Gest and Flabberghast, to cite two) still manifests from time to time, which can be a bit jarring when those names brush up against the more normative elements of the narrative. Otherwise this is Veitch's sharpest, most well-observed satire in a career with many high points in that too-small subgenre of comic books.
In a perfect world, this series would have gone on for a long time. Unfortunately, we only got 18 issues of it. So it goes. Gary Erskine's inks eliminate pretty much all the occasional shagginess of Veitch's pencils, giving the book a sort of hard-edge hyper-reality that well serves the subject material and the treatment thereof. Great satire, and a great war book. This isn't for the drooling old codgers sitting around watching The Hitler Channel. Highly recommended.
