Entertainment, Books - Army Times

‘Army@Love’ offers dark, bizarre look at future war

Preview:

See pages from “Army@Love” No. 1 (mature audiences)

If the idea of fielding a cell phone call in the middle of a firefight doesn’t tell you that the newest war comic is going to present a different view of combat, then the form-fitting body armor on the female soldiers should.

And then there’s the battlefield sex.

That’s right. Not love among the ruins, but amid the flying rounds and exploding mortars. When the earth moves for these soldiers, it’s only partly because of incoming artillery.

Welcome to “Army@Love,” a bizarro take on the war in Iraq, here called “Afbaghistan” and set about five years into the future. It’s published by Vertigo, a DC Comics line that typically offers more adult fare, both in terms of story line and art.

This is not DC’s “Our Army at War” or “Sgt. Rock,” probably the most successful war comic titles of the past five decades. “Army@Love” presents war as bread and circus, where corporate logos adorn mobility aircraft, the Pentagon boosts morale by sponsoring orgies and even the mentally retarded can pull a combat tour (but not carry cell phones).

In this area of operations, Motivation and Morale — MoMo — is a Pentagon agency that keeps soldiers happy by organizing sex retreats between combat missions. Recruiting and re-enlistment, which had been on the decline, suddenly are on the rise, and no one seems at all to mind the combat, the killing or the death.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, where supplying parts for the war means a healthy black-market industry, husbands and wives of deployed troops also cheat.

The mind behind the comic

The series, now in its fourth month, is the brainchild of Rick Veitch, whose comic credits include DC’s “Swamp Thing.” Veitch went through comic book boot camp, so to speak, under the guidance of the legendary Joe Kubert, longtime illustrator and story editor of “Our Army at War” and “Sgt. Rock.”

For American boys growing up in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, it was Kubert — not Homer, Hemingway or Heller — who gave them their first taste of war literature.

But where Kubert presented a serious picture of war, often through the experiences of the iconic NCO Sgt. Rock, Veitch is taking his troops into a kind of war theater of the absurd.

Veitch drew inspiration, in part, from the state of global politics, he said, and “imagining where it might go.”

What came out is a dark look at war, seen through the experiences of the men and women of a deployed New Jersey National Guard unit, their families and corporate officials who have the job of “selling” the war to an increasingly unsupportive American public. It’s an MTV war — there’s even a hit tune that everyone wants to hear; you just crank up the sex and noise to inspire the warriors. These soldiers, Veitch said in a column at the end of issue No. 1, “are a rowdy, bawdy bunch, brought up on Paris and Tommy Lee, addicted to adrenalin (sic) like it was diet cola, and who only want to f---, fight and footrace (except on Sunday, when they don’t footrace).”

‘Mature audiences’

As Vertigo notes on its Web site, this comic is intended for “mature audiences.” Although there are no graphic depictions of sex, there’s enough nudity and rough language to make this a comic you wouldn’t want your mother to read. (An online preview of the comic notes that “by proceeding from this point, you are certifying that you are 18 years of age or older.”)

The cover of issue No. 2, for example, depicts a curvaceous female soldier in calf-high boots, tight pants and a shirt open most of the way down and revealing a lot more than just her dog tags. A send-up of the photo of Army Pvt. Lynndie England holding a leashed Iraqi man in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, the soldier on the “Army@Love” cover leans against a prison wall holding a leashed pink French poodle.

The question is this: How will troops respond to “Army@Love”?

It’s hard to say generally, although Pat Robinson, owner of The Columbus Book Exchange in Columbus, Ga., home of Fort Benning, said he has sold few to soldier customers.

Kubert also has reservations about how troops will receive “Army@Love,” although none at all about Veitch, who was among Kubert’s first class of students when he opened the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in 1976. Through an agreement with DC, Kubert’s students even got to illustrate the short stories that appeared at the back of “Sgt. Rock” issues, which is where Veitch appeared professionally for the first time.

For Veitch, making a go in comic books was tough, Kubert recalled in a telephone interview.

“He had to scrounge the dough from different places. He worked like a dog. But he was one of the hardest-working, one of the most devoted guys in [pursuing] what he wants to do that I know.”

Kubert said he thinks Veitch’s story is “as political as it was satirical. He’s absolutely entitled to whatever opinions he has. Look at Iraq and possibly Iran. ... The whole bit there is not something most people are happy with. Any place where people might get killed is not pleasant to think about.

“He is totally entitled to his opinion. I think he shares that with a lot of people in the United States. I happen to disagree with him.”

Meanwhile, Veitch hasn’t heard how “Army@Love” is being received by military members, or even if they’re seeing the book.

“I hope they’re going to realize it’s satire,” he said. “Not of them, but of the guys that got them into the war, and how wars are kind of marketed and sold.”

Preview:

See pages from “Army@Love” No. 1 (mature audiences)