Interesting to see what happens when you present two creators with the same brief.  In this case, there wasn’t a literal brief, but comics creators Rick Veitch and Kyle Baker were so struck by the twisted reality of the Gulf War that they wanted to respond to it in the form of satire.

Both Veitch and Baker can write and draw more than capably, and have been involved in some of the better comics of the last 20 years or so.  On this occasion, Veitch is the writer and the artist on his project Army@Love is Gary Erskine.  Published by DC imprint Vertigo, it’s a story that looks at the big picture of American involvement in the Gulf, with particular emphasis on media and corporate complicity.

Two collections have been published, telling interwoven stories about one particular platoon who’ve been sold on participating in the war by ads making it out to be the most extreme of extreme sports, with sex thrown in.  Though there’s the appearance of chaos, the work is tightly scripted, with plenty of salient points to be made about the politics of blood and oil.  The big scale of the story puts it in the same ballpark as Catch-22, and if it falls short by comparison it’s still an ambitious and valuable piece of work, barbed and scathing.

Kyle Baker’s Special Forces, available from Image, is an altogether different kind of comic.  Where Army@Love is interested in the big picture, Special Forces thrusts you guts-deep into the thick of the action, an angry blast of hiphop compared to Veitch’s considered piece of Americana.  Baker’s starting point is a real life incident when an autistic teenager was signed up and sent out to Iraq, one of many dubious registrations that swept social misfits off America’s streets and sent them packing to Baghdad.

In Baker’s story, that autistic kid is Zone, and he’s bizarrely well-suited to military life.  Just give him a clear set of instructions and he’ll obey them to the letter, without fear and with the ability to take more damage and greater risks than regular troops.  And that’s exactly what happens in the story: a collection has just been published detailing Zone’s mission to take out an enemy commander.

Where Army@Love cuts between the Gulf and America, and different strands of story, Special Forces stays firmly with the operation that Zone and his comrades are on.  The former gives a sense of the wider factors involved, and is hence more distanced.  The latter is very much an experience of immersion, responding to a crazy situation along with the characters embroiled in it.

Neither Army@Love nor Special Forces quite hits the spot for me, but they both still have much to recommend them.  Veitch’s scripting is more than capable on Army, but some of the situations feel forced, and Erskine’s art has a certain stiffness about it.  Baker’s cartooning is, if anything, too loose at times, and the story could be tighter.

The solution is clear: put the two projects in a blender and you’ll end up with a yummy concoction that combines the best elements of both.  Or that might at least shape your own attempt at creating a comic satire of the Gulf era.  But, hopefully, the time for a project like that is coming to an end.  Politics will continue to provide material for anyone planning to reduce their blood pressure by turning their anxieties into art: in the UK we now have neo-Nazi Nick Griffin as a Member of the European Parliament, and there are sure to be further examples of corporate shenanigans and mercenaries behaving badly in Afghanistan before troops return to America.  Better spill ink than blood…